The most recent roadmap thing i could find was from their twitter account, from March 17th:
https://twitter.com/CompanyOfHeroes/status/1636834826065162254
All a bit vague and lacking in details, though.
Thanks for checking, I could not find this on the official forums if they posted it there.
The first block looks fine in my opinion, if this includes squashing all their left overs that should have been fixed pre-release.
The other two concern me though. One new map for each 3v3 and 4v4? No big map package? Team colors are apparently such a large update that they can't exchange them in an instant? Camera Zoom changes as well? What is this?
Block 3 is even more absurd. What is an "invite flow"? All they need is to pull the friends list from Steam, add an invite button, create a popup message with two buttons for the invited player and make him join the lobby if he pressed join. Why is this "scouting"? Thousands of games on Steam managed to this, Relic however needs to figure out how it works.
Most concerning is the expansion (which I understand as some type of paid DLC, i.e. something like the theatre of war missions, a new campaign or a new faction. Maybe they mean new battlegroups, who knows). This means two things to me:
1. Either the time horizon of the "scouting" is half a year away. That would be a normal time frame for releasing larger DLCs, but this also begs the question why all the other stuff in the first two blocks need half a year to be implemented.
2. All time frames are shorter and the expansion will be released in 2-3 months. This way, the first two blocks would be "okay"-ish. This in turn shows that Relic does not have their priorities right. They should have put all people on fixing the current game, yet they appear to already set them aside for monetizable content. |
Regarding using player numbers to judge CoH3's success (with all the caveats associated with that approach), I have to correct myself. There still is a noticeable outflow of players. One month after launch, CoH3 currently has a good quarter of the players at release left. CoH2 needed two months to reach that mark and then continued to lose another 20% from that point onward, which was the low point of CoH2.
For CoH3, when comparing yesterday to the Monday a week ago, as well as the current players right now to a week ago, there's another 2k missing that might very well translate to the next days. CoH3 might very soon reach the same state that was the low point for CoH2 (in percentage of the players at launch), but much sooner after launch and it does not look like the game has reached the bottom yet.
CoH3 does a bad job at retaining players. And this is despite many here claiming that the launch state regarding stability and performance were much better, the core gameplay being much better, more factions, even a campaign that is supposed to offer higher replayability. All this should slow the efflux down considerably, but is doesn't.
I have no idea what Relic is doing. I couldn't find any info on the forums. Just some smaller patches and hotfixes, but no big steps forward. Neither the most embarrassing smaller issues like missing descriptions and wrong icons have being fixed, nor some major progress towards design issues as far as I can tell. They had a roadmap for the postponed launch in November and further reveals. So where's the roadmap now? They even had an extra beta with feedback in between to get a better idea of what needs fixing. Where is their idea and strategy for their newest game of their biggest franchise?
At the very best, Relic is just horrible and communicating but fixing stuff under the hood. At the very worst they are bargaining already with Sega how much will be invested into CoH3 and define some mile stones for further support. It would be a very bad outlook for the game and community, but it has been almost a month after launch. There should be info out there. But there is not, or did I miss something?
EDIT:
Last part is probably a bit overly pessimistic, especially looking at DoW3's player drop. Still, CoH3 has less players than a healthy game should and so far Relic has not signalled proper support since the game launched. |
I found the blizzard idea really cool, but it just does not fit CoH. The blizzard gives you special phases of preparation and pushing. You can move your army to a prepared bonfire spot during the blizzard and don't be spotted and then attack from an unexpected direction later. It also made transports more useful.
The game overall is just too fast for these additions. Armies also became a bit smaller overall as far as I can tell. These huge preparation phases just don't work since there is not logistics, and unit positioning is non-existant if all units are hurdled across a small bonfire. There is just nothing to prepare. The CoH concept is basically to continuously throw units at the enemy and outmaneuver and outmicro him in the meantime. The resource territories and strategic points also force you to constantly attack. Not doing anything valuable for a minute or two during the blizzard can just cost you the game, especially if it happens multiple times.
