The DeanBeat: Scratching the Surface with Company of Heroes 3

At the recent Gamescom show in Germany, I had the chance to play another preview of Company of Heroes 3, where my mission was to take over a German-controlled airfield during the Italian campaign of WWII. Then I was able to interview Steve Mele, executive producer at Relic Entertainment, about the final details of the ongoing development.

The real time strategy game will be published by Sega and Relic on PC via Steam on November 17th, and it looks pretty polished. My job in the demo was to take over an airport, and I barely got in before I had to move on to my interview. I also played another demo where I was wiped out pretty well. If I showed you that on video, it would be as laughable as my performance at Cuphead in 2017. With only half an hour at Gamescom, I was just scratching the surface in this game.

I think I’ll have to get used to getting my head in this game, especially if I’m playing multiplayer against some experienced strategists. But this is the kind of game that you learn little by little. Compared to my previous demo, I felt like I had a better understanding of how to navigate the strategic map. I conducted a few reconnaissance flights over the airfield and discovered the tough defenses. I bombed them with planes and conducted a fire mission against them from my battleship. That softened them up pretty well, while it didn’t keep me dry on resources for other campaign goals.

But when I went into battle, it was unpredictable. It’s pretty easy to come across German armor and infantry just ripping your squads to shreds. And that’s what I love about this version of Company of Heroes, which I’ve been playing since the series first debuted in 2006. It’s been over eight years since Company of Heroes 2 debuted in 2013 with a Russian front.

I can tell you that I will happily spend many hours on this game when it comes out. I spoke to Mele about the fine details Relic has brought to the game since the previous demos.

Here’s an edited transcript of our interview.

GamesBeat: Have you been with the project the whole time?

Steve Mele: Almost all the time. I’ve been with Relic for four years and the whole time was with Company of Heroes.

GamesBeat: How’s it all together? What do you have left before shipping in the summer?

Mel: It’s all coming together as we approach our launch date later this year. We’re in the final phase, so now it’s about stability and the critical bugs we want to fix before we start. All the pieces are there. The experience is all there. We are very proud. It’s the biggest Company of Heroes to date and we have a lot of fun both creating and playing.

What we want to share at a high level, we want to make sure we capture the essence of Company of Heroes, the RTS gameplay. When you look at this, it feels like we’re trying to do Company of Heroes. It’s not something entirely new. But we offer players new ways to play, with the strategic map. Tactical pause is also new. Within missions, you can pause the action with the spacebar and issue commands. That’s new, and it allows players to get in and get familiar with the RTS, to slow it down. And then the last big thing is we updated everything. We have the new Mediterranean theatre, which offers us all this variety. The engine, the graphics, the destruction are all modernized. We are proud of what we have here.

GamesBeat: The North Africa setting, was that a surprise to people?

Mel: We knew we wanted – from the start we met our city council. Together we formed a small group of people from the community. We call them our co-development group. We started talking about which theaters people wanted to see, where we wanted to go next with Company of Heroes. There were all these different ideas. Everyone was enthusiastic about the Mediterranean Sea, the soft underbelly of Europe. That’s what we chose, Italy and North Africa. People rave about the variety you get in both places.

The way we approached North Africa was also part of the push to play the way you want to play. In Italy, we wanted to give people that strategic map layer, which would allow them to play more strategically, but the North African operation was more about the traditional linear storytelling experience that players are used to in our previous games. As you get started in North Africa it gets more wide open in the deserts, more tank battles, bigger maps to go through. It’s a different play style. Italy offers you more mountainous regions, hills and urban areas within the cities.

GamesBeat: How hard is it to relate the strategic map to the tactical gameplay?

Mel: We talk about that a lot. We want the strategic map, the campaign map, to influence the RTS missions. As you move your businesses, you have different types of businesses on the map. You have different influences coming in there. I saw you bombed one of the yards there. That will help you access the mission, help you to a new place. You can also bomb the actual mission area you are going to. That will weaken some units within that mission. It will also damage some buildings there, so you will see slightly damaged versions of the terrain.

The companies you work with, whatever you apply to them, the characteristics, that will affect what you can have there. The other thing is, if you bring your companies forward – this company here, and this other company here, they can both come in if you choose to do that. For example, this one will have a medical effect that will help you heal better within the mission. And of course the results of the mission also affect the campaign map.

GamesBeat: Is it always better to bring that kind of attached power? Does that go into effect automatically?

Mel: What happens is you get this preview window. It applies them automatically, but if there’s another influence you’d rather pick, you can go in and say, “No, I don’t want that one, I want this one instead.” You can bring a number of things to influence your business when you come in.

GamesBeat: Does it matter if you have any movement left for the units involved?

Mel: No, it doesn’t matter. You just need to have that one action you can use to get started and join the battle. As long as you have that, and you have the others in place, this is how it will work.

GamesBeat: If you fight for the same cities a lot – if you take it, the enemy recaptures it and you take it back – what variations do you see?

Mel: Oh yes, there are actually – in many of these mission areas we have a defensive version of the same mission. You go in and you take the area, and then there will be a defensive mission for you to play if the enemy counterattacks. That works very well. What you will see is that you have mission cards, large mission cards, which are scripted. Then you have dynamic skirmishes that take place around these spaces. Depending on where you are on the map, some of them will be dynamic, and as you go into the major cities, you’ll get an important mission there, something in a script.

GamesBeat: When I played previous versions, I spent a lot of time on the strategic map. I would skip some fights and just keep going.

Mel: Obviously there is a lot of great content out there. Here’s what we said about playing your way. If you want to focus on the strategic map, move things around, focus on that, and be really strategic about what you’re doing, you can. And if you really want to go ahead and get into the RTS gameplay, you’ve even done it where Andy helped you. If you just drop the paratroopers there, you can get in right away.

GamesBeat: Was it hard to figure out how much you could do on the strategy map? Was there the potential to make it too easy to get through?

Mel: When we announced last year, we shared the campaign map, the Italian experience – we shared it with players very early on. We showed an introductory experience. We have listened to our players and learned from them by getting feedback. We listened to the community and what they said. A lot of it was about how fast we would get to content, how fast you could move around the map. Ranges of motion, how we approached the detachments and emplacements. We learned from that and tackled it in the following iterations.

GamesBeat: I remember you actually didn’t want to spend your plane that early.

Mel: Precisely. We give you that option. What do you spend your resources on? In the earlier versions, we broke up – the way those detachments work is we broke them apart, and they were more of a unit on the board. Now they are more of a skill within the company.

GamesBeat: I did find that – when I went online, of course I just got wiped out. Are there any tips you would have for someone like me?

Mel: I should have our gameplay team here! It’s funny because even in the office there are different levels. We have hired a number of people from our community. One of the highest ranked players in the world in Company of Heroes 2, we hired them on the team. He is now a designer and helps us balance and fine-tune the game. He is excellent. But the point is, you can see him play, you can see people who are really good, and then you can see people like me in the middle. Our game offers a huge range of skill levels.

Going online – obviously starting against the AI ​​is what I do. You build that skill. The gameplay team, they keep talking about strategies and units and using them effectively. It’s a skill like any game. You just have to put in the time. Recon is very important because it involves counterplay. If you look at their powers, if they are learning a certain way, you have to have an answer to that particular technology.

That’s one thing the gameplay team taught me, understanding what the other side is coming up with. When you start on the RTS side, you can choose which path your force will take. If you’re going for infantry, that’s fine. That’s an approach. You build up that aspect faster. But the problem is you have to have a way to react when they go with vehicles. How are you going to handle that?