General Information
Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCJT-oswDRyOrhrVghT-6ZRw
Steam: 76561198157193379
Nationality: United States
Game Name: Snaek
Divided on the topic though. I think having 4 factions currently keeps the game alive, because even with only 2-3 maps, you can have at least some variety in gameplay....the balancing isn't an awful lot off..."overfitting"..CoH3 balances each faction against two others from the start...
All very good points
This surely came at the cost of other parts not being finished. I don't think that CoH3 would have been a solid game if it released with two factions and shifted resources elsewhere. There was too much wrong with the game at release, having four factions can't be the cause of these issues.
The post-release drought is a symptom of incompetent Relic leadership...
+1
I think the situation overall has improved.
Certainly, a lot of stuff sucking the fun out of the game in 4v4 got patched early on, like OST emplacement spam and brit boys rifle deathballs.
...Relic bit off more than they could chew, at least with poor leadership and planning. Four factions at release is part of that, but not the main reason why the launch failed so horribly and why the post-launch phase was very underwhelming.
Thank you for the post. Good points all around. Maybe it was doomed from the start just from the Relic staff and leadership, maybe it was biting off more than they could chew, or maybe it was both ofc. Who knows. To be completely fair, it's probably not worth much to speculate about, seeing as there's nothing we can do to change the release (unless someone on here's invented a time machine I don't know about ), it was more of a hopeless rant on my part haha.
Yeah, here I was thinking that the plan was to release the game with the two new factions. Apparently it was US and Wehr, so maybe not as shrimple as I thought.
You did not remember my post in the shoutbox correctly.
Fixed, thanks!
Relic wanted to release with US / Wehr factions - do you think anybody would have been hyped for factions that was alrdy the CoH1 launch factions? I absolutely don't think so. And we should not forget that DAK / Brits as launch factions would never ever happened simply because the US market is so big. (Germany is a big CoH market as well).
Wow, that's puzzling. Coh 1 - US vs Wehr; Coh 2 - SOV vs Ost; Coh 3 - Brits vs Dak US vs Wehr (???)
In light of that, I'd say that it probably was a good decision to include the others at launch, considering that it would basically be received as a blatant ripoff of CoH 1 at that point.
And is balance really the reason the game has not met expectations? NO, balance is one of the strengths of the game.
In 1v1 and 2v2 yes I agree.
There are a lot of factors that hold CoH3 back...Releasing the pc version 6 at least 6 months too early is the main reason. Let's say CoH3 would have been released in September then replay mode incl. caster hud would have been released 3 months after release - acceptable, right? We would have had 4 4vs4 maps after 3 months of release and so on....
One X factor to think about in the 2 faction scenario is how many people have complained that there is no Italian faction. I can envision a boycott of a 2nd DLC that did not include Italians.
Or perhaps the game's budget (relatively speaking, as I know the costs of development are only getting more bloated and expensive as time passes) just wasn't large to fully deliver on what was promised?
That's probably the case. The lackluster nature of the current "roadmaps" just made me wonder if it was originally where the release of OST and US was supposed to occur.
I'm just going to put my thoughts here, because they're starting to get a little too long-winded for the shoutbox.
Regarding the title; I heard that the decision to release CoH 3 with 4 factions and 2 campaigns was a decision that was made at the behest of urging from the first wave of the community council members (thanks Smartie). Now I'm not here to throw anyone under the bus, because at the end of the day, Relic were the ones who ultimately decided to acquiesce to the suggestions, and any of the speculation I'm about to engage in falls squarely at their feet, not the community people. (After all, the only people who can gauge whether or not they're able to pull something off whould be the higher ups) HOWEVER, I think that what we are seeing may be a symptom of Relic mistakenly listening to the community when they should have stuck with their plans.
What do I mean? Well, let's just imagine an alternate universe where CoH 3 releases with 2 factions. Number one, balancing is relegated to one faction versus another. Simplicity. The difficulty of balancing a unit is not multiplied by a plurality of faction designs and units it has to contend with. Number two, a more positive initial reception. Maybe if the Brit and DAK matchup (NOTE: Apparently, Relic's genius idea was to rehash the US vs Wehr matchup for coh3's release, so keep that in mind) had some more love and attention, and bugfixing in general, the game wouldn't have gotten the bad reviews it recieved (and rightfully so, outside of our pleasant hypothetical realm. Sorry to burst your bubble 1v1 and 2v2 players) Number three, actual post-release hype. With only two factions on release, but with two factions coming in the very near future, players would have something to actually look forward to and give them an incentive to pay attention to the game. And that flows into number four, the big one imo, income for Relic. Yes, I think I would have bought DLC for CoH 3 if its release wasn't so shit poor. I may very well have bought a US and OST expansion. And I think that goes for a lot of people. Maybe that would have given Relic some much needed post-launch gas to keep going.
All in all, I personally wonder how much of the post release content drought would have been alleviated by the release of the US and OST factions post launch, and if fast tracking those factions are what caused the drought in the first place.