Other concepts like the deep snow and mud also fell short. The maps are just not big enough to allow for that many different areas of slow movements but potentially high impact after flanking. There is just too much pressure to actually make use of the units on the front line instead.
They worked great for bot matches though. I actually liked them very much in this context. |
It is so intersting how the tables have turned. All these discussions are almost identical to those 2013-early 2014. Now CoH2 is regarded as the gold standard for coh games.
Because it has been patched for 9 years.
Release version CoH2 has not been gold standard back then and would not be today. |
A more general point:
I hoped Relic would redesign the whole plane system. More like a 'buy once, use for free' approach. There is currently no downside to losing a plane, therefore defending against strafes does not make sense, unless your AA is so potent that the plane gets shot down before it can do anything, at which point literally every plane will become utterly useless. Therefore, balance always had to thread the needle but rarely hit the right spot.
I also find Aerafields suggestion to make paratrooper transport planes invulberable a very bad idea. There should be a trade off between dropping to a safe spot on your side or dropping potentially in the back lines. Being able to drop them next a AA does not make sense.
At the very least, there should be a refund system. A strafe balanced around 90 mun should e.g. cost 120, but refund 60 if the planes makes it home. Suddenly AA becomes useful against strafes.
Also, Relic should think if it makes sense to always spawn planes from the direction of the players base. Being able to choose the spawn point by selecting the direction of the strafe makes it difficult to balance. You can always select the direction with less AA (closer to the edge of the map). In CoH2, there were additional issues regarding the time until the attack dropped.
And finally, the damage that a plane has taken should affect the cooldown timer.
Suddenly, planes and AA are easier to balance and there is no binary outcome anymore. |
It is so mind bogglingly dumb.
Hire a student for a couple of hours and have a real developer check them in the end. They'd be happy for a couple of dollars and Relic has one thing less that just screams 'the game is unfinished'.
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Probably a slightly crazy take but I actually think the loiters can stay exactly as powerful & impactful as they are right now IF all factions get an AA unit that is exactly as effective vs loiters as the USF M16 Quad.
If the opponent has one M16, the axis loiters won't even make it until their first strafe. Feel free to test yourself in cheat mod
You should be able to dodge heavy offmap damage. Keeping it just leads to everyone being forced to build AA. That's exactly the opposite of varied builds and gameplay. |
Yeah I'm sure the player numbers will stay at a solid 4-digit number. But if I check out the first couple of pages of all CoH2 ladders on all factions & modes, I see a lot of "Last match 3+ weeks ago". Which looks pretty decapitated to me in terms of trying to find competitive matches now.
For 90% of the remaining coh2 playerbase barely anything will change though of course, and CoH2 will technically still be alive
The only thing I can say is that I did not have any issues finding games in CoH2. The "filthy casual" tier of players seems to be doing fine. The player numbers are now on the lower end of what CoH2 had over the last years, which means its fully playable.
Relic also seems to have solved their issues regarding crashes and drops in CoH2 that occurred directly after the launch of CoH3. They probably allocated too many servers to CoH3 to not enrage even more players with bad server stability if the game already has many other issues, but relocated more server capacity back to CoH2 afterwards.
We topped out at 11271 today (Monday). Like I said, we could be below 10k this week already
Aera was talking about CoH2, not CoH3.
We'll see what happens long term for Coh3. AoE4 also had low player numbers mid-term but started doing okay after about a year. Is an "okay" game enough to make Relic financially viable long term? I can't tell, but probably enough to support the game for a while. It might lead to more aggressive monetization via MTX and expansions. |
Steam has grown a lot, I am looking a the headlines "Steam Tops 7 million users online" in 2013, and today it is 33m online.
The 10-20k concurrent playerbase game was a smashing success in the 2013, and now it might not even be the top 100.
