14 DAY TRIAL // Quinn Duffy, the leading designer creating Company of Heroes 2 at Relic, says that the strategy game’s mechanics were largely inspired by a number of details the team found during their research effort.
The developer tells VG247 that, “What you find is that though all that research you’ll find one little anecdote – a couple of lines in a story – or an observation that was made, and you put a sticky note on that, which then becomes inspiration for a whole gameplay system.”
The team benefited from looking at both Western and Russian sources, some of which have only recently been made available to researchers, and managed to get a solid picture of how fighting on the Eastern Front of World War II looked.
The first Company of Heroes game and its expansion focused on action in the Western hemisphere and the team struggled with the technology and saw that it could not do Eastern battles justice.
But now the situation has changed and Duffy believes that there are more interesting choices than ever that the player will have to deal with.
He added, “We had a big focus, when we started development, on increasing the mind-share in the tactical gameplay. We didn’t want to overwhelm players with lots of stuff, as we wanted to maintain the core gameplay of the original Company of Heroes.”
There are two main innovations at the core of Company of Heroes 2: TrueSight, which makes each unit have a clear field of view that can be affected by weather and terrain, and the ColdTech, designed to simulate the way General Winter affected both sides.
Company of Heroes 2 will keep the core elements of the series, including a focus on resources and variety as one of the main values of any successful force, but will also introduce innovations, like new retreat mechanics for the Soviets.
Company of Heroes 2 will be launched on the PC in 2013.