The Failure of Company of Heroes (And Why There Is Hope!)
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- Опубліковано 2 тра 2024
- AHHHHH I CALLED PETROGLYPH STUDIOS PARADOX CALL IT OFF THE VIDEO IS RUINED
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0:00 - Intro
0:42 - Campaign
14:30 - Skirmish
17:25 - Antonio Vivaldi publishes The Four Seasons
21:49 - The patch that saved everything! (But mostly your credit card information to Sega's servers)
23:55 - IT WAS REALLY COOL ALMOST FINISHING THIS VIDEO AND HAVING IT CONSTANTLY DELAYED BECAUSE MORE AND MORE NEW INFORMATION KEPT COMING OUT. I REALLY LIKED THAT. IT MADE PRODUCTION SO EASY AND SMOOTH.
24:38 - 🪸🐍🪸🐍🪸🐍🪸🐍🪸🐍🪸🐍🪸🐍🪸🐍🪸🐍🪸🐍
25:43 - The Future of Company of Heroes - Ігри
It's wild that the game was so undercooked that they couldn't even jam in the cash store on release
The game encountered financial difficulties, the publisher/CEO changed, new publisher/CEO pushed towards a cash store, cash store was implemented as an afterthought, this cash store would finance any further patched, money/patches didn't come.
I'm writing this as a prediction *knowingly*. Feel free to correct/ educate me. I just want to take the opportunity to test my gut feeling.
Sadly, sometimes companies wait for reviews to come in, then release cash stores to not negatively affect the initial reviews. It’s happened before, and really leaves a bad taste in your mouth when it happens.
I hope he look at men at war 2 multiplayer compane, if not, single are... freaked due to progression i guess its fun
more like it was made specially for reviewers, so people wouldn`t comply about in-game store too much. It`s quite common practise nowadays, IIRC, even CoH2 got shop after release.
It's not that they couldn't, I think, just that they waited, so it wouldn't go into any reviews and not tank the game's sales.
the AI not playing objectives has been a Relic problem since Dawn of War 1 ...
The AI likes to play for kills, except for the Khorne demon perk in Dark Crusade. Then they like to just sit around and wander in circles.
The one time Chaos Marines could have been scary. The one time.
Immediately remember the slog of DoW II vs ai skirmish
@@bigbroarivuslol don’t forget how the ai don’t even recapture generator sites as long as it’s upgraded
Never played DoW, but on coh1 the AI is is great on the campaign, I played every campaign at least 5 times each.
I'm surprised that company still tries to make RTS's when they obviously can't
Your description of the campaign would be a near-exact summary of the American campaign from Company of Heroes 2, Ardennes Assault, which came out in late 2014. Everything from "The AI doesn't actually play the random objectives" to "one of the four Companies you can play as is locked behind a separate, poorly-rated dlc" (seriously, they pulled this crap then too). How did Relic look at Ardennes Assault and go "Yeah, We should release a full-priced game that's as bad as this dlc, and make a dlc for that game's campaign that is overpriced as all hell and also one of the very first things a player sees"?
The biggest difference between this and the Ranger Company for Ardennes Assault was the fact that Rangers were (and still are) stupidly broken and can single handedly carry the campaign if the player is good at micro.
Not that I'm trying to justify them doing it then, just saying this time they did the same and somehow did it worse.
ardenne assault was actually fairly good compared to COH3's campaign.. the weird map in coh3 adds nothing but annoyance.
It has a fun bug that makes an enemy unit invincible and frustrated me to giving up on it.
Ardennes Assault was alright. But it doesn’t hold a candle to COH 1 campaigns.
They saw that everyone unconditionally likes Ardennes Assault (because the only players left to buy it were broken in by COH2's awful launch) and decided not to improve in the slightest
The Red Alert 3 campaign was entirely co-op. It was one the better things about that game. Seems kinda wild they didn't learn from that game and team you up with a partner, AI or otherwise.
In RA3 the AI was scripted to be more humanlike and (iirc) playing coop would increase difficulty, to make up for the "bad" coop AI.
This is what you'd call "going the extra mile". It seems what remained if Relic at this point, didn't have the resources to do that.
It'd even fit with the competing generals in the Italian campaign.
@@fonesrphunny7242 This is incorrect, the AI in red alert 3 can execute inhuman godly micro with Cryocopters and dolphins. They are just easy to handle because lethality is high in red alert 3 so you'll notice it as more of an inconvenience when you lose 8 apocalypse tanks to a lonesome guardian tank because you forgot AA.
Nor would playing Coop with a friend increase the difficulty, the missions are scripted for multiplayer coop and the only difference is that your AI ally can get a steroid boost if you are losing badly during a mission.
I mean the montecasino mission could have a bear unit, so the lack of Wojtek is proof they dont have any idea how to have fun with it.
It's easier to say 20 times polish soldiers fought there and make one scripted ride, than create dedicated mission like in CoH 2. I am from poland and i felt so dissapointed and embarrased, when i seen this. :/
You'd think they would have found the problem by now and fixed it.
@@Malod1997 It wouldve been fairly easy to make the mission more historically accurate - and even take more time so it felt more meaningful. Its a testament to how lazy Relic is. Never buying a game from them.
To be honest, there is an entire CoH clone when you have a whole campaign featuring Wojtek. Iron Harvest isn't a best rts but have a fine single player.
@@nmorek7004 it has one major downside. Units are scaled to multiplayer, so they are painfully sloooooow. If they ever make Iron Harvest 2 and patch over the inadequacies of the first game (I would take a remaster over a new game if it helps) then it would be a great contender for CoH like game against CoH 3.
