Overview
Company of Heroes 3 has been out for a little over three weeks, and for everyone at Relic, it is incredibly rewarding to see so many fans playing and discussing the game. Our team is now shifting gears to focus on long-term support for the game’s future. Our intent has always been to continue improving CoH3 in the coming years with new content, fixes and more, so we want to go over how we plan to do that. We also want to recap everything that’s happened in the launch window, what top feedback we’re seeing from players, and what comes next! The response so far has been terrific, with plenty of praise, criticism, requests, bug reports, and feedback – which is exactly what we need, so keep those reviews coming!
Read more below or check out our summary here!
Hot Fixes
Your feedback and reports allowed our team to fix some notable issues very quickly on launch day. This included several crashes and other issues that prevented people from playing and enjoying the game. We ensured our team was ready to provide fixes based on real player data and activity after release, and that is why we’ve been dropping hot fixes at a steady pace.
With these hot fixes, our goal was to focus on the top priority items that prevented or blocked players from accessing or making progress in the game. Our team has rolled out 6 hot fixes in two weeks (that’s one every two or three days!), meaning major issues leading to crashes and undesired performance have been reduced significantly. So, what have we changed or fixed? Here are a few examples!
- Fixed a ton of GPU related crashes
- Fixed crashes when ending a turn in the Italian Dynamic Campaign
- Fixed progression blockers in and around the Benevento, Salerno, Calabria, and Gaeta locations and missions
- Fixed settings not saving correctly between sessions
- Addressed power imbalance of the Afrikakorps
- Changed Emplacements so they are less exploitable
- Improved the High Dynamic Range mix for audio and stabilized audio playback
- Fixed cases of infinite loading and disconnecting in multiplayer
- Improved Tactical Map functionality
- Made AI on the Italian Campaign Map more aggressive
- Increased effectiveness of select Allied units
- Broke the British Boys Anti-Tank Rifles
- Fixed the British Boys Anti-Tank Rifles
Along with addressing crashes, progress blockers and pesky bugs impacting everyone’s experience, we were glad we could sneak in some long-planned balance changes and quality-of-life improvements. There have been 52 total improvements since launch (not including balance changes), with more to come. Our cadence of hot fixes will slow down for now, but we’ll continue addressing any major issues as they come up.
We are also happy to say that our first major 1.1.0 update is only a few weeks away, which will include a huge number of fixes and improvements for the game. We will have more news about that soon!
Player Feedback
Our team has been very appreciative of all the feedback players have been providing so far. We are in the process of prioritizing and triaging all of it so we can address critical issues, quality of life concerns, balance and more in a timely fashion. It is important for our team to weigh the impact of fixes and changes for all players, so rest assured that even if we don’t call something out as a “top” point of feedback, that does not mean we haven’t heard it and are not already discussing or working on it. Another caveat is that though certain items are considered a priority, they may take longer to fix or address based on how complicated they are to solve, test, and implement. We also need to ensure we can allocate the resources and team members to cover all those priorities. So, what top concerns are we seeing from players and what are we discussing internally? In no particular order:
- Addressing remaining crashes or issues with the game failing to open or start
- Fixing campaign progression blockers or bugs
- Further polishing and fixing of gameplay bugs and visual bugs
- Tuning AI difficulty in skirmishes and co-op
- Investigating camera zoom level requests for the RTS layer – what is possible from a technical standpoint, what would its overall impact be on performance and gameplay, etc.
- Further faction balancing
- UI/UX improvements – social flow, save game flow, HUD, settings menu and options, in-game pings, icons, unit portraits, post-match stats, etc.
- Investigating Unique Player Color options
- Continuing improvements for audio and visuals
Modding Tools
Another area of focus for the team is CoH3’s modding tools. We were happy to get mod tools released in tandem with CoH3’s launch so that players could start exploring the tools and playing with mods from the Steam workshop right away. Just like we plan to continue supporting CoH3, we also plan to dedicate more time to support and improve the mod tools over the long term. Though the current iteration of the mod tools and worldbuilder may not meet all player expectations, providing them at launch gives us a chance to get them up and running. We want players to continue testing the tools and providing feedback and feature requests so that we can prioritize those improvements for the future. What features or capabilities do you feel are missing or what do you want to see improved? Let us know by starting a thread or leaving a comment over on our forums. Please know that the tools likely won’t receive any major overhaul in the short term as we need to prioritize the core game first. We hope to sneak in a couple small fixes in patch 1.1.0. In the meantime, you can get familiar with our documentation on the Modding Knowledge Center. Let us know what other information we could add to the Knowledge Center to help you while creating your mods. You can also check out some of these example mods from the Relic team to help unblock you or to give you some inspiration!
Coming Next
The team is very excited to share a look at our current Development Priorities. “Is this a roadmap?” we hear you asking, and the answer is “sort of!” Putting dates on features or content is often unfair to players and the development team, especially if those things need to move. Instead, we feel it is clearer to share our current focus, along with what’s coming next in development.
As you can see, we have a lot of work planned for the days and months ahead! Our team is looking forward to supporting Company of Heroes 3 for years to come with a ton of content, meta shakeups, new features, quality of life improvements and so much more. We can’t thank you enough for joining us at the start of this journey together. We have so many awesome things planned for CoH3, and this is just the start.
- The Relic Team