I would argue that Coh2 started with a good base. As I've mentioned before, the OST was superb. The voice acting was well written. Coh3 did not meet my expectations for a good soundtrack or good voice acting. Most of it felt recycled from Coh2 but in a bad way. Like they hired lower quality voice actors than before. This unfortunately I don't see is going to improve over time unless they decide to spend an extra amount to overhaul the sound design which they probably won't. Thinking of the long term, the longevity of this game, its hard to see it will last long with such bad sound design unless an expansion in the future improves it.
While that's mostly true, I cannot imagine anyone leaving CoH3 because of inferior audio or stuff like that. There is simply way too little MP content in the game right now, it's just a matter of "will the game survive long enough until all the content is there". Because then I can almost guarantee everyone that CoH3 will do better than CoH2
I thought the massive imbalances were fun. Using E8 at launch was fun. Ost vs Sov was well balanced. T-34 vs Pz4 with no Panthers back in the day was loads of fun imo.
Not sure if you remember correctly but CoH2 in June 2013 had super boring/non existent weapon profiles on infantry , meanwhile the vehicle weapon profiles were crazy but in a bad way. As in a SU-85 losing 90% HP vs one Elefant or Tiger shot or t-34 getting one-shot by these tanks but also being able to bounce off their shots.
Ost vs SOV well balanced
I remember a very different experience where soviets were as good as unplayable provided the wehr player spammed MG42
E8 didn't come out until June 2014 WFA DLC which is commonly seen as the turning point from bad to good of CoH2. But what we got instead in late 2013 were these outrageous pay2win DLC commanders. The original Tiger Ace has to be in the top 5 most OP DLCs in Gaming History.
And that was all just balance, where CoH3 is in a pretty good state after 3 months in my opinion. CoH2 also had issues such as
- the game performed horrible on the majority of all 2013 PCs with low FPS and crashes
- no battleservers, each game was hosted via P2P system --> horrible input lag in many games to a point where it was unplayable
- small map pool, but same story or even worse in CoH3 now
- the fucking blizzards that stopped all meaningful gameplay for 3min and lowered FPS from 20 to 1