My only concern for Relic's future is 2 things:
1) Relic's leadership (they could have been responsible for all of the issues and if nothing else they are complicit with the issues)
2) Brain Drain (they have lost a lot of people and I doubt anyone from their golden age is still around).
The same could be said of so many game developers, it's like we've entered a new dark age.
=)@@User9r682
I tend to put a lot of stupid decisions on the shoulders of leadership, at varying levels. Perhaps that isn't fair in every case, but in the majority of them, I think it's true.
@@User9r682 There have always been terrible games and a lot of them. It is just that we tend to forget about them because they suck.
@clamum9648 I agree, I just differentiate between studio leadership and publisher executives. There are times when it is clear that a publisher mandate hurts a game (microtransactions for single-player games). It is a lot harder to say when it is studio leadership, but it can be seen in games like Suicide Squad where the decisions made by those who made the game were unforced errors.
“There were actually 2 world wars” -Grant
This line is so funny to me for some reason.
World war 2 and what other one?
Hoping there's no need to post a "that aged well" in the next few years
Not to mention there were also two theatres. Coh3 taking place in the Pacific as opposed to in europe for a third time was something tons of people were expecting and hoping for, it would have generated a whole different level of excitement, potential (especially with seaborne assaults and support) and gameplay rather than facing a toy version of the axis after having already fought a superior version of them for 15 years.
Why stop at 1 & 2. They can even make (hopefully) fictional world war 3. Like 'World at War' which is an actual banger.
That terrible audio is really unfortunate because previous games (especially CoH 1) had great audio implementation and balancing (including great music). They obviously spent ton of time on audio alone in older games. Even in 4v4 games it was never just a glob of sound like you showed in the video.
In CoH1 that was mostly a result of smaller unit scales.
Go Play the Blitzkrieg Mod and run a 3v3 or larger, the huge pile of units will eventually cause the exact same issue with all the sounds turning into a cacophony of noise.
CoH3 seems to give the player so many units at once that it happens much more often.
@@Kr0noZ Blitzkrieg mod have some poor audio mixing, because some sounds, like machine guns fire, are deafeningly loud.
They mustve contracted little timmy to be the enemy AI.
More like ChatGPT.
- go kill the player’s troops
- As a language learning model, killing others is forbidden by my code, so I will run around the player until he shoots at me.
Fitting when you remember, Little Timmy was never hostile in any of his appearances.
TIMMYYYYYYY
When you came with those C&C nit sounds I thought "let's put it to the test, can I tell what every unit is from memory just by the sound." The answer, yes. Though I must admit I forgot what the jetpack guys are called. The lightning sounds are also so delightfully iconic.
Rocketeers.
They'll take the high road and be ridin' high!
At this point, I want Grant to take a look at Relic's other games, specifically the original Dawn of War: WH40K games, from the first up through Soulstorm. All four were great games for the time, though I honestly believe that Winter Assault was the best, in part because it wasn't a bunch of skirmishes on multiplayer maps and then a number of scripted missions for each stronghold. Those scripted missions are always difficult and fun, with insane enemy numbers, extra objectives to find either bonuses or to take away enemy tech, and awesome set pieces, such as the Titan's gun on the Imperial Guard stronghold in Dark Crusade.
Maybe it's not up Grant's alley, I understand not everyone enjoys WH40K. But I think it would be good to take a look at the games that lead up to this game, especially since you can see where Relic got the idea for the campaign in this compared to a more heavily scripted campaign like the first two Dawn of War games.
He's been playing through them for the first time on the Archives channel. Seems to be enjoying them from what I can tell.
I see your dawn of war and raise you impossible creatures
I'd also like to see his look at 2. You can see some of the basis of tossing in the RPG elements in that game, and despite myself not liking 2 being basically a RTS/RPG/hero shooter mashup initially, it's grown on me and I consider it one of my more favored games.
If I recall correctly, Grant got severely burned by the community.
He once said on a stream that he will NEVER play ANY Warhammer games in the future ever. Not because the games or the setting themselves, but because the fans of these games were so salty and rude to him. (At least that's what I heard on the stream.)
I don't know if he changed his stance on that, but the incident is still there.
@@user-ve3rf8eh6b He got burned hard for some reason i forgot while doing the Norse campaign of AoM.
Not surprised if he's ok with AoM now considering his AoM video.
Maybe the exact same thing here too.
The "store in the first patch" move is very common, actually. You push the update AFTER the most important reviews and preorders so it has overall better reviews
Yes. Having a micro transaction store in a full-price game tends to make people give bad reviews for greedy monetization, so a lot of games sneak that crap in with a patch or "major update".
Like Bethesda did with their paid mods (that nobody asked for).
great video as always but a quick note - the ww1 rts (great war western front) had no involvement from paradox. it was made by petroglyph (of empire at war / command and conquer remaster fame) and published by frontier (of planet coaster / zoo fame)
Grant, I cannot compliment your work on videos like this enough. The retrospectives, the reviews, the challenge runs - the scripting, voice work, and footage editing all come together so well.
The style of humor works for me so well, and the way you focus on the positives and optimistic angles while also not shying away from being critical where and when and how it’s appropriate works so well. The nods to the great experiences of hand crafted missions coupled with direct compliments to the devs who worked on those while expressing criticism and confusion about the state of the other parts of the game.
I don’t know if you’ll end up reading this but if you do I hope you’ll know that your time and work and style is greatly appreciated. I hope for the absolute best for you going forward. 😊
🤬 my face when all I had read was “I can’t compliment your work on videos. . .”
A World War I Relic RTS game would be so good. We definitely need that.
It would be, and I say that because the "The Great War 1918" mod for the original Company of Heroes is a good proof-of-concept for that exact thing, and is quite fun.
