Company Of Heroes 3 preview and interview – the great RTS comeback-Steve Boxer-Entertainment – Metro

Company Of Heroes 3 – return of the RTS (pic: Sega)

The return of Sega’s World War 2 franchise hopes to bring RTS games out of the doldrums and back into the spotlight where they belong.

If you seek evidence that the games industry is an ever-evolving entity, subject to the shifting tides of fashion, look no further than the real-time strategy (RTS) genre. From the late 1990s to the mid-2000s, RTS games were plentiful and highly successful, but then almost overnight they disappeared from release schedules and the public consciousness. Not only that but nowadays turn-based strategy games, which the RTS originally supplanted, are now much more popular, but there are signs of a comeback…

It’s nine years since developer Relic Entertainment released Company Of Heroes 2, but that game and its 2006 predecessor are still held in high regard by fans and WW2 aficionados alike. On the evidence of an extensive play-session, involving two chunks of the single-player campaign and a number of multiplayer matches, Company Of Heroes 3 appears to be at least as good and a welcome return for the franchise, the genre, and Relic themselves.

As well as playing the game, we also spoke to David Littman, Company Of Heroes’ vice president of production at Relic. For Littman, the key new element for the franchise is what Relic describes as a dynamic campaign, in which the single-player part of the game alternates between RTS encounters and a turn-based, board-game style overview, which lets players manage the entire Allied campaign to push northwards through Italy in 1943.

‘We asked our players early on what kind of campaign they would like and they answered that they’d love a dynamic campaign like this,’ said Littman. ‘What it does is give you ownership over the gameplay more than a linear campaign would do. It gives you a lot of agency to command the Allied forces and take back Italy any way you see fit. There are thousands of different strategies and tactics you can use – no two playthroughs are going to be the same, which for gamers is a powerful thing.’

Another new feature Littman highlights is a full tactical pause, which lets you halt the action at any time and queue up a number of actions: ‘We still have over 400,000 players playing Company Of Heroes 1 and 2 on a monthly basis, so our first goal was to make sure that those players will love Company Of Heroes 3.

‘The second goal was to continue to grow the audience, and that’s where we put in some new features like our dynamic campaign and full tactical pause, to make sure players, when they come in for the first time, can have a lot of fun, understand the game and slow it down if they like. But at the same time, the game has the depth that those core players will love.’

Hands-on with Company Of Heroes 3

Our first play session with the game took place at the very start of the single-player campaign, as the Allies make their initial landing in Sicily, before pushing up north through Italy. After a brief but tidy scene setting cut scene, we were instantly plunged into classic RTS action, that brought back pleasant memories of the two previous Company Of Heroes games.

The first mission, Gela, was particularly redolent of the first Company Of Heroes game, as it involved landing on a beach and establishing a foothold, albeit in much less intense circumstances than the first game’s D-Day landings. Taking control of American troops, it took us a while to get back into the mindset required to play a military RTS. Company Of Heroes 3, like its predecessors, is a pretty hardcore game, and it doesn’t have a formal tutorial.

However, in the Gela mission, at least, it did demonstrate an extra level of forgiveness, offering tips on how to establish a beachhead and then advance into the nearby town, in the face of hostility from defending German Wehrmacht forces. These hints include encouraging you to find cover, with the best indicated in green and semi-cover highlighted in yellow.

Switching between squads, we circumspectly fought our way up the beach, flanking enemies wherever possible and instructing troops to take out machinegun posts with grenades. Above the beach, we were able to regroup and briefly take stock of our resources, which included a very handy Sherman tank.

Armoured vehicles like the Sherman now have side-armour as well as front armour (a new feature for the franchise) and the Sherman proved devastating against dug-in German troops. However, it had to be carefully manoeuvred to keep it front-on as much as possible – and we made sure to remove it from the fray and send engineers to repair it when necessary.

Moving into the town of Gela, the full Company Of Heroes gameplay experience began to unfold. The Sherman tank proved useful at clearing the fog of war, as it could be made to blind fire into un-scouted areas. We were also encouraged to get squads to unleash flares, which again revealed enemy positions. Although we had been given the main objective of liberating the town square, new objectives, such as taking out enemy artillery, soon popped up.

