Releasing the game half broken, then only minor fixes after one month, followed by a focus on an ingame store that has manipulative selling strategies and accompany this by a token "freemium" system as an excuse just shows that Relic has no interest in releasing a quality game. There's so much stuff missing from the main game, and their focus is on a predatory store.
10-20 Euros for a skin set that allegedly (according to a comment I read, please confirm) does not even work on all vehicles like call ins? Are they serious? A single artist probably shat that out in 1-2 days, which according to Relic is valued at a sixth to a third of a fully released game.
And don't come with excuses of "but you can get stuff with merit by just playing the game!". No you can't. Period. You have to play for what looks like a full week to >maybe< be able to buy a skin for a single pioneer or other unit. It's a system designed to divert criticism. Realistically, you cannot earn those skins at a decent rate.
For me, it went from "highly likely buy later when the worst things have been ironed out" to "don't buy at all". They're trying to pull off their bullshit, I hope the steam reviews drop accordingly. Which luckily seems to be the case, Steam shows only 39% out of 88 reviews as negative, compared to 63% (2200 reviews).
This patch is laughable at best and shows that the planned path for CoH3 seems to be a quick cash grab by Relic.
I will just say this:
The backlash from in-game shop and these currency shenanigans coupled with lack of polish and features that should be at release in Darktide resulted in the game being review bombed down to 22%, only that woke Fatshark devs up, they have adjusted currency pack prices, so if you wanted full set of cosmetics, you could get full set of cosmetics for exact price, no leftover currency, they have also put on hold all their planned monetization and got to providing players features that were missing on accelerated rate as well as other QOL changes, which pulled the game from attricious state comparable to one CoH3 is in right now.
However, something tells me the same review treatment would lead to abandonment of CoH3, DoW3 style, but also WH40k community is one you do not want to fuck with(bEhavior interactive even pretends they didn't made Eternal Crusade, that's how strong backlash about broken promisses and low quality were).
You can fight these things.
But this community won't, too many casuals and not enough vocal, butthurt players who know how to write reviews.
Yes, I fully agree, also on your gut feeling regarding potentially ensing the support of CoH3
This game had less players than CoH2 before the patch. The patch managed to undo the player loss of only a single week, so about 1500 extra players. All alarms for damage control should run constantly at Relic, yet they release their shitty in game store.
There are still many issues unfixed that I would have expected in this patch, like changing shield symbols etc. Really easy and quick stuff. Relic doesn't do it. The patch is not even THAT big, considering the state of the game and the fact that they had a whole month to prepare it.
Out of interest: How much Merot can you earn with their challenges, how much merit does a skin cost and thereby how long (in hours of gameplay) does it roughly take to be able to buy a skin (i.e. what is the earn rate of 'merit'?)
The preview of the store also confirms what I said before:
The fake currency will force you to always have some left over. They show prices of 600, 540, 360, 240. I would bet that you can only buy their fake currency in something like 100, 200, 500, 1000, 5000 etc. This is forcing overpayment.
I just hope they stick to their cosmetics only promise, because we've seen plenty of companies rolling back on this type of promise already.
Relic surely highlights some minor changes (minor as in not much work load needed) if they received enough criticism to ensure players that those will be addressed.
What bugs me is that there are some highlights that I have not read THAT many complaints about. Either they use them as filler in order to make the list a bit longer, or - pessimistic view - there are not that many other things.
Let's wait until tomorrow. At least they started communicating again. Their strategy seems to be to make fewer, but larger patches (I think they did the same for AoE4). I think it is the right choice, at least there will be noticeable differences after each patch that can draw players back into the game and players won't get the feeling of "it's the 10th patch and they still did not really fix things".
Judging by the little info they gave us so far, it looks like they managed to get halfway through to the state that would have been more acceptable for release. Maybe with a patch end of April they will reach that stage, where they have eliminated most of the most embarrassing problems.
The other surprising fact is I have no interest watching community members stream. The game looks terrible
on most streams and is incredibly boring. There's no atmosphere at all.
I have the same feeling and I don't think there is one particular reason that stands out. I'd rather watch GCS2 instead of the newest CoH3 tournament. There's so much tension, the constant feeling of urgency, heroic-melancholic music setting the mood. Sounds, effects, all fit the graphics and art. I just looked up CoH2 gameplay from 2013 to check if CoH2 was bad at release too and improved afterwards. But it was all there right from the start. I even found a video dated to 10 June 2013, which is pre-release, and it all was there.
