Let's give a shout out for all the other casters who pitched in their efforts with all the games going on!
Yall have our thanks for providing us with great content.
Also the players for death matching each other
+1
I love the passion the casters/streamers have put into this franchise. It's one of CoH's core strength.
As for AE's mixed popularity, the core community is still divided between the "Old Guard/CoH1" and "New Guard/CoH2". I'm not blaming AE/Stormless for this schism, but Relic needs to take this into account.
CoH3 likely will be Relic's last chance reaching out to CoH1 fans.
The Starcraft community had similar problems as when SC2 launched South Korea was still predominant "Old Guard//StarCraft: Brood War" etc..
As a result of StarCraft’s unparalleled popularity in the country, South Korean pros dominated the scene throughout Brood War’s entire lifespan. Few non-Korean players could even come close to keeping up with the best that South Korea had to offer. This did not discourage many from trying, and StarCraft remained popular as a spectator esport in the West.
By the time that StarCraft II came out in 2010, Brood War was an institution. Diehards were reluctant to move on to the new game, especially many of the established Korean professionals who continued to play Brood War, and thus a schism formed in the scene. This was further exacerbated in 2010 when a match-fixing scandal involving 11 players (Including Ma ‘Savior’ Jae Yoon, one of the most famous names in Brood War’s history) rocked the integrity of the professional scene. This incident, along with other external factors and the pre-existing schism, are widely credited for the decline of Brood War.
For CoH3 I hope the community can put aside their differences and focus on building one RTS community that all fans can be proud of.
Say hello to the Goldman Sachs of the game industry, EA and Activision execs.
How Activision CEO Bobby Kotick Made MILLIONS By Lying To Investors:
Lying and manipulating players is something that we’re all used to from the big gaming publishers. But reportedly, Bobby Kotick didn’t stop there. According to the Washington Post, he's reached a whole new level of greed and manipulation, this time at the expense of investors.
"Generally speaking, the longer a genre exists, the games that are responsible for taking it forward tend to make it more complicated. With Age of Empires 4, it was important for us to be like, 'okay, how do we back away from that?'. We do not want to take on all of the complexity that we see in RTS games today," Isgreen explains. "This is a fresh start for us. We want to modernise the series and that means we are going to do things differently."
*SNIP*
What is Relic's role in development? They doing gameplay design or just art assets?
Confirmed | 3 game studios to be involved with AoE4 development.
I think it's easier to tell what the other two studios do and Relic do the rest.
1) World's Edge studio
New studio is being built by Microsoft. So far the primary focus seems to be marketing, community management (with help from https://modsquad.com/) and final word in game design (Adam Isgreen) + Narrative design (Noble Smith internal promotion to Franchise Narrative Director).
2) Sperasoft (AoE4 art service)
Relic & Sperasoft Partnership Announcement
Working in cooperation for over a year, Sperasoft provides art services for Relic and is regarded as a trustworthy and flexible partner.
Confirmed - another game studio to be involved with AoE4 development.
Connecting dots and reported on this intel 1 year ago.
Reddit/CoH2.org exclusive news story related to AoE4 art (Sperasoft) and future Relic games. Sperasoft and d3t are owned by Keywords international.
New modding tools from Relic/Keywords international not announced yet but likely teased in the last CoH2 roadmap (2015/2016).
https://community.companyofheroes.com/discussion/243407/coh2-the-road-ahead
New Content (UGC)
Although we plan to continue releasing new in-game content in future updates, we will now be leveraging UGC such as vehicle skins and maps to help offer new gameplay experiences to the community. We hope that advances to COH2’s modding tools will also take place in the coming months, allowing additional forms of content to be created by the community as well - however this is still to be confirmed.
Relic Entertainment is a Canadian video game developer based in Vancouver. For over 20 years they have specialized in award-winning real-time strategy games, and are known around the world for franchises such as Company of Heroes, Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War, and the upcoming Age of Empires IV. When working on these games, Relic uses its proprietary Essence Engine, developed in-house. The Essence Engine utilizes the Havok middleware physics engine and enables many next-generation features to help push their titles forward. Relic’s desire to innovate in the real-time strategy genre has led to numerous awards and accolades, and they’re bringing that same innovation to their next title, Age of Empires IV.
Being part of SEGA, Relic Entertainment strives to create rich, thoughtful strategy games that people love to play. Working in cooperation for over a year, Sperasoft provides art services for Relic and is regarded as a trustworthy and flexible partner.
Sperasoft is an old hand at game development, showing the studio’s true colors in its work with partners and clients, providing all the necessary resources and completing tasks of any complexity on time. Such a foundation allows us to build long-term relationships with our co-development partners.