This was a good excuse to check out the new full tactical pause feature, triggered by pressing the spacebar. Full tactical pause feels intuitive and easy to use – other RTS games have implemented similar features, and it certainly provided welcome respite as the battling grew intense, which it is wont to do in Company of Heroes 3.

Company Of Heroes 3 – the first two games still have a big audience (pic: Sega)

The Italian front

After liberating Gela, and triggering a cut scene, the action moved to mainland Italy, initially in the hills of Calabria, where the game, still doling out gameplay tips, focuses on the usefulness of squads of scouts and the ability to mount attacks after laying down smokescreens. Before long we made it to Salerno, a well-defended town where, again, the intensity ramped up a further notch.

At this point, the full depth of Company Of Heroes 3’s gameplay started to reveal itself, as we were given the ability to call in paratroopers and command special forces units (Company Of Heroes 3 has a feature called Battlegroups which lets you pick specific types of squads, influenced by the turn-based dynamic campaign). We were also able to call in airstrikes and reconnaissance runs from nearby air force and navy units, and could start building specialised squads, such as mortar teams or engineers to remove barbed-wire defences.

It’s here that a key element in the game comes to the fore: what Relic refers to as Veterancy. If you can keep your squads alive (which sometimes involves forcing them to retreat from impossible situations and fall back to the nearest medical station), they eventually achieve veteran status, which renders them much more effective as a fighting force.

The Salerno mission is a long, multi-stage affair in which some imaginative objectives are imposed. To finish it, after establishing control of a large part of the city, we had to destroy two bridges to stop German reinforcements coming in from the east. Here, another factor started coming into play: local Italian resistance partisans began appearing, to help us out.

Company Of Heroes 3 – the dynamic campaign map is brand new (pic: Sega)

The dynamic campaign map

Finishing the Salerno mission allowed us to experience what is perhaps Company Of Heroes 3’s key new feature: the dynamic campaign map. This moves you out of the action and onto a wider map of the surrounding terrain, introducing a turn-based game reminiscent of Risk or Diplomacy. It casts you as the overall commander of the Allies’ northward push, with three sub-commanders – Buckram, Norton, and Valenti from the US, UK, and Italian resistance.

They tend to bicker, adding an interesting narrative element, and your decisions will please some and anger others. This part of the game includes a loyalty engine, so if you please one of your sub-commanders by doing what they suggest, you will start opening up new squads and units in an upgrade tree.

There’s plenty to do in the turn-based aspect of the game, as you have navy resources as well as troops, and can opt, for example, to take control of airfields or secure supply lines before launching a full-out assault in a particular area. Even the routes you choose are important – slow but stealthy through forests or quickly along roads, but with the risk of ambush.

We loved this element of the game. It felt entirely in context and really makes you feel like the commander of an entire war effort. And we could see the effects of our labours when dropping back from the map into assaults and skirmishes on the ground. With some skirmishes, you can tell the game to resolve them automatically, but not, obviously, with the story missions. Relic’s claims that its dynamic campaign approach means no two playthroughs seemed completely believable.

Desert warfare in North Africa

Our experience of the Italy campaign was restricted to the first two hours, but after that we moved onto the other main chunk of Company of Heroes 3’s single-player campaign, in North Africa. Relic says that, overall, the game’s single-player campaign will take a very meaty 40 hours to complete, so it’s roughly twice as long as that of the previous game.

In North Africa, playing a mission roughly halfway through the single-player campaign we swapped sides, taking control of the Afrika Korps and fighting British forces. A narrative element was provided in unexpectedly oblique fashion, with a story told in cut scenes of a Jewish Berber fighting with the British, and showing the consequences of the fighting on his family.

It worked well, adding a sense of overall context to the missions, as the North Africa campaign is a conventionally linear one without the turn-based dynamic element seen in Italy.

Again, the missions were varied and imaginative; in the first one, our Afrika Korps division was surrounded by British minefields, and we had to fight off waves of British assaults while waiting for reinforcements to forge their way through the minefields, before launching an assault on the nearby, dug-in British squads.

