It's hard to even get at the balance of the game when so many other aspects of it are broken. My impression seems to be that, with the veritable mountain of other issues aside, the game falls into the pretty standard RTS model of having only one or two viable strategies per faction - I'm sure the majority of people don't really care about this too much. Any RTS game (or competitive activity, for that matter) will have a meta, the nuance comes in how defined or restrictive that meta is. Company of Heroes 2 had major problems with this from its early days, but the community balance patches introduced an environment where you could get away with odd or unconventional strategies, and for the most part, you weren't restricted to a well-defined build order.
Company of Heroes 3, in this respect, is just plain boring. The reduction of individual squad modularity in favour of reintroducing global upgrades was a major step backwards, and combat overall feels very dull. The dust hasn't settled from release yet so there are still cases where an outlier unit is defining a faction's response to a number of threats and leading to scenarios where some units never see the light of day. No lessons were learned, apparently, nor was pre-release feedback taken into account.
The real reason, though, that I think these forums are somewhat dead is that the game is mostly dead. The release drove away a large portion of the long-time members of the community, and the continued poor quality of the patch efforts hasn't exactly encouraged others to stick around. It's very quickly dwindling to a small number of sycophants and a deluded few who think that Relic is going to pull a miracle out of their ass. I would love to be proven absolutely wrong, but I think that's just not going to happen. Either way, there's not really much to talk about, other than the fact that the game is circling the drain. Those watching a car crash don't usually have much to say in the moment either. |
Japanese game development is fascinating in contrast to North American game development, largely because in the Japanese context games media are still seen as somewhat niche products (despite the staggering reality on the ground) and the companies that make them are more than willing to finance ridiculous auteurs and get out of their way. Profit is a motive but corporate culture over there is significantly different and reputation is more of a factor in influencing a company's decisions.
North American companies, on the other hand, controlled by financiers operating off of a financial playbook that works very well in non-creative industries, chase the dollar down to the bottom of whatever hole it goes in. Epic games is a great example of the trajectory of this - they came up with a successful engine and a few good games based on it (Unreal Tournament, Gears of War), nearly killed themselves chasing the latest trend (MOBAs), and then mounted one of the biggest comebacks imaginable by capitalizing on a nascent trend that had only just breached the horizon (Battle Royale). Other companies, looking at that, skipped the first part and promptly poured money into the abyss trying to rival Fortnite's success instead of making something original or improving on their own formulae.
Why do they do this? Because artistic businesses are inherently risky, and investors are notoriously risk-averse. Giving Hideo Kojima millions of dollars to make a giant-budget game about delivering packages isn't as solid of a bet as making a Fortnite clone to them, because the investors making the decisions don't see it as trying to supplant a market monopoly, because the idea isn't to make something that's fun or interesting, but rather something that encourages compulsive behaviour (and spending).
Company of Heroes 3 itself exists in a limbo between these two competing forces, and I sincerely doubt that it's much to do with SEGA as a publisher. SEGA is, if anything, fairly infamous for being laissez-faire with their studios, sometimes to the detriment of the final product. Hell, Creative Assembly basically only exists today because SEGA was bankrolling niche and less profitable historical strategy games since the mid-2000s, and largely letting them do whatever they wanted with them.
If blame is to rest anywhere, it should rest on the people in charge of Relic - time and time again, the management has fundamentally misunderstood what the game is and why people enjoy playing it. Looking at Company of Heroes 3 in action is like looking at the relics of a Vanuatu cargo cult - people re-enacting barely-understood mechanics as rituals in the hope of recapturing some level of past prosperity. It's depressing but it's the reality we inhabit. |
I think you are interpreting too much into it. How do you depict that Germany deployed heavier tanks into a game? You make their stats better.
Also this goes both ways. They literally implemented a non existing super tank for the British in Coh3 or an out of setting Pershing in Coh1.
I don't give a single shit if the Allies got one paper tank, focusing on minutae and tiny quibbles like that is meaningless in the overall scope of my statement, which is that, in all three Company of Heroes games, the Germans are "the late-game faction". Which means they have the biggest and most dangerous armour and infantry and the Allies need to either stop them early or build an unstoppable horde to win. If this were explicitly a fantasy game I wouldn't even remotely care. But it's (nominally) based on historical events and it therefore bears some responsibility in respect to the narrative it's creating. |
Well, even Marvin van Crefeld came to this conclusion that the Wehrmacht was almost everytime superior. But whatever...
Your cited historian hasn't published anything substantial on the subject since the 1980s (when we were only just beginning to see the narrative I've been describing overturned) and has a marked popularity among German neo-Nazis. So that's hardly the refutation you think it is. |
The Wehrmacht was objectively superior by every metric: training, technology, tactics, equipment, everything. They only lost because they went up against 3 globe-spanning empires that turned North America into a continent-sized factory. Cry harder.
Tell me you're a historical revisionist without telling me you're a historical revisionist.
Yes, the myth of the superior German soldier stabbed in the back by incompetent political leadership/military high command/all of the above is a time-worn trope at this point - it worked out really well for Hitler in the 1920's and onwards and it likewise proved very popular among Nazi generals and former SS servicemen, many of whom had a vested interest in avoiding a noose or otherwise ensuring they had careers post-war. I've mentioned HIAG already but the "popular perception" of World War II which Company of Heroes has had a hand in perpetuating has been shaped largely by Nazis and their Allied patsies, unwitting or otherwise, who likewise often had a vested interest in making it look like the opponent they overcame was, post-facto, a terrifying and unstoppable force.
It's why you get the reality of a foe deemed to be "superior in every respect" which nevertheless did not win a single major strategic or tactical victory after 1941. It's also why you get Nazi fanboys contorting themselves in attempting to unironically deal with the same aforementioned cognitive dissonance that the authors of this particular false history strove to create in the first place. If I wasn't a historian I'd be amused but I am and therefore it just makes me sad.
