Profile of Hannibal

Gives some insight into Relic:
Working on CoH3, there's a project lead supervising a senior dev supervising a junior dev supervising the new that in turn supervises the new intern that does the actual work. But also that guy can only work half hours at best because he's working part time as a waiter to pay his rent.

Otherwise I don't really get how the patch can be so small after a month of nothing.

PPPS: tl;dr






Just kidding though, thanks for the break down. I've had MoWII on my watchlist as well, but unfortunately did not find the time for the playtest except for one of the campaign missions - which was okay.
The interface is much cleaner and more usable than in MoWAS2. But even back then I only played bot matches. I somehow never could get along with how this game works, having to click everything down to potentially even inventory management of single soldiers while I actually have to constantly reposition units and control shots directly. I love the detail to it, and I absolutely loved how this game manages to tell small stories with gameplay alone - trying to save your tank crew after their tank got damaged and could not move, starting an operation to gain control over that hill that the tank is now lying on and repairing it under fire, or just trying to get the crew back to a safe place - really cool memories, something that even CoH can't recreate. I am still one of the people that would love a slightly dumbed down version of MoW. The micro management distracted me too much from the actual game play. The small mission I played was more fluent in the overall gameplay, but unfortunately not enough to convince me that my gripes with the general game flow will be solved. Maybe I'll get another chance if there is a next test, let's see. I'll probably pick it up at some time for a couple of Euros, but 90% sure not for release.

Currently, I've come back to the never-aging Age of Empires 2 and Beyond all Reason. The latter one is a game that is being developed by some talented people from the community with no game dev studio behind it. It's a passion project through and through, the devs even play the game at a very good level and you feel it every second in the game. The sci fi stuff is actually not my type of game, but I fell in love nevertheless.
Apart from that, I've also played a couple of matches of Wargame recently while having an eye on both Warno and Broken Arrow. These look promising too, but they are rather modern warfare games.

You're just making bold claims here as to why people stop playing CoH3, that the game is not good fundamentally or targeted the wrong audience etc etc.

Nearly every single person I have spoken to and myself included stopped playing CoH3 because the map-pool is horrible and I mean HORRIBLE in 3v3 and esp. the most popular mode 4v4. Imagine you play CoH2 4v4 but only on Hamburg and Lorch Assault all day every day, even the most diehard CoH fan can endure this only for so long.

It's that and axis queue times that kill the MP experience currently. It sucks but both issues can be fixed with ease down the line

I really don't know how to respond to that.
Me saying that there is a variety of reasons why players drop out of CoH3 is bold but you saying "it's exactly these two reasons" isn't?
C'mon Aera, you know that's nonsense as well.

You underestimate how subjective presentation is. You're saying CoH2 looks good to this day but the complaints people have about CoH3 are extremely similar to what people were saying about CoH2. Bad contrasts, cartoony, ugly UI. People have an extremely strong bias towards what they are used to.

Edit: And you were saying that conparing the technical state of the games comes down to preference. That's what I was referring to mostly. CoH3 has good playability. The game just works. It may not be very good atm but at least it's not dysfunctional like CoH2.

The problem for CoH3 is that players apparently decide that the strengths of the game are not worth it. Yes, CoH2 got similar critiques, some rightfully, some as you say because it is new and not what everyone is used to, but the extend seems to be different. All the critique did not stop players from playing, at least not as quickly as for CoH3. Like it or not, but despite a bad release as well, CoH2 had something going for it that CoH3 can't replicate. It might be presentation, sound, whatever.
Having a smoothly running game is great, but doesn't help if the game itself is boring. There's people loving CoH3 in its current form. The overall majority however doesn't, and that's why we see a huge drop in player numbers and the efflux is still not stopped. CoH3 has lost players compared to last week, probably another 200 on average (just estimating), which comes down to ~10% of the player base.
Relic partially focused on the casual gamers, but those will not rebuild the game. They either had their fun or didn't, but moved on either way. They're not going to buy a game with 40-55% positive reviews on Steam. Relic has to rebuild it from their main, die hard audience. Which is not what they have been aiming for, and worries me if CoH3 will get the support that it needs to make it a good game.

