Rob Zacny

Three Moves Ahead 323: Company of Heroes

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Three Moves Ahead 323:

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Company of Heroes

The true measure of a game's greatness is how many game developers play it during their lunch breaks. This week we learn that Company of Heroes validates this universal truth with its compelling gameply and lasting appeal. With the recent addition of the British army to CoH2, Rob Zacny, Blendo Games' Brendon Chung, and CoH product Shane Neville look back at the original game and the state of the sequel. The first entry in the series still holds strong while the sequel continues to improve.

Company of Heroes, Company of Heroes 2

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I actually JUST bought CoH on Steam about a month ago. At first I was going to get CoH 2 but I bought the first one since IGN's review suggested I start there. I've always been a huge Dawn of War fan and it's been really great to play another Relic RTS.

 

The thing that I miss is multiplayer. Starcraft 2 scared me off of RTS multiplayer and I've never had the cojones to step back in.

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Thanks for this. Company of Heroes doesn't get talked about enough. While Dawn of War 2 was my multiplayer RTS of choice I always felt CoH was a richer game, and a design masterpiece. I never did pick up CoH2, as the unlockable bonuses and commanders put me off getting it, and I no longer have the time to devote to learning and playing online RTS. 

 

Company of Heroes is a wonderfully watchable game, and I don't often see that talked about. It was the first game I ever found myself watching on Youtube, with Bridger's wonderful Tales of Heroes series*. It's an easy game to follow as a spectator because the flow of battle and the basic mechanics are very comprehensible to the viewer, but there is endless room for nuance and skilled play. It looks fantastic as well, and the spectator gets to appreciate the crumbling, changing battlefield even better than the players. As you said in the podcast, it's like a birds' eye view of a war movie. 

 

There's an alternate universe out there where CoH became the dominant RTS in e-sports. That's a fun thing to speculate about.

 

No discussion of a Relic RTS is complete without talking about sound design, which you also touched on. More than any other game I can think of, I can tell what's going on in a game with my eyes closed. Each unit has an impressive range of situationally appropriate voice responses. Units will tell you their situation, so if they get in trouble when your attention is elsewhere you only have yourself to blame. Each weapon has a distinct sound when it fires. The amount of personality they've crammed in is impressive as well, and listening to German officers chivy along nervous Volksgrenadiers and British Tommys mock each other is amusing and atmospheric.

 

*I'd recommend any of series 8, but my personal favourite is this one: 

which showcases some delightful post production editing using the powerful replay feature. War movie indeed.

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I wonder if Relic/Sega botched CoH 2 from having a robust competitive multiplayer scene with the huge array of microtransactions and little bonuses to grind away at. I seem to recall that being a real point of contention when the game was first released.

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Bit off topic since podcast mostly talked about CoH as multiplayer game, but I wish next installment of singleplayer for CoH just took one gigantic map and let the player navigate around it for few hours.

 

I mean some of bigger missions are pretty much this, except I'm imagining just one gigantic version.

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  • First time visiting this thread since release of the podcast. I am surprised this thread is not 30 pages long, full of old battles and discussions on CoH, ToV, CoH2 ... fill in your favorite topic.
 
  • I have absolutely nothing intelligent to add. You can stop reading now. Thanks, Arathain for mentioning the *watchable* aspect of CoH. So, I am not coming totally off here (see below).
 
  • Only hours ago, my school buddy - from 30+ years ago(!) - and I played against CoH2 Standard AI ... and lost miserably. And I am the guy, who does not play multiplayer games. A) Nobody I know plays video games (old people) ...and B ... I don't like them ... except CoH, as it seems.
 
  • Recently, last couple days, I slapped ReShade (that's a post-processing graphic tool) on CoH2. This game is so 'optimized' for frantic multiplayer matches that it is often way too much for me. So what did I do? 
 
  • I started watching. I slowed it down. I ... enjoyed it as a movie experience! (Heresy! I know!) Michael Curtiz and such. 
 
  • And I need to share my excitement with SOMEBODY ... so it falls on you, five people, five people of EXCELLENT TASTE ... here in the Idle Thumbs/3MA forum. I don't know how to include videos in these modern websites. Be aware, what you will see is fabulous, is on YouTube and has no ads. (Who are these people, who opt-in to ads on YouTube, really?)
 
First one was just a ReShade test, but it looks more like a recent movie, with some recent movie stars, driving an old tank? Oh, I brag. Apologies, YOU decide... 
 
 
And the second one, hopefully speaks for itself. It is a black and white movie. The main reason why I wanted to share this is to show you: there is minimal to more like NO skill involved in this! Everyone, who wants to, can just record something and watch it as a consumable entertainment token?
 

The amount of work that goes in these games - not only on the mechanical side, crunching numbers, making balancing work, creating new units, which look, 'feel' and 'play' unique, but also the 'grunt' work of 'texture artists' and 'gfx artists' .. or - as mentioned - excellent sound design ... often is forgotten, in the focused minds of winners, who focus on winning and out-thinking their opponents. It is nice to explore other elements in games too.

