14 DAY TRIAL // The development team working on Company of Heroes 2 at Relic says that it has a long-term plan for the video game, which involves constant updates and new content drops over at least a five-year period, with all the changes designed based on the feedback coming from the community.
Quinn Duffy, the game director in charge of the coming Western Front Armies content, says that his company is currently remaking the core infrastructure of the strategy title in order to have all the tools required to then deliver more updates.
He tells Eurogamer that, “It's a wish list. But like any plan, it doesn't survive first contact with the enemy. We're planning for things, and then we look at what our community is saying, we look at what our metrics are telling us, and that helps inform our plan. Prioritisation changes. We might pull something forward we thought we would do six months from now, and we do it now instead.”
When Company of Heroes 2 was first launched it had quite a few problems, and many long-term fans complained about the changes made to the core mechanics.
Since then, the Relic team has delivered no less than 21 full patches, much more than for the original at the same moment during its lifetime, and it has changed everything from damage models to the way certain weapons work.
Duffy explains that the fan community for Company of Heroes 2 is bigger than ever at the moment and that many players tend to pick up the paid downloadable content that Relic is delivering, mostly in the form of generals and more historical battles.
The developer adds, “The way we've developed The Western Front Armies gives our campaign designers finished tools to build campaign content. They're not designing in parallel, which is what we've had to do because of schedule reasons. It's hard to build a campaign and a multiplayer in parallel. Blizzard doesn't do it. They build the multiplayer armies and then the campaign goes off with finished content.”
Western Front Armies is a standalone expansion which will allow gamers to use the United States forces and the veteran German units that did battle in France for much of 1944.
Each of them comes complete with new units, more options on the battlefield, and a complement of new Generals to use.
Launch is set to take place on the PC in late June.