No thing in CoH3 is really horrible (some particular personal preferences aside), but there is also nothing great. Everything looks dull. It feels like the majority of models, sounds, effects have been finished to the point where you can somewhat label it as "job done" and then it has never been touched again. And the errors that are in the game are very obvious and even straight to your face. I cannot see a Coh3 video without noticing a weird visual glitch every 2 minutes or so. Dead soldiers are constantly teleported and rotated for their death animations, the minimap planes fly across the screen, shots constantly seem to disappear, weapons shoot without facing the target. Yes, some of these are in CoH2 as well, but just not as obvious and frequent
As I said, it is hard to nail down what exactly sets CoH2 apart by that much, but here's a few things I noticed:
CoH2's overall effects are amazing. The craters from explosions look so much better, the earth is smoking for a couple of seconds. Some explosions create lingering smoke that stays for longer. Overall the particle effects look better and the artists back then used them masterfully to cover up graphical issues. Eg. look at collapsing buildings: They have to remove the old model and add a new, destroyed one in the same place. CoH2 spawns a ton of smoke to cover up the model being exchanged. It's not perfect, but they did it well enough. In CoH3, I have seen so many blunt changes from "intact" to "destroyed". It almost feels like the game is laggy for a split second, and I am only watching it. It is such a sharp contrast, as a viewer, you'll just be drawn into it.
Uniforms and coloring schemes blend perfectly into each other in CoH2. Infantry is clearly visible, but they all have a dirty look on them. And while also being a bit cartoonish, they look believable. The uniforms in CoH3 all look like toys. I think that's an issue with shading and lighting, but they just pop out so much that it does not feel like those men are fighting in a dirty and grim war. They're a moving toy figure on the screen.
Infantry in CoH2 seems to have more or more visible animations. There's more idle animations, and even animations between shots. Didn't really notice that in CoH3, it just looks more static. What bugs me as well is, that retreating is just a sprint. They look like they're jogging out of danger. CoH2's models somehow leaned more forwards. Retreating looks more believable, I also think they change their running animation sometimes and even duck their heads.
And after writing all of this, I think I forgot about the most relevant thing: The game overall lacks visual depth. Terrain looks washed out and muddy despite good textures. I guess the overall higher resolution does not help either. It makes the game look sharper and sets the expectation for more realistic graphics overall, but makes it only more visible if that's not the case. Stylized graphics often age better than "ultrarealistic" ones.
That was a lot of semicoherent rambling from my side, but I just find it hard to pinpoint the exact issues, because it is a big of everything in every corner.
Not exactly thrilled by it myself but I could see it being one of managements priorities to get the storefront open so that another revenue source is up and running. Gotta keep them lights on.
As a business decision, it is the correct thing to do. Sucks as a player though if the game has that many issues but they divert a lot of manpower towards opening up the online store first, because their management was too bad to release the game in a proper state in the first place.
As ex-dev(designer to be specific), yeah, and its missing largest misconception ever since steam chart exists.
Daily concurrency =! active players.
Daily concurrency is just that, how many players logged into the game at specific day and how was the peak.
Real metric of player activity is being measured at weekly and monthly retention, because only and exclusively the most hardcore of players play the exact same game on a daily basis.
Daily concurrency dropoff in 2 months post release is normal, anything higher then 90% is "ded gaem", anything between 90 and 70% is regular drop and if daily concurrency retains more then 30% after two months, its jackpot only a handful of games can show.
Bigger indicator then daily peaks is how many players come online during time when new content patches are deployed, because both hardcore and casual, less frequently playing players want to check them out within first couple of days of release and even that is not always true, hence MAU chart, which we have no access to what so ever is the only accurate one for estimating active playerbase.
Yes, I definitely agree.
In lack of other metrics, we have no other option than to take concurrent player numbers as our proxy for CoH3's health. Which is a fair assessment, bad games drop down more quickly and heavily than good ones.
Many of the issues you mention should also be partially corrected for by the comparison to CoH2 that I did, assuming both games have a similar audience and similar design, which they do. With all the caveats, CoH3 appears to be doing worse than CoH2 at launch, and CoH2's launch has been described as pretty bad overall.
This concerns me for CoH3, especially because Relic does not signal well enough what needs to be prioritized.
The game would benefit tremendously if someone could cross check this.
Coh2 discussions to this date are based mostly on serealia data that is often imprecise and in some cases clearly wrong. The overall curve is fine, but people will pull out this data for exact discussions. And 10% DPS more or less matter a lot.
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