“Sperasoft is a big fan of Relic Entertainments games and the RTS genre as a whole” – comments Denis Larkin, Chief Commercial Officer at Sperasoft – “it has allowed us to quickly find a rapport and hopefully, successfully gratify RTS fans everywhere”.
“Relic is excited to work with a trusted partner who shares our values of meaningful collaboration, transparency, creative problem solving, and learning from the experts around us.” – Heidi Eaves, Chief Operating Officer at Relic
About Sperasoft
Sperasoft is a leading game development company headquartered in the heart of Silicon Valley with development centers in the USA, Poland and Russia. We offer full development capabilities with comprehensive professional teams that are built upon the best producers, engineers, game designers and artists in the industry. During 15 years of existence, Sperasoft studio has not only grown to 500 people and has opened 5 offices around the world, but also moved to a new level of cooperation with customers – becoming a co-developer of the world’s most famous publishers.
To help ramp up content production in art and engineering/programming Relic is working with two studios now owned by Keywords international. https://www.keywordsstudios.com
Keywords international are a growing services provider to the global video games industry.
Microsoft Studios and Relic/Sega are involved with this.
1) Sperasoft Studios
Client source: https://sperasoft.com/about/ (see Relic in the client list)
A big international studio.
Keywords International are connected to Vancouver based XDSummit which Relic/The Coalition has been involved with for years.
Microsoft currently has 3 people on the XDS advisory committee: http://xdsummit.com/about/advisory-committee/
Below is Relic's XDS presentation in 2014 by Dilber Mann. XDS committee member 2014-2018.
Relic Development Director, External.
Removal of ALL unofficial community managers, who have access to Relic only because their friendship with Relic workers, not because merit or knowledge or community long term compromisses.
I agree (balance that is). Access and/or friendship with Relic can have unintended consequences.
Example non-bias;
From my POV Luvnest (maybe) and Callum McCole (@GGTheMachine) has lead by example with non-biased balance analysis.
Many if not most players have bias/fanboism and that's OK. At very least, remember to include both axis/allies fanboys in balance leadership.
IMO Relic can't be trusted to be non-biased so it's up to the fan community sorting this out..GL.
Relic Entertainment's Company of Heroes 2 "Grand Finals Weekend" finishes today. I love this franchise, working on it with Rob Cunningham, Josh Mosqueira, Owen Hurley, Adrian Vershinin, Quinn Duffy, the late Brian Wood and so many more amazing people as the first Narrative Designer was truly one of the greatest honors of my career. I grew up loving wargames and RTS. I've played more hours of this game than I care to admit, but it was work right? Right? No, I still play. It's just a passion. You can get COH2 free this weekend on Steam as well! https://bit.ly/37cWJFs While I didn't work on COH2, much of the speech that my writing team created remains when you use the four armies from the original COH, especially the Panzer Elite and British. It's always fun to hear those lines. Watch some of the best competitive players live now at the link below! hashtag#games hashtag#esports hashtag#wargames hashtag#gamewriting
Age of Empires 4 is expected by many strategy fans and we already know that it will gain more information and gameplay in November. But by then, the best player in the world wants to see one thing just for the continuation of the franchise: make it as epic as Age of Empires 2.
In an exclusive interview with Voxel, the Norwegian Team Secret pro Ørjan "TheViper" Larsen explained his concerns and wishes for Age of Empires 4. "I want to see a worthy successor of Age of Empires 2", explains the player. "Similar gametype, similar time period, similar mechanics, just improved in every aspect and modernized".
Although his desire is to improve what we already have in Age of Empires 2, the Norwegian mentions that there is room to bring unpublished things. "I think they would have to go for new mechanics. RTS is a genre that isn't as popular as it used to be, maybe they would have to be creative and reinvent the genre a little bit. But if it would go too far from AOE2, it would be a disappointment again", says the pro, recalling the community that left Age of Empires 3 to re-compete in the previous game in the series.
Going back in time, TheViper recalls that Age of Empires 3 has had its problems, but the genre needs to strike the balance even more for pros and audiences to enjoy themselves in the process of deepening the game. "I think RTS is too complicated and demanding in terms of effort and skill set, that it can't compete with the less complicated, yet competitive games anymore."
"Those games simply appeal to more people as it's easier to play, yet competitive with a high skill ceiling. Maybe sometime in the future this will change again, but I don't see it happening any time soon", he explains.
The success, for TheViper, will also depend on how Microsoft will conduct the game along with the sports competitions. "I think the best would be if Microsoft laid down the law in terms of rules and settings for most tournaments. Then maybe there could be a cooperation between tournament hosts and Microsoft in order to make some tournaments that can be used in forms of a league/cups that score points with maybe a grand final somewhere? That would be incredible! But I hope Microsoft invests more and more into the competitive scene and makes it super interesting with AOE2E", he concludes.