Creative Assembly at their prime would've been the one
@@rosameltrozo5889 CA has never made a good game with guns.
@@ZeroNumerous they have
Try Iron harvest.
GRANT DOES GAMES WOOOOO
I am from poland. I remember in "Company of heroes 2", we had a great designed dedicated mission, where we played a couple of polish insurgents. This mission was briliant. We had dedicated special units with their own voice lines. There was a feeling of partisian war. I really loved this mission. When i seen that CoH 3 will be in Italy, i knew there will be something around Monte Cassino. Ittalians partisians had their own units and missions, so i thonk there would be somekind of dedicated mission here too, right? Nope! Against it, we just ran on the mountain by Tanks like Hussars or something out of screen and player did his job himself. I was so dissapointed by this mission. But this is just half of problem. Before mission we heard like 20 times that polish army will be there. At first time i had feeling like "Great! They didn't forget about us!". In next two times i had the same. But with each next repeat, i felt bigger and bigger cringe. It was like somebody took frying pan with inscription "Polish faught on Monte Cassino" and smashed my head... I feeled so bad when i seen it, and i can only imagine how ppl from the rest of the world could feel.
4:12 I'm taking this to mean Grant is secretly a big Genshin player and nobody can tell me otherwise.
7590 is a lot of dust. No way he just created an account just for that bit. You are right, Giant is a huge Genshin fan :)
Edit: and he has Xingqiu at max constelation. Yeah, he is a big fan.
@@khankhomrad8855 Jokes aside I assume he found a random video with footage.
@@Slaanash that might be the most reasonable explanation. But, if that is the case, why isn't there any source for the footage?
@@khankhomrad8855 i thought it's youtube messing up when i saw the thumbnails, then i found that it's not youtube's fault lmao
@@khankhomrad8855 could've sworn I posted this but apparently I didn't, on his discord grant said something to the effect of "I've never touched genshin and that is definitely NOT my writhoesly you can see."
Finding out what gaming youtubers play outside of their main games is always fun.
Larian Studios with Baldurs Gate 3 has that a studio can be incredibly successful if the studio is not greedy and just gives the players a game they want to play, no micro transactions or locked content, a 60$ game with easily 100 hr of content. But the big difference is that game does not work with short term profit in mind but community building and longterm sustainability which goes against public companies having investors which in turn push for profit and dont care about the product of longevity of the company!
100? Ok so you are limited to the act1 only?
@@Grasher134 my First run was about 120hr (currently i am at about 500)
Tbf you can easily spent 100 in act 1
@@CodjHD to be fair, 100 hours in any game of the quality of BG3 is already a big victory for the developers.
@@Grasher134 You were when the game first came out into Early Access in 2020, priced at $60
You may laugh at "Operation Coral Viper", but that one is based on a real Operation
I just wanted a CoH Pacific Campaign man...
Funny thing you've mentioned Sega firing a lot of employees: Relic wasn't the ones that got axed the most, that was CA. At least a third, 240 employees laid off, several of their studios closed, and Sega execs going in and pretty much dictating what they're gonna make. It was bad.
Wait, seriously? Isn't CA like only studio that still don't have issues with making profitable RTS games? Not a big fan of Total War, it doesn't hit the spot for me, I prefer slightly faster tempo but this sounds wild. Aesthetically speaking definitely a lot of people had to be involved to make games like TW that have quite high focus on that aspect and damn me, those games really look great with all the animations etc.
Sega must be quite desperate to meddle in CA. I get that not all TW games are proper success but Warhammer ones definitely were making up for others and even those less successful entries still bringed some profit if I recall it correctly.
@@andrzejnadgirl2029 They've been having issues since Warhammer 3 launched: the main campaign was horrible (To the point that the first most made was disabling it), it was buggy as hell, it was unpolished and unfinished, and it took them from January to AUGUST to release Immortal Empires (Granted, the maps huge, not to mention they had to patch a lot of the gamebreaking bugs at launch, release the workshop, make the WoC rework and the DLC). From there, they did a few patches and hotfixes until April of next year when the first price hike happened with Forge of the Chaos Dwarfs (Only people who complained were the frugal ones, because the DLC is worth the price), but then they tried some shady, stupid shit in early September with Shadows of Change. The patch itself broke more things than it fixed, they tried to sell a $25 (Same as the Chorf DLC) DLC while shortchanging you with minimal content with Kislev getting the short stick and Cathay getting a light tweak instead of a proper rework.
From there, it got worse, Hyenas, which was an ARCADE shooter similar to Overwatch and Valorant, with hundreds of millions put into it was canceled due to backlash and SoC not selling as much as they've hoped. Then they released Pharoah at $70 as a Saga game, which was literally a TW Troy clone with an Egyptian coat of pain. This included all the downsides as well, as well as very generic, bland, copy-pasted content that was NOT worth $70, and it bombed hard. Like, the height of concurrent players iirc (Won't quote me) didn't break five digits, and then shrunk to triple digits. It was bad, VERY bad. This pretty much got SEGA on their ass and now they HAVE to do good with Thrones of Decay, which should release either later this month or in the first half of next month. If they don't, they're in trouble.
Good, both CA and Relic needed that
@@sheepfly CA needs to step up and make a GOOD historical TW game again. Empire 2 is long overdue and they should now have the technical means to get that working, unlike Empire 1(which had grand plans but couldn't make them work, yet still turned out pretty good).
And Relic... after Sega got them almost all they made was garbage in some respect (maybe with the exception of AoE4, but I don't own that and can't judge it). CoH2 has issues, it's DLC and monetization never sat well with me either, DoW3 is hot garbage and CoH3 seems to follow this trend.
Pretty much nailed on the head the issues the game and Relic suffers from and I really hope they watch this video. Hopefully they can turn it around now they are independent but I guess we'll all have to wait and see.