PS: I started starring at video games a while back. If you are really crazy, you might want to watch one of my 30 second videos showing off the

, or the exciting
I...  - and I even made a 
 , showing basically nothing - unless you liked "The Thin Red Line" or "The New World" ... ok, enough vanity. Again, apologies. I just like to point at things my eyes see in video games ... through videos. 

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  • First time visiting this thread since release of the podcast. I am surprised this thread is not 30 pages long, full of old battles and discussions on CoH, ToV, CoH2 ... fill in your favorite topic.

 

It's just... the podcast was mostly about multiplayer and CoH series just does not work with me for multiplayer.  I crave precision for multiplayer games and this series' squad's autonomous-ness just drives me nuts sometimes even in singleplayer, I can't cope with that in multiplayer.

 

Like mortar for example... that thing an straight up kill a squad or sometimes just miss.  That sort of variation leaves me too salty.  Maybe I need to grow up but for now, I would be just way too salty and pissed playing this game online.

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It's just... the podcast was mostly about multiplayer and CoH series just does not work with me for multiplayer.  I crave precision for multiplayer games and this series' squad's autonomous-ness just drives me nuts sometimes even in singleplayer, I can't cope with that in multiplayer.

 

Like mortar for example... that thing an straight up kill a squad or sometimes just miss.  That sort of variation leaves me too salty.  Maybe I need to grow up but for now, I would be just way too salty and pissed playing this game online.

 

What put me off years ago and never wanted me to play in particular the Company of Heroes series multiplayer, goes back to another Podcast: Games For Windows Live Podcast which had a young Shawn Elliott (who later was hired by Ken Levine & Irrational Games to work on Bioshock Infinite), who in many episodes articulated his love for the game in ways I could not understand. He introduced me to the concept of 'griefing', which basically is a notion to 'break' the game, not follow the rules and hinder your opponent to play the game. It layed open the vicious side of human nature. 

But, more to your point, introducing 'randomness' in video games, or more broadly, in computing itself(!) is one of the most challenging things? (Would be an interesting podcast topic, imho. Or was there one?)

One of the videos above in my links shows a single rifleman 'nuking' it out against a tank for over a minute. It was the first time I myself recognized what is going on there. That kind of non-precision? But you want units to have certain stats against other units, to keep the overall balance? Which of course introduces some dice-rolling non-precision and ridiculousness, if taken 'literally'. No soldier would survive a tank shell from five feet next to them.

I could easier excuse a 'bad' mortar crew. It is easier to 'fictionally' justify such a unit? Clicking/commanding a unit to do a specific thing and that unit failing in many ways IS how combat really goes? It reflects the theater of war?

I guess, all these games have to find a balance between familiarity of units, historical references (here, once again, our all favorite topic) and the abstraction as it translates into gameplay?

 

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Yes.  And for me, it's not just randomness, it's randomness in multiplayer environment.

 

I enjoy my share of procedurally generated single player games (including rogue-likes, notorious for unforgiving RNG).  But for online multiplayer (local is fine) I think any sort of percieved 'injustice' by the game just turns me into pile of salt.

 

And it's also whenever control over a squad breaks down cause of some pathfinding issue that drives me nuts.  Like whenever you have a vehicle and squad in close proximity, you can see just how fubar the control gets cause game wants the squad to dedicate their time avoiding the vehicle and it's just a cluster%$*)

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I know there's no arguing personal taste, and you're usually great Gaizo but this just makes me so angry. Sometimes taste can be wrong.

 

More seriously, coming from a wargaming tradition, this is all just second-nature to me. I played Squad Leader more than C&C growing up, and a combat-resolution table is all about variance and luck. But I also think this game is NOT as variable as you make it out to be. A lot of the issues you describe just require a different approach to control than in games like SC2, but if you micro properly, you still get some pretty predictable results. Take the mortar, for example. 9/10 the first shots fall wide of the target. If the mortar is veteran, obviously they're more accurate, but the point remains that the mortar becomes more dangerous the longer you leave infantry under fire. I almost never see a one-shot kill on a full-strength infantry unit, unless they've already been damaged by previous shots or other kinds of combat. So it's not a completely random event, and I'm comfortable with having combat that involves a degree of skewed luck.

 

I will say sometimes the fact that squads' autonomy does cause them to fall into poor positions or facings can be infuriating, but again, usually they stay where I put them. 

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Oh yeah, I probably didn't word it clearly but I do consider this more of my personal 'issue' rather than some grand game design problem on CoH end.  That's why I focused on 'percieved injustice' and how it leaves me salty, because I agree that in grand scheme of things those tiny randomness doesn't little to nothing to strategy while adding ton of flavor.  But it still leaves me salty and tilted as heck cause, well, that's how I am.

 

Also on tangential note, the free 3d building placement is another thing... like in city builders I obsess over exactly how wide certain blocks are or if the roads are perfectly straight, so whenever RTS game let me freely place buildings (unlike in set grids like say, Blizzard stuff), it paralyze me (well not literally but it causes great anguish) cause I want my buildings to be perfectly aligned and I really think I can pull it off.

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