A bit of The Viper's career in Age of Empires
TheViper is not an unfamiliar name for a fan of Age of Empires: he has been touted directly as the best in the world since 2012. The community knows and even jokes about it.
"Who's #2?" was one of the community championships in August this year and brought together four of the best players in the world. And guess what: TheViper wasn't there. Obvious reasons: He is the #1.
During the interview, TheViper also praised the Brazilians who are still present at Age of Empires international competitions. "Brazil has always had some of the best Age2 players in the world, and they're obviously very hard to beat. When I came through and started playing competitively, there was RiuT, dogao, Alive and Wrath to mention a few. Then there were also other players getting better all the time, such as F1Re, FeAge, miguel, St4rk, GoKu, etc. There are plenty more, but Brazil must be one of the countries with higher percentages of really good players", he recalls.
He himself has had the opportunity to almost lift the cup alongside two of them, Daniel "RiuT" Lima and Helenês "F1re" Romano, at the grand final of the Clan Masters: The Final Showdown in China in 2016. But on that occasion in specific, he ended up playing very badly.
"I remember [in this event] it being really rough on us, as all the players on our team had a pretty heavy night before. For myself it has to be one of my worst performances in a tournament. I remember throwing up 3 times before the final begun from being hungover, after 3 hours of sleep. It was just a really hard day, and it showed in my gameplay. It was still really heartwarming to see the Chinese audience and our opponents get so happy and excited. I would still prefer to have lifted the trophy myself though!", he jokes.
And yet, he almost won that championship against the Chineses [and Brazilian, because dogao was in SY and played until the semifinal].
"I remember we lost by a difference of one game. I was very angry. I remember that I was playing very well and precisely the Viper, who was the best in the world, did not play very well that day. And he was decisive. he's fine, we win, if not screwed", commented Brazilian RiuT on this occasion in an interview with Mais Esports.
We have one certainty: TheViper will be one of the names to be beaten in Age of Empires 4. It remains to be seen if it will last as long as the fans' love for Age of Empires 2.
---
TheViper answered more questions that were left out of the story but are worth getting published.
The competitive scene didn't stand long on Age 3 like Age 2. What do you think Age 4 should have to attract pro players?
TheViper: First of all it needs to be fun to play and feel competetive. Secondly, it must be fun for an audience to watch if it's going to become a proper e-sport. Thirdly, it needs investment in terms of tournaments and competitions, from Microsoft or other parties, or both!
We have Age 2 DE, Age 4 and Warcraft 3 Reforged coming up after such a long time without competitive RTS on the mainstream. Do you think that RTS could make a comeback and attract new players?
TheViper: I think RTS is too complicated and demanding in terms of effort and skill set, that it can't compete with the less complicated, yet competitive games anymore. Those games simply appeal to more people as it's easier to play, yet competitive with a high skill ceiling. Maybe sometime in the future this will change again, but I don't see it happening any time soon.
What was the best moment in your entire career?
TheViper: I've had so many great moments, it's really hard to choose. Competitively I can't really decide between winning some tournaments, such as NAC1, NAC2, ECL and World Championship in Maldives. LAN events are just something special, and being able to lift the trophy there is an incredible feeling, as you're able to celebrate and share the victory with friends and fans at the same time. I think even losing events like that is still an amazing experience.
And the hardest match you ever played?
TheViper: It has to be either the World Championship vs Yo in the Maldives or the KOTD1 vs Liereyy. Versus Mr_Yo I was down 0-2 in a Best of 5 in the Grand Final, and couldn't afford to lose another game. I was able to comeback and win. In the KOTD1 Grand Final, I was facing Liereyy, and after having a comfortable lead, he was able to fight his way back to a 4-4 score in a Best of 9. I was able to win that one as well, but both of them were very challenging in skill, but especially mentally, which is why I value them more.
The community is still playing Age 2 for such a long time. What do you think that keep all these players playing the game?
TheViper: I think Ensemble Studios simply made an amazing game that was way before its time. The gameplay never gets old, the civs are incredible well balanced considering the amount of civs, and also fun to play. Different map generations constantly make new games so that no game is ever the same. The new expansions has also freshened everything up a bit.
On top of that there is an amazing community behind this game. Players, fans, everyone is contributing in their own way. We have some amazing people as well that help keep the game alive with their contributions. Noone mentioned, noone forgotten, but we have a lot of people to thank for keeping this game alive.
Denmark
E", he concludes.
Cobra
Ozena
Relic Entertainment
cblanco ★ 
보드카 중대 
VonManteuffel 