Also what isn't mentioned in Grant's video is the fact that after the failure of DOW3, Relic knew that they should be listening to feedback as they alienated DoW's original player base by creating a RTS/MOBA hybrid for DoW3 that no1 wanted. So for CoH3 they championed the CoHDev program which focused on bringing in people in early to get feedback and test the game, years before CoH3 released. However it honestly felt like pure lip service as most of this feedback was ignored sadly.
Yoooo, even HelpingHans was disapproval of Lelic
The sad thing is, the campaign used to be you having to fight in battles, but instead of tailoring them to be mini missions, they were all skirmishes and they removed it to make gameplay faster, but in doing so it really hurt how campaign mode plays in general
8:11 When the game released, encounters on the campaign map gave you the option to autoresolve or play the skirmish for bonus xp. Now it's autoresolve only, so one less option.
I really wish World War I got explored more in fiction. My first few years doing UA-cam stuff, every Remembrance Day I'd showcase a game set in WWI and talk about the history of what's going on in the game, and just generally try to talk about it based on what I'd learned about it myself (not a history expert, education on WWI just became really emphasized in Canada when I was growing up). After about 3 years I basically ran out of games to showcase (granted this was before Battlefield 1 or The Great War), and it wasn't well received to begin with, but I was really surprised at how rare the setting was in games.
Issue with WW1 most folks have is that trench warfare just isn't that exciting.
And most folks are scared to show eastern front in Europe that was absolutely manoeuvre war but ofc western front is more iconic for the wider audience.
@@andrzejnadgirl2029 Yeah, Great War 1918 worked because it was set near the end of the war when the trenches stopped being relevant
Too miserable to be a fun experience.
Amnesia the bunker is set in WW1 for a reason after all
Look up iron harvest 1920. It’s a CoH clone without ai issues, it’s combat issues. Not bad combat, just slow. Some say clunky (it depends on your processor) but mostly just slow animation. Games last between 15-30mins though. (Fast for CoH)
ww1 is also a goldmine for making a game series because it has so many fronts and theatres, and each one is different. the ww1 game series is a series of multiplayer shooters with each one being set in a different front and they all play totally different, and an rts series could do the same. the dug-in stalemates of the western front, the rolling plains of the eastern front, the mountain fighting of the italian front, the guerilla operations in east africa, etc. each front has a unique game in it.
At that point they would again be competing with themselves.
CoH1 only had the Western Front, so they put the Eastern Front in CoH2 and the Southern Front into CoH3, but as mentioned in the video some of the most well-known units of WW2 never operated in Italy so you can't have them in the game. CoH2 got the western theater as DLC in "Ardennes Assault" to get that content in there.
Maybe CoH3 will get updates to bring the other fronts in to allow for more unit variety because that would be a low-hanging fruit...
I saw a comment on some video that the mechanics would work for a pacific, island -hopping campaignThis would not only fix the issue of the game having less exciting units, but also it could be cool seeing the fanatasism of Japaneese growing with more island you get, which would be like that game about czech legion fighing through all of Russia to get home
Completely different game but "island hopping" made me think of Bad North. Really good game, BTW.
The lack of Naval mechanics would sting too much I feel. Pacific theater is usually relegated to flight sims for a reason
I was actually pushing and encouraging coh3 to be set in the pacific theater, probably not the only one but I was really believing hard they would logically take the next game there.
Another interesting place for WW2 RTS could be Burma, covering the war between Imperial Japan, the Republic of China, and the British Empire in the region. Sure, the location and forces involved aren't as mass-marketable as the good old British/Americans vs. Germans in Africa, Southern/Western Europe, or Soviets vs. Germans in Eastern Europe, or Americans (because, let's be real here, basically everyone forgets about the part that Australians, Kiwis, British, Dutch, etc. also played at the Pacific War) vs. Japanese across the Pacific, but slap in a good solid gameplay loop and a recognizable brand that is linked with good WW2 RTS games in people's minds, and I could see it selling pretty decently. Outside of WW2, there is also WW1, like was mentioned in the video, but the Korean War or the Spanish Civil War could also be interesting settings for a CoH game.
It's always the executives wanting to make more money. They don't take a risk the company that has to do as told does.
Oh, so the campaign is Dawn of War: Dark Crusade, but bad...
Soulstorm but worse
Ardennes Assault but the same
Eyyyy, cool to see you cover CoH3! The video serves as a pretty good summary of a lot of CoH3's issues. Though I did find it strange you spent this long talking about the "dynamic campaign" without bringing up the linear DAK campaign. I also think it could've been great if you compared the Invasion of Italy campaign to CoH2's Ardennes Assault since it's where Reluc got the idea from and yet another thing that CoH2 just does better than 3.
There's also some major complaints with the game you skipped, such as units being shown in marketing material and available in early test builds just to get locked behind battlebgroup DLCs, or the blatantly unfinished art assets. Though I can see why you didn't go into them, seeing how you basically covered similar themes with the ingame store and the sound design already.
Hearing you mention empire at was makes me wanna watch you playing through the campaign, I would be sooo excited about that! Its a grant video as always :D
Man would I love to see Grant take on Awakening of the Rebellion, Thrawn's Revenge, Fall of the Republic...
Great video Grant. I was just looking at this on steam. Thanks for saving my $60.
this game is going up against Gates of Hell as well
A game that did the 4x, rpg and decisions that matter, and also good skirmish is Divinity: dragon commander by Larian Studios
That one was a fun game. I remember enjoying it.
The idea of campaign sounds really cool, like XCOM2 but RTS.