Well yes and no.

Coh always had micro but there is difference between COH1 and COH2.

Coh1 give player more decision making than COH2. The tree like commander abilities and tech structure/cost forced player into making decision that had an impact on the game.

In coh2 and especially after the "community" patches decision making become less important.

In COH3 there attempt to return closer to COH1 model (even if not successful implemented) and that imo is a good thing.

Turning the game into a LOL type of game where one controls 10 units instead of one would be bad direction imo.

My original point is that game should not be only about micro with high TTK where, for instance, how well one dodges a grenade wins or lose the game.

CoH2 has design issues no doubt about that. Doesn't change the fact that the whole series is very micro intensive. The whole point of the cover system is that the player has to order the squad behind to take cover behind the tractor and not 3 meters next to it. That you need to place that grenade yourself down to the centimeter instead of just clicking the 'throw a grenade' button and it is resolved automatically. That doesn't mean it becomes LOL or any other game, but that's just the way any CoH has been designed from the get go. Therefore, this grenade should also matter. It should not decide about the game, but about the battle between those two squads. As you said, a good strategy game is about decision making. If this grenade doesn't have an impact on the battle, there is no point in the ability, especially no point in having the player control it to the finest position of the throw. If that's not the case, just automate it and let the player focus on the grander scheme of things.
There's a lot of grey areas to the exact outcome obviously, which cannot be properly discussed without having an example. I personally also had the feeling - at least by watching the tournaments - that Coh3 is not punishing enough, that the decision to flanking and other movements doesn't matter enough. CoH2 hasn't hit the sweet spot either, but CoH3 probably doesn't as well.

What on earth are you talking about. It actually boggles my mine that someone who was around for CoH2's launch would make such a claim. CoH2 was barely playable. It had ABYSMAL performance both in terms of input lag and FPS. It had HORRENDOUS core design. The whole game revolved around ridiculous AoE damage, absurdly high ranged super units and other super gimmicky shit. It had the worst feature of CoH history in the form of Col tech. It got reviewbombed to pieces. It certainly didn't have 85% positive. I don't remember the exact score but I'm not confident that it wasn't lower than CoH3. Everybody who had been hyped for the game was completely disillusioned. People who had had big plans for COH2 quit the game for good after a few months to a year (Tommy, Fatal, Ami etc.). It had paid commanders from the start. It had no ladder at all for months.

Then march deployment happened and the core gameplay improved massively. But roughly at the same time relic released the most bonkers P2W commanders in CoH history. All the stuff people call OP these days is a joke in comparison. These commanders would almost literally autowin the game for you. Saying CoH2 never dropped below the player count of its predecessor also makes zero sense because CoH1 had not been a steam game until then and transitioned to steam servers at that time which basically killed the game.

You make some good points, especially the one about coh1 not being a steam game, which is an oversight on my part.
However, as Spitfire said, I am talking about the overall state of the game. Coh3 surely has strong points like optimization, but also some serious weaknesses, most of all presentation. Coh2 is a beautiful game to this day, coh3 has overall good graphics, but I wouldn't say that they are really special apart from the vehicle damage model. Anyway, I am not keen on iterating every point here.
The player numbers speak for themselves: coh3 cannot retain players as coh2 could. We're not even 3 months after launch, and numbers for coh3 are as bad - if not worse - than for coh2 at the lowest point the game ever had. And this despite coh3 starting with 50% more players at launch, allegedly more single player content etc etc. Relic has always been slow on patches, but the environment in the gaming industry has changed in the last 10 years: gamers expect now quicker patches and fixing of the prosuct (which surely is due in part to more games being released in a broken state). Relic does not do itself a favor by not adressing issues quickly enough and bad communication.
The longer this process takes, the harder it becomes to salvage. Old Relic has shown they can pull it off though. New Relic did a decent job with fixing AoE4 as well, and the community in coh is pretty sticky and will try out the game a couple of months down the line. The longer Relic takes, the worse the chances get though, especially if Sega becomes doubtful that the game can be salvaged