Profile of Feynmaniac

Pripyat River bears an uncanny and unnerving resemblance to Blowlands, in my opinion.

Anybody else feeling this? The game's personality seems to have disappeared in the name of realism.

vCoH was kind of a caricature of WWII; it was more like a bunch of WWII miniatures had sprung to life than an actual war. It was consistently larger than life both with the units, their personalities, and most of all, the art!

Games are a fantasy, why not exploit this? Sure the bases were completely imaginary in vCoH, but they had so much personality. I liked all of the Hollywood in vCoH, making the axis sort of sinister (although I suppose they sort of made themselves sinister in the actual war) and the allies less so. Instead it's pretty hard to tell the difference between the German base and the Soviet base.

Not just the art though, the actual gameplay itself had relatively little interest in simulation. A tiger could obliterate a Sherman from what, a mile away in the real war? Not in vCoH; everything was designed as a fun gameplay mechanic (well, most everything) whereas in CoH2 some things just seem to be designed to conform more to reality (e.g. tanks taking criticals well before 5% from non-special abilities).

Am I the only person with this experience?

Innovation and novelty can be hugely overrated though. If it ain't broke don't fix it; that's what DoW2 proved about the CoH formula (the lack of base building can be thought of as a serious design flaw).

Indeed, taking existing formulas and perfecting them would be nice. SC2 was kind of a downgrade from SC1, which also didn't really improve much on what made SC1 great; simply rehashing the same formula is not cool, but actually iterating on it without fundamentally altering the underlying structure is ok. It's like modern art; these days they're so obsessed with novelty that a splatter painting is considered superior to a Rockwell illustration. I really don't ever want to see that in the games industry.

You make a very good point Onkelsam, but I have to point out that it seems as though this really boils down to map/faction balance, not whether or not mirrors are in the game. Mirrors are just some duck tape over a deeper issue.

I should stress that I'm no longer really opposed to them, I just vehemently disagree that they have any intrinsic benefit to competitive multiplayer.

It isn't necessarily wrong. It isn't necessarily correct either. It quite simply depends on how well the factions are designed around the concept of possible mirrors.V

Does the game become more competitive if balanced mirror matches are included, or just more diverse?

And authenticity? I honestly don't care. Lacking authenticity never ruined Age of Empires 2 or Call of Duty 2 multiplayer for me. I get that some people actually get these kinds of games because they're somewhat historically accurate, and while that's fair, that's what the single player campaigns are for in my opinion.

Do you gain anything apart from more diversity with the addition of mirrors? Is more diversity worth the loss of authenticity? In other words, are mirror matches an objectively superior addition, or truly just an aesthetic preference ("I prefer diversity/authenticity to authenticity/diversity")?

Also, chess would've been mirrors if it wasn't for the fact that it's a turn-based game and thus asymmetrical by default. :V

Exactly, that's one of the really amazing things about chess, it seems shocking that just having one side move first could create radically different play styles for two otherwise symmetric sides (mastering both sides of chess is many times harder than mastering both sides in CoH, I would guess).