Maybe player only have limited resource, and instead of just create any amount of units out from thin air with some rocks them mine, they only have access to whatever they can "bring" into that specific mission.
So player have to choose how much they want to invest into every battle, adding another layer of strategy outside the normal gameplay.
But listen from this video, this or something equally nice probably didn't happened.
Just yesterday, I reinstalled CoH3 and jumped into my mid-game campaign save, played it for about 10 minutes, and then uninstalled.
I didn't even get into a proper battle. Three of my armies were destroyed in auto-resolves that I could have won by actually playing the game. Those skirmishes were kinda fun because I was at such a huge disadvantage and now... I'm not even allowed to have that fun. :/
The bloat of skirmishes was probably the reason I put it down in the first place. Now I don't even have a choice when I WANT to play them...
CoH3 has a good foundation consisting of elements of CoH1 and 2. You can still see some of the love that went into those earlier games, and as my by far favorite series, I have bought each overpriced DLC in hopes they can turn it around.
But that release was an absolute embarrassment.
Main channel video whoooooooooooooo!
Grant, will you do a campaign runthrough of Red Alert 2 pretty please?
Man, Battlefield 1 still feels weird to me. The devs went out of their way to make it play like every other Battlefield game. Tons of automatic weapons and shit that the average soldier didn't even use.
To be honest, I think the best possible thing Relic could do at this point is to go back to GW on their hands and knees and beg them to let them to a Dawn of War 1 remake. It would be a trivially easy win and *as long as they don't fuck it up* would help win back a lot of the bad blood they got for the absolutle shitshow that was Dawn of War 3.
I think this is a much harder sell than it seems on the surface. Games like Dawn of War 1 hold up so well not because they're still competitive products but because they're old. The age of Dark Crusade covers a multitude of its sins, several of which Grant even invokes in this video talking about CoH3! The distinct quirks of a game as old as Dawn of War 1 are likely to be received much more critically in a fresh, $60 title.
The current staff at Relic doesn't even hold a candle to the people who made Dow 1, the dissapointment that CoH 3 is is a testament thta they never learn from their previous successes
No No No No No No No No No
The studio that allowed DoW3 and COH3 out the door will absolutely fuck up a DOW1 remaster. Count on it. Never. Don't let them even so much as sniff the 40k license.
@@surge486 DoW 1 holds up so well, because it is the best game in the series and has great mod support. The latter is crucial for games to be played as long!
@@idsgrad2572 This, this, this.
The people make the company not the name.
Absolutely incredible analysis. Tha k you for this amazing work! 🎉💯🔥
WW 1 with Relic RTS mechanics sounds *perfect.* I'm actually shocked that we haven't gotten one.
Honestly after AoE3, I was expecting them to go into Napoleonic Era/right before or to WW1. Still an option for AoE5?
Iron Harvest tackled this and it was not a good result. They tried to make the gameplay enjoyable by employing althistory Mechs as to keep the realistic trench warfare to a minimum and anchor the gameplay and combat to them but to the point where some of the factions mechs are now also hp sponge heroes too which made it similar to aoe3's explorer contribution.
They'd have to also do some althistory as catering to realistic combat for ww1 means depicting the trench warfare.
Petroglyph's Great War: Western Front downright removed all the RTS mechanics in exchange for RTT deployment(which coh2 and coh3 also use too much) and grand scale in commanding but the game is abandoned as Petroglyph moved to it's next game which is common for them to make a game and ditch.
@@zonetropper Iron Harvest feels a lot less WW 1 then WW 2, despite having the look of alt history WW 1 because of the focus on vehicles.
I think that they could absolutely pull off trench warfare with the gameplay style. It might not be what ADHD and/or PvP focused gamers respond to, but a slow crawl that requires a _massive_ amount of resources and manpower, while requiring positioning and timing sounds like a blast to me. Heck, could be more PvP focused if they design it so that feints and bluffs on a strategic level in a match works.
There is a RTS ww1 game its just called world war 1 (2005) built on the blitzkrieg engine
Trains?
Last train home?
Just finished it couple of weeks ago, after rewatching one of your videos, i liked it. And after completion, only question that i had is "I want to see what is Grant's thoughts about it"
Cant wait to see it =))
Grant, i love seeing u play Starcraft 2, but your reviews are fenomenal and incredible, i would love to see more of your point of view of many other RTS games, both old and news.
Thanks for the video, and keep doing your best, u are incredible
21:20 Grant must have been fighting Sans at the time
Where is that genshin gameplay from Grant, tell me WHERE IS THAT GAMEPLAY FROM? Are you mayhaps a fellow gatcha addict????
I'm starting to think COH caught lightning in a bottle with the first game, which I genuinely like a lot more than Starcraft 2 and wish more RTS games had tried to copy.
I should point out that I quit COH3 before they added that hilarious $16.99 expansion, and most of those skirmish missions in the campaign, I just had my airborne company drop behind enemy lines and satchel charge all their production buildings for a quick win that didn't require following the objectives.
Man I love when Grant makes videos like these, especially about games I have no idea about - something about his voice just leans itself perfectly
The bit about World War I had me howling with laughter. Scared my cat.
Holy hell man! I wish I could like this video more than once. I had already liked the video from your well thought out and explained points. Then, whilst you were reitterating your point about them having to competing with their previous games, I caught myself thinking back to the Great War WWI mod for CoH1, wishing someone would make an official game like that, before you go right out and say the very thing that I was thinking about! Have another subscriber!
I would absolutely adore a proper game set in the first world war, soldiers digging trenches and machinegun nests to defend chokepoints. Rows of fieldgun and artillery placements churning ground and soldiers alike, burning forests, blasting buildings apart, turning vehicles into slag, and leaving massive craters as the map deforms, to make new cover positions, as you try your very best to capture and hold objectives to get those vital resources and keep the war going, in a slow, exhausting slog across a withering map, with massive off-map call-ins, with slow timers to emphasise timing, working up to the very few armoured vehicles you can squeeze out, until you finally push through to the other side and win the battle.
