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so it's great and all to talk multiplayer stuff, MP is what keeps the game alive for 5+ years.
but i wanna talk about what gets more casual players to jump from singleplayer into MP, and that's the campaign. a good campaign helps with metacritic scores, which helps sega not crush relic's funding, which helps the executives not fire the entire team after crunch etc etc etc
and fellas do i have some news for you about relic campaigns in 2018. they suck.
put simply, a narrative driven, linear RTS campaign in the year of our lord 2018 isn't tenable. there are only so many mission tropes you can put together in novel ways, and by now we've seen them all. the old school westwood style of cutscene-mission-cutscene just doesn't hold up anymore. they're boring and frankly, ya'll need to move away from aping WW2 movies if you're gonna try that.
coh2's campaign, in particular, had roughly zero replayability in addition to its gross narrative failings. historically it was a mishmash of dramatized anecdotes blown up into gameplay mechanics and outright nazi propaganda with the player behind the wheel of a bunch of war crimes that was unsatisfying to play then and really kind of cringeworthy now with the current political climate. in terms of the user experience, it was profoundly boring, partly because i'm playing against the AI, which isn't a compelling experience, and partly because the hollywood spectacle the campaign apes simply doesn't work in the context of a game.
i only exaggerate slightly when i say i would rather smash my own hand with a claw hammer than play coh2's campaign again.
a campaign, nowadays, needs meaningful choices for the player to engage with, both in terms of narrative and gameplay if you want anyone to revisit it for any reason other than achievement farming. ideally this is accomplished via a meta-layer over the campaign missions, which is asset-light (requiring VA and a map UI, but little else) and something that relic has already proven they can do in the dawn of war 2 series of campaigns.
my advice, for what it's worth, is to stick to history. take a handful of actually existing historical military units, ideally represented through doctrines, and base coh3's campaign around an actual campaign. sure, whip up some fictional characters to provide exposition and character moments, but don't mess the actual formula of "this happened" too much.
an example:
an axis campaign in 1944 italy. bonuses for involving a theater which doesn't get a lot of play compared to crossing the rhine (again), a new axis army to lessen the pressure on the german table of equipment, and if you put the player in the shoes of an italian you manage to obfuscate the distasteful situation of "playing as a nazi" which is always nice. let's pick a battle that the axis actually wins, which means we're looking at operation winter storm, the italian version of the ardennes offensive.
players would interact with the metacampaign by moving formations (again, represented by pre-chosen doctrines hopefully kind of matching up to actual historical units in the area, so italian belsaglieri or german gebirgsjager divisions or whatever) to accomplish operation winter storm's stated goals: retake territory to shorten the defensive line, take pressure off the italian puppet government's capital, and in general shove the allies back a few miles. accomplish this however you'd like, with (fictional) officers giving tactical advice, some inter-axis bureaucratic sniping between the italians and germans, etc. taking map territory would shift into an actual game of coh3, with modifiers based on actions from the meta-map. complete a secondary objective to seize a british munitions depot in one territory and you'll have access to more munitions income for your other operations, but allied command will rush more reinforcements to the theater to slow you down, whereas not taking the depot and allowing the british commander to evac his supplies would create a situation in which allied command isn't panicking quite so much.
as an aside, i also chose operation winter storm because it's a successful axis campaign, they pushed the allies back and didn't get crushed in a counterattack immediately or anything, so you avoid the ludonarrative dissonance of doing very well but being told you lost anyway.
the same could be done for the allies, potentially with a focus on the 442nd regimental combat team, which is a fucking treasure trove of narrative hooks. if you wanted to get real fancy with it, you could try something like a resident evil style zapping system, where actions during the axis campaign would make the allied campaign harder; taking that munitions depot in the example above means the allies wouldn't have access to it in their version of the campaign, but this is getting a little out of scope.
basically, please make sure your campaign at the very least isn't the trainwreck of boring gameplay and nazi apologia that coh2's campaign ended up.
PS please fire whatever idiot in marketing came up with the initial coh2 ad campaign that reveled in the scale of the eastern front and came across as really uncomfortably bloodthirsty. i have multiple friends who refused to buy coh2 because of how just...fuckin weird that was |
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SPACE GUILLOTINE
Relic Entertainment
cblanco ★ 
보드카 중대 
VonManteuffel 
Heartless Jäger 