Yes, this is definitely a good point. But you also cannot expect linear growth. Both Steam and the gaming market have changed drastically since then. In 2013 Steam had roughly 2500 games on the store. Last year alone they released almost 11000 (mostly trash games I guess) spreading the overall players over more games, and strategy games have generally fallen behind in public favor. It's hard to conclude that a game has failed in some way because it only surpassed its predecessor by X%.
CoH3 surely does not have the impact on the gaming market that the first two games had. It also does not have to to be financially viable.
If we take AoE4 as a rough benchmark (highly advertised, and despite not much novelty it got favourable reviews both by critics as well as on steam and metacritic), CoH3 seems to be roughly half of that. Probably not great, but not bad either for competing with what is probably the largest strategy franchise. CoH2's numbers are surpassed a lot. If Relic managed to financially survive on CoH2, they might manage to survive on CoH3 as well unless they heavily increased their spending (which I do not have any insight about).
The game started at a peak of around 30k players. Now it is down to around 14k on the weekend. 12k during the week. By this coming Wednesday we could be seeing below 10k players.
I hoped for a much better start. And at a minimum have the numbers keep going up, not down.
As Aerafield said, maybe the single player people played it and left. Maybe the numbers will gradually increase as players become used to the game and venture into MP. Or maybe when the price drops, people will try it out and stay. Hopefully Relic has the bugs worked out by then.
All I know is, if I was a manager at Relic and saw this I would not be happy. Crap reviews even by people who love the series and never have anything bad to say, player base starting small and dying fast... I would be sending out resumes fast because my dismissal is right around the corner.
I am starting to see longtime Coh2 MP players saying they uninstalled Coh3 already.
Streamers are sticking to Coh3 still. So that is a positive sign. It is the future of the game for sure, so that makes sense they would.
What you fail to show is that this is an all in all pretty normal chart. Almost every game has most players at release and retains only a quarter or a third within 1-2 months.
Steamdb is down for me and steamcharts does not have the resolution at the respective releases. But from what I remember, CoH2 was down to about a third of the players at release after a good month or so, AoE4 as well iirc. Look at all the Total war games, that are much more focused on replayability and SP campaigns. They all drop the same.
If you compare the peaks of CoH3 from a day to day basis, there's not a huge efflux anymore. Numbers still go down, but not that I'd expect the game to be dead soon. We'll see what happens after this weekend, usually people play a lot on the weekend and then drop a game because they start finding it boring or move on, so let's see what happens for the next two or three days. |
Is it really though? All I have heard is people saying the campaigns were boring. Which is a real surprise to me since AOE4 looked pretty cool. I assumed they put a lot of effort into the campaigns.
AI Skirmish is a joke right now. You cant tell how many kills anything has. The only way to see the end game stats is to play the whole match out. It is not new player friendly at all due to being so unfinished. And these are easy to fix things that should have been done since day 1. When I was writing my RTS I had kills printed as soon as I got infantry moving around and shooting at each other. How did they even test this game without kill counts?
What I meant to say is that the overall scope of SP has increased vastly. Of the current numbers, more players will hang around in SP than in MP compared to current CoH2 numbers. I also read reviews that said they find it boring, but also ones that found them decent enough (given the omnipresent bugs) to keep playing. I also have not found a proper argumentation why the DAK campaign should be worse than CoH2's Soviet campaign. They will stay a pull factor, especially in the beginning.
...
That is why the low numbers of players on Steam is alarming to me. We are going to be right back to sitting in queue for 10 minutes to get a trash matchup that is not even worth playing. Thanks relic, you are the greatest... at sucking.
Why would you say the player numbers were low? I don't know about Relic's financials, but they compare very well to CoH2's release and still decently to AoE4's release, which got much more advertisement from what I can tell. And as I've shown before, the player drop is nothing extraordinary, it does not hint at players leaving the game on mass due to completely broken stuff. I guess the next 2-3 weeks will tell if the shine of a "new" game wears off and the semi-casual players will leave or not, but from the current trend, the game is not losing that many players anymore. The majority who did not like it has already left, at least that's what it looks like. |