I adore that experience so much in the Great War mod. It's pain, it's a slog, it's really hectic at times, but the feeling of managing to hold the line, then slowly and meticulously scouring the enemy from the map before finally pushing through to a victory, after anywhere from 20 minutes to 2 hours, nothing compares quite so much to the mix of relief and thrill of actually having to put so much work into a virctory; even losing is strangely rewarding, since you know you made your oponent bleed for every milimetre of soil that they took. No other game has managed to capture that slow, yet exciting, world war one feeling for me as what that mod does, and I wish the devs would come back and add more nations, or at least finish the French which they teased. Better yet, I hope Relic can stay afloat and get their heads in the right place and make one!
I'm tired of seeing WW1 made into a tone deaf "fun zone" that has no basis on what a miserable slog of death and suffering with no clear bad guy and no clear winner that it was. Just because you can point to it and say "LOOK! VARIETY!" doesn't mean it should be packaged off and sold as entertainment. I just got done playing Last Train Home (Made by THQ who also worked on CoH1) and it was exactly what a Relic CoH done during WW1 would be like and it was forgettable and felt nothing like the subject matter it was supposed to be based on.
As an FPS player this all sounds heinously familiar. I think I've seen this story play out before and I hope you're right about your optimism but experience lends towards doubting a return to form.
It's baffling to me that companies seem to not understand that having players WANT to spend money will earn them infinitely more than forcing them to. If I have a game I love, I will look for any excuse to spend more money on it to show my appreciation to the creators. I won't even care that much what I'm getting for it, and getting something cool just makes me want to spend more.
Seeing games try to twist my hand and manipulate me into spending more, just makes me want to stop playing them altogether (or not buy them in the first place)
If you make a game to make money, it'll fail. If you make a game to be fun, it'll make money.
Relic seems to have a problem with number 3. First it was Dawn of War 3, now CoH3 is crashing and burning.
Valve is watching them. Gabe was right.
inb4 they ruin Space Marine 3...
@@TheNikoNik let's hope the space marine 2 is good before jumping the gun on space marine 3! 😂 Considering the state of the industry I'm not sure how it will turn out.
@@ludvigkarle1743 😂
Hey grant, have you heard of terminator dark fate? It’s really good being a mix of company of hero’s squad based combat and the Hyperion crew mod for sc2 would love to know your thoughts on it!
Real talk my man, is there any chance for a StarCraft Retrospective that goes in huge huge detail like the Warcraft 3 one did? It genuinely was one of my fav pieces of YT content i consumed in t he past half a year.
I enjoy CoH3 even to this day but I am still of the opinion that the scope of their campaigns was the biggest detriment to the development of the game.
It is entirely a new system that's very much isolated from the core gameplay that is known from CoH. All that effort and funds could've been placed somewhere else and you can even see glimpses of it in the campaigns with the scripted missions. And I say this as well knowing they built the game from the ground up which would take even more time than just reusing old code and scriptbases.
The Campaign is flawed because of old choices and issues that stemmed since launch (and the large scope); really they would need to heavily rework the campaign to get it feeling great. The campaign Skirmishes for example were originally bad because it was super repetitive and happened whenever you engaged another company; but that was when they had less maps to work with and less available resources/content compared to now
A good example of a good rework was the Prologue mission, because that DRASTICALLY changed since launch while still keeping the original flow (just look at older videos on the prologue). This mission is the only time throughout the entire campaign that the COASTAL RESERVES are used by the Germans; because originally they used the Guastatori/Bersas instead to represent the enemy Italians throughout the campaign and the Coastal Reserves were added much later into the game. This shows that they can change and implement even newer features from the game into the campaign and I sure hope they continue to do so.
On the non-campaign side of things, player vs player is pretty good all things considered now; and the AI for skimishes were given some touch ups to make them somewhat better (they still have a long ways to go). I would even say that it's really good with what it offers in that front which further makes it feel that the campaigns should need the same amount of love put onto them now too.
On the topic of Post-Sega Relic, the devs are just now starting to show previews and proposed changes that would be coming in the next updates/patches before going through with them to get feedback on it too; The recent Coral Viper update was also well received not only because it added and did stuff that the community liked, but is was genuinely not as bug ridden as much like previous major updates. Keep in mind, this is the major update they originally delayed, had extra content added in to compensate, then after news of being separated from Sega, decided to cancel the delay and push out the update earlier.
Hey grant nice video you got over here It would be cool to see you playing some lesser known old RTS titles that focus less on base building and more on realistic combat like the sudden stroke series or the men of war series
Is that GGG's real voice or is he using a voice modulator? Dude sound like he in witness protection
Battle for Middle Earth 1 not 2 had the campaign fully done in Conquest mode. Battle for Middle Earth 2 had it as a separate customizable sandbox mode kind of like a skirmish.
about the WW1 idea
there is a reason why it isn't portraied as often. aside from it being known les, it also was a lot less mobile. cars and armor was less known and a lot was infantry being sent into their death because they tried to apply napoleonic stand and fire strategies and charges in times of trenches and machine guns. this caused a lot of stalemates where simple atrition was partly more a concern than enemy bullets. in contrast, car industry has developed which lead to blitzkrieg tactics and the fast and interactive gameplay which is so much fun in RTS.
Didnt stop BF1 from completely eschewing all of this and basically applying a WW1 skin to WW2 combat. COH can do the same
Hey Grant. What're your thoughts on closer to reality strategy games like Call To arms: Gates of Hell ostfront or even the Graviteam tactics series?