It's no coincidence that, while the rest of the world either doesn't care or tacitly accepts the historical truths of the conflict, the Company of Heroes community is one of the only places where I still continue to find dusty statements like your own repeated, or worse. For this, I hold Relic at fault. |
@Vermillion_Hawk:
capture points have returned to a Company of Heroes 1 standard
This is flat-out wrong and degrades your argument.
- There were no capture circles in COH1. You either hit or missed the flagpost.
- If you were e.g. 75& up in your capture of a point, you would automatically go down to zero if your enemy touched the flagpost and you were not holding it. e.g. Ketten push
Purchased veterancy for Wehrmacht in COH1 was part of the asymmetric design.
Relic's love for the Nazis is defamatory. There are no Nazi symbols in the game - German standards alone demand that.
rip parts from Company of Heroes 1 visibly for nostalgia factor at the expense of a coherent vision for how the game should play
Here we can agree. It confounds me that Relic seem not to take account of age. The 18-year-old in 2006 is now aged 35; the 18-year-old in 2012 is now aged 29. i.e. they are most probably moving into building families in RL and have little time to devote to PC games. There is no Lost Legion of COH1 players stuck in Scotland among the Picts, waiting to troop South to fight again under the execrable loading screen of COH3. They have vanished. And the same applies to a lesser extent for COH2.
Unlike you, I believe that COH3 will be cleaned down and improved, especially for teamgames. But I am sure we would both like an answer as to how it came to this, especially when there were a team of testers/posters, mostly from this site, who went along with it all.
You're right in that we still have the (infinitely superior) Company of Heroes 2-style capture circles, I should have been a bit more specific and said I was mostly talking about the capture points as representations of the match economy. Manpower being a standardized income affected SOLELY by unit upkeep was probably one of the best features of Company of Heroes 2 from a competitive standpoint - one of the main issues in Company of Heroes 1 was the outcomes of early engagements practically deciding the match and allowing for manpower snowballing. Relic, in their infinite wisdom, saw fit to return to a non-functional standard here, not the first time that was decided in this game's development.
As for their love for the Nazis, that's hardly defamatory since it's been on display since the first game, and I'd wager it's one of the reasons why some people like this game to begin with. It's not necessarily having an open endorsement of National Socialism or having swastikas and iconography everywhere, it's the way the German factions have been deliberately portrayed. Relic dredged up every pseudohistorical myth creating the German factions as "elite" forces with superior technology and weaponry, with a strong late-game presence. Someone who has no idea about the actual history of the war would think the Allies were some kind of scrappy underdogs if this game was their only experience of it. I remember John in particular was really sensitive to these criticisms in the run-up to release and it gave me a little hope that they were shifting things around - nope, same old, same old, "elite" Nazis versus cobbled-together Americans and British. The Africa Campaign's existence leads me to believe someone was making a Rommel-forward campaign showing him as a noble commander (as in many post-war memoirs and HIAG-approved histories) and not a meth addict so far up Hitler's ass he didn't get a tan in Tunisia, and then at some point someone else realized how it would look, which led to the post-mission campaign briefs of the civilian storyline. So Relic's definitely earned their reputation, and I'll be more than willing to speak on it.
I don't think the game will get better, because the studio is clearly run by people who have no idea what this game is and what decisions will be best for it. It stinks of bean-counter logic the whole way through, from the pre-alpha until now. I'd like to say it was a big disappointment but I really had no expectations for it at all after the public tests, and now the continuing trainwreck of its post-release support is more entertaining to me than the actual game. Relic deserves every bit of what's happening, and I only wish the burden of that actually fell on the people in charge of the studio and not the programmers struggling to extract a decent game from a mountain of shit. |
There's all this nonsense flying around about how Company of Heroes 3's factions are better-designed than 2's... in areas, maybe, but long before the godawful release reared its ugly head and buried everything else beneath a mountain of shit, one of my chief concerns was the terrible choices made in overall game design, and this includes the factions. Economic upgrades have returned to being standard when they were blessedly absent from Company of Heroes 2, purchased veterancy is back, capture points have returned to a Company of Heroes 1 standard, which was awful, and once again Relic's love for the Nazis has led to them investing the most amount of work and affection into the factions which everyone is predictably queuing for.
Don't think that the shoddy release was the only thing holding this game back - plenty of longtime players, myself included, never bought the game in the first place purely because of the obvious direction Relic was heading in terms of game design, namely, rip parts from Company of Heroes 1 visibly for nostalgia factor at the expense of a coherent vision for how the game should play. It'll take forever to reconcile the disparate parts of the game into something resembling entertainment for me, and Relic won't survive long enough for that. A disappointing haul in the Summer sale will probably be the last nail in that particular coffin. |
Hanlon's razor: never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity. |
They're clearly keeping expectations contained. Another three months, minimum, for a replay system is absolutely ridiculous. Not a word either about balance or redoing battlegroup ability trees, that's all on the backburner, probably permanently since the console edition hasn't exactly been the stellar sales success they probably needed it to be.
In short, expect little for the future of the game, and you won't be disappointed. |
Keep in mind that absolutely none of these estimates factor in refunds. We have no way of knowing what percentage of people who bought the game initially ended up refunding it. There's also a ton of lowballed costs there - I'll eat my hat if the advertising budget was only $3 million, and you can't stop factoring in the cost of personnel once the game launches. If we're to believe Relic, they're focusing on supporting the game, so those expenditures continue even as sales have nosedived, added to the cost of keeping the game running, all sorts of other expenditures, etcetera.
The financial situation is dire and if they were counting on the console release to bring in additional funding, I doubt that it even made up for the cost of porting and marketing it. |