The desert warfare was intriguing and highly tactical, with a plethora of motorised elements including super-quick two-man motorcycles and towable heavy guns, which are new for the franchise. As you’d expect, maintaining squads of engineers (preferably veteran ones) proved key – we even found some abandoned but salvageable tanks, which was just as well, since we tended to be a bit cavalier with our Tiger tanks. Various exotic Panzer units proved very handy, but beating back the Desert Rats was a long, hard slog.

Company Of Heroes 3 – multiplayer is a key part of the appeal (pic: Sega)

Hands-on with Company Of Heroes 3 multiplayer

We also got a taste of Company Of Heroes 3’s multiplayer, experiencing both 2v2 and 1v1 action. Although the multiplayer extends to 4v4 play, scaling its map-size up according to the number of players. Littman was keen to stress the importance of the game’s multiplayer element and outlined where Relic’s priorities lay when crafting it: ‘We’ve still got 400,000 players playing our game on a monthly basis, and most of them are playing multiplayer. It never gets old, because you’re coming up against new players. So we wanted to make sure we satisfied the multiplayer lovers out there.

‘The first thing we did is launch with four factions – we’ve only ever launched with two factions before. Within that, we have over 140 units; each unit has different abilities and different ways to play, different tactics and different ways to combine them with other units. So the multiplayer is deeper than COH1 or COH 2. A lot of our players play 3v3 and 4v4, so we have 14 maps at launch. They can play in North Africa or Italy, and those maps are obviously very different.’

We tried both: North Africa for the 2v2 and a smaller map from Italy for the one-on-one action. The four factions playable at launch will be British forces, US forces, the Afrika Korps, and the Wehrmacht, and we ended up playing as all four in custom-generated multiplayer games.

Especially in 2v2 multiplayer, map-domination by capturing designated points, that generate resources which in turn can be used to spawn motorised units and troops, was key. Such capture points form focuses for the fighting and we soon discovered that a bit of graceful withdrawal from firefights that weren’t going our way, in order to reinforce our troops and preserve our veterans, was the best ploy in order to prosper.

In the one-on-one action, the key phase came before either player had ventured far from their base in search of the enemy, when it was vital to flesh out your base with buildings that would later allow you to replenish motorised units, heavy guns, and the like. Later, holding capture points provided vital resources to generate those reinforcements.

Company of Heroes 3’s multiplayer was every bit as hectic and hardcore as you would expect and was clearly best approached after you had played through the campaign and developed a deep knowledge of each faction’s troop types, Battlegroups, and motorised units. Relic will provide a way in which you can ease yourself into it, though: you can set up multiplayer matches against the AI rather than human opposition; the former being much more forgiving.

Company Of Heroes 3 impressions

It was great to reacquaint ourselves with the Company Of Heroes franchise after a nine-year hiatus and everything we experienced suggests that the new game is at least as good as its predecessors. Barring an egregious outbreak of bugginess between now and February 23 (what we played was solid as a rock, although some UI elements were apparently not finalised) it should prove popular with fans and hopefully reignite general interest in the RTS genre.

Company Of Heroes 3 is deep, highly tactical, very authentic, and the addition of the dynamic turn-based element adds a supremely clever linearity-busting twist to the genre. It’s not a game for the faint-hearted, though – it’s a game you’ll have to work hard to master, primarily with your brain rather than twitch reactions.

It’s also worth noting that when it launches, it will come with a deep and extensive modding engine. According to Littman, Company Of Heroes 1 and 2 already includes multiplayer maps created by fans and he was keen to emphasise the importance of player input in Company of Heroes 3’s development:

‘I’ve never had this much immersion with our players during development before, and I’m most proud of that. Because we’ve made so many changes throughout the last few years based on player feedback, I feel so confident in our launch.

‘The second thing I’m proud of is our development team. When you do work with players, it’s a lot harder to develop a game, because you’re constantly adjusting and changing things because of their feedback. It’s making it a better game, but it’s also hard on the development team to now schedule these changes when we already had work planned.’

That could explain why Relic put back the game’s initial launch date, but its efforts and general approach, on the evidence of our hands-on preview, appear to have borne fruit. If you crave a gameplay experience with true depth and authenticity, and which offers a considerable challenge to your tactical sensibilities, keep an eye out for Company Of Heroes 3.

Formats: PC
Publisher: Sega
Developer: Relic Entertainment
Release Date: 23rd February 2023

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