5pm on a Friday night, what a perfect video to drop after work
Night at 5PM? Damn, my man, you live in the Himalayas valley or something? lol
@@DinnerForkTongue night as in I'm no longer working.
5pm on an early evening Friday felt cumbersome.
@@snakedeleon Nah, it's all good, I'm just jesting. Over here 5PM is indeed almost night when near the winter solstice.
@@DinnerForkTongue hahah all good - are the Himalayan valleys known for their early nights?
6:11 - I recently replayed CoH1's US campaign and I have to tell you I'm disappointed that Relic hasn't really improved its campaign combat AI. In CoH1 the way they made missions harder was to half your units' health and double the accuracy, health, and damage of your enemies. It made for a difficult campaign, but not a fun one. This was nearly 20 years ago, (fuck) and the fact that they haven't improved since then is depressing.
Your old video aged like fine wine.
28:20 WW I era has a one flaw - it was mainly trench warfare. Battlefield 1 is a good game, well made with great gameplay, but it went with a cost of dumping historical correctness - most people should stay in trenches having only long bolt-action rifle and wait for a wave for attack or something like this not a run-and-gun with rare or experimental weaponry but... it is really fun and to be honest that is a lot of people want from Battlefield.
Also a lot of studios (game, film, etc.) think that WW II started in 1941/1943 not in 1939, when typical tanks are now considered as light, rifles were the main infantry weapon, usage of horses, etc. That war lasts 6 years but throughout this time the way of fighting changes dramatically due to new weapons, tacticts, vehicles that were developed and at the end of this we have the most iconic elements of WW II like huge german tanks, infamus MG42, russian T34, american and british planes, commonness of automatic guns (self-loading rifles and SMGs) or almost fully motorization in armies.
Nice video Grant. Thanks.
Now, trains huh? I'm gonna go with a safe bet and expect a WoL challenge run
Eyyy main channel :D
I had an entirely different experience with the "hold the objectives near the enemy base" type of skirmishes. First off the game spawned a Panther in every time I did this type of skirmish. Then the enemy AI did nonstop smoke barrages onto my team weapons so it was almost impossible to use machine guns and at guns. Since the AI has way more manpower than I do they had already built 2 grens, 3 jägers and a 222, on top of the free Panther before I could even get a single at unit out. And unfortunately they did not ignore their critical objectives at all, even going for the objectives near my base whenever possible.
The skirmish missions are something going all the way back to Dawn of War Dark Crusade, although they were better executed there as they didn't try bonuses that didn't work. Didn't seem as broken as this at least... I hope you go back to the series one day :) Cool vid Grant, thanks for the update
While there are hopes that Relic would do better after the split, there's plenty of questionable decisions that were they own ever since CoH2 and all of the storms surrounding it - from the campaign writing that infuriated a lot of people to DLC spam (even including in their early take on dynamic campaign with Rangers locked behind a paywall) that also affected the game balance (just 2.99$ for a commander in a faction you have to buy first too!).
And then they followed with DoW3, which was a clear mess.
So while I kinda want to stay optimistic on this, I just can't.
Another great couple genres that no one does much; Vietnam. There's plenty of FPS games, not a lot of rts and strategy games. You can definitely name a couple but there's not 20k titles like WW2 has.
Next. This one I dont think I've seen literally ANYTHING for. Korean War. No one talks about it in the first place. They have so many WW2 assets and its 1950s, they still used a lot of WW2 equipment and it would be extremely interesting to see.
Doubt relic would do either of these and if I'm honest, I'd just be happy if they mass fixed DoW3 and CoH3. Was so sad when the launch of 3 was butchered, played CoH1 as a 6 year old kid on my dad's old external hard drive he got from his navy buddies. Thank you for coming to my TED Talk.
Interesting to see the perspective of someone who focuses on the campaign. I haven't even touched either campaign as I knew they would be mid at best. My interest was in the multiplayer, which was... mixed. The gameplay is good but there's just something about it that feels so lacking. The sound improvements have helped a little but CoH2 sound STILL overshadows it pretty hard. And that's just sad, really.
who here wants to see grant play empire at war mods hearing him say he loves that
I was so hopefull for a second that the towns on the map would just be the missions so you get this really free form mission selection... And then my dreams were dashed.
It feels like they just did Dawn of War : Dark Crusade but worse. Kinda wild
I for one want to remove historical accuracy. This is a game. I want a Waffentragger E-100 in game now!!!
For me the thing that make me not enjoy the company of heroes anymore is the fact that everything is so slow and hard to die.
It's not that it's bad but i don't have the time like back when i was young anymore.
I love seeing other fronts and earlier periods of WWII rather then constant "Panthers and IS-2 on every corner" as if only 1945 existed, but... that's why I got Gates of Hell and play finninsh dynamic campaign😅
Sadly the game so far doesn't support having two different factions as your opponents so you can't mix equipment too much.
I'd love to hear Grant's thoughts on "Terminator - Dark Fate Defiance" which does try to be "Company of Heroes in a Terminator Universe"
A classic CoH but set in the Korean war could be cool. Still close to WW2 but plenty of options for units and cool new stuff.
I very much enjoyed this video. Thanks Grant.
While it's very tempting, and often also correct, to blame the publisher for all the game development's ills, this is probably not true here. Sega has proven to be a very hands off publisher, giving the developers under its umbrella a lot of freedom to do their own thing, simply providing the money and asking very few questions, until things go terribly wrong that is(due to the developer's bad decisions)... This was famously the case with CA, in the whole fiasco that was Hyenas but also in their actual Total War titles that were god awful like the latest one: Pharaoh. All the problems with all CA games have been 100% CA's fault, not Sega's. While I'm not a Relic/Sega insider or anything I don't think Sega drastically changed their modus operandi and suddenly decided to force Relic to make all the terrible decisions that led to CoH3. The much more likely scenario is that Relic themselves decided to treat CoH3, perhaps their CoH franchise itself, as a cash cow, milking it for all its worth before abandoning it, selling it off, whatever. Or they were just incredibly tone deaf and thought this was somehow a good idea, which isn't out of the question but I don't think nearly as likely.
im an Age of Empires 2 enjoyer, but after playing age of empires 4 i find the game is more enjoyable in term of non modded pvp match
I’m an old school relic fan since homeworld. That said the crew that are the relic old guard is Blackbird Interactive, which I’m sure someone else has mentioned. I too want relic to rise again, but if not maybe their legacy can live on in BBI
Fingers crossed for Grant looking at Empire at War next.
The last line of the video makes me thinks it's gonna be Last Train Home
as far I know, he likes it quite a lot. Some mechanics from it was used in some of SC2 mods
Your description of the campaign breaks my heart, CoH 1 is one of my favorite games ever, and the ONLY reason why i didnt pre-order Company of Heroes 3, is because 10 years ago i pre-ordered Company of Heroes 2, my first pre-order and the game released in a very messy state, after YEARS of updates it became a decent game, but that taught me a valuable lesson, be wary of pre-orders and specially, never pre-order anything from Relic ever again
TBH, a Relic WW1 CoH style RTS would be epic!
another era I would love to see company of hero set in us the Chinese war front.
(we got the soviet/german front).
why not the Japanese/chinese or Japanese/russia or the Japanese/Pacific war.
or heck even the Chinese warlords era.
game set in that period/area is shockingly low.
at best we get the US towards the end of the war island hopping campaign.
Another sin of COH2 from a campaign/narrative direction, is that you don't play as one company as you have in the past. It is Company (singular) of Heros. Not "Hero Companies".
Let us reinvision this campaign, as a singular company moving through a world map with a tighter focus and objectives. A sort of mothership moving carefully through a hostile land, sending out "teams" ( effectively a ranged action, not a seperate unit ) to deal with objects. Eg. begin a small mission to secure a bridge, up to starting a large base-building skirmish to capture an airfield ( for supplies/reinforcements ), or scouting. I think that could have proved a really nice, focused campaign with a different spin on things. While still facilitating all that COH needs.
The ball is firmly in Relics court now. I can believe that these microtransactions and the release before it was ready could have been initiatives pressed upon the company by SEGA. The problem is the heavy dlc/microtransaction model was set in the Dawn of War 2/ Company of Heroes 2 era. Now this could have been to boost THQ failing finances but it's still a worrying precedent that the Leadership at Relic are keen on rinsing it's customers for every available dollar instead of making it's fanbase hungry for their next product in the same way the original Dawn of War expansions and Company of Heroes made them. The next Relic game will be a very cautious watch that is for sure.
25:16 both battlegroups were free. And the naming of the patches is quite accurate to how they did name operations during ww2.
I mean, the skirmish and fights between companies is pretty easy to fix, just give the player the choice, autoresolve or play the battle, is what total war does and it is pretty nice to have a choice, sometimes you want to fight even if it is worthless and sometimes you dont
@2:16 wait I can just walk around and win battles without fighting?? In a COH game?
Dude a proper WW1 Company of heroes would be so cool.
There is so much potential with "Campaigns" being long battles, like the Somme, Ypres, Verdun, Isonzo, Tannenberg and Gallipoli just to name a few.
And so many Factions to chose:
French, German, Italian, Romanian and the Turks. being their own factions.
And other factions have Interesting Opportunity for sub faction like mechanics.
Austro-Hungary could have cultural Minority mechanic where they could change to how they play giving flexibility.
British Empire (Maybe even Commonwealth being their own sub faction you pick at the start of the game, ANZAC, Canadian, Indian, South African).
Russian Empire where you could have a expansion about the Revolution, and play as Whites or Reds.
And so many Theaters to choose from:
Western Front, Eastern Front, Italian Front, Romanian Front, Bulgarian Front, Serbia/Balkans, Mesopotamia, African Colonies and Pacific Islands.
You could have lots of Potential for Expansions like a small one shot campaigns like Lawrence of Arabia, or go have Crazy fun with a 1919 ALT history where you could have Diseal punk Zeppelins and huge Bi-planes and Even larger land ships.
I am a biased WW1 nerd however.
Having wasted 1550 hours of my life in Company of Heroes 1 and 160 in CoH 2, I got CoH 3 for 15 bucks maybe 2 months ago. From the very moment you open the game it feels unfinished, just by taking a look at the absurdly small amount of maps and a campaign that only gives the illusion of being dynamic while being very on-rails, the mission variety being just laughable and the fact it has daily/weekly missions that unlock pretty much nothing. Needless to say, the campaign does not play at all how the actual Italian Campaign happened in WW2.
The gameplay isn't honestly that bad (although the infantry vs. infantry fights in heavy cover drag on for an absurd amount of time), but since I mostly play against the AI it's just extremely annoying to see them just circle around your units and emplacements because they map hack.
They had 2 games to learn from and improve upon, how they managed to barely fix anything nor add content in a year is still beyond me. Hell, even the main menu looks like it's taken from a generic phone game, they could have at least changed that.
Excellent analysis. Loved listening.
I think it would work for them for the next game to be CoH adjacent. Like, the korean war or something. It's relatively similar to late WWII tech-wise, there's good potential for an old-school story campaign, and it's a setting that I don't think I've seen before.
did i hear FREEDOM? *sips liber-tea*