Since the launch of Company of Heroes 3 in February, our team has received considerable player feedback, data, and information. Our principal focus has been on fixing urgent issues through hotfixes and supporting and improving your gameplay experience with larger updates.
With Operation Sapphire Jackal, we fixed over a thousand issues & bugs. In the same update, we also brought Challenges, Merit, and cosmetics to the game. These were not received as well as we hoped, notably due to a lack of transparent communication based on the feedback that you were giving us and our own team’s priorities.
So, we’ve reorganized, and we hope you will see improvements in our communication in the coming weeks as we are planning to give more insight into what happens behind the scenes during the live development of CoH3.
We’ve already begun this process with last week’s livestream where we offered insight into how our Design team approached the latest Balance Update. Additionally, we want to show you more of what is in the works at Relic for our next update. We saw quite a bit of feedback on our Development Priorities list, so we hope that this post today also provides insight into how we make decisions.
We are dedicated to supporting this game for years to come and our aim is to strengthen player trust with effective communication and action to back it up, as we continue to make CoH3 the best experience for all our players.
What is a Development priority list?
Our April Development Priorities
We wanted to provide more clarity on what “Development Priorities” means to our team, and what players can expect. What do the different columns mean? How are these items and features prioritized? Why are some items not listed here? Hopefully, we can answer some of those questions.
On Target
Last-minute technical problems notwithstanding, you should expect these items to be in the next one or two updates. That is the Soon™ list!
In Development
In the In Development phase, we are actively working on these items. However, they may not be slated for an upcoming release/update, or the timing of their delivery is still being nailed down. These items will be scheduled for a release as soon as they’re completed, or moved to On Target once we have a better idea of when we can deliver them.
Scouting
Items in the Scouting phase are in development but will need more time before you see them in game. We may be at the design phase, are still scoping it, or working on prototypes. Sometimes items in Scouting will be a larger undertaking for the team. For example, a new Expansion!
Subject to change
During development, unforeseen technical issues or new unplanned priorities might come up. This can impact any item on our Development Priorities list. These items might then be moved off of the list until they are closer to release.
What if the item I care about is not on the Development Priorities list?
This is meant to be a high-level list and is not representative of everything we are working on. With this list, we want to share the items that we know our team can deliver in a reasonable time and that players are interested in. Some larger features might take a while longer to show up on our Development Priorities, especially if they’re in very early stages, but they are likely still on our radar!
Our progress
Progress since the March Development Priorities list
Released in Operation Sapphire Jackal
- Hundreds of bugfixes and improvements
- Challenges, Merit and Cosmetics
- The gameplay changes originally planned for that update were released earlier with the 1.0.5 balance hotfix, but our communications didn’t reflect it properly.
Released after Operation Sapphire Jackal
- Hotfixes and stability patches
- Balance update
Moved Items
- Several items were moved up to On Target and In Development
On hold
Because we want to work on critical improvements to the game, we had to shift focus from some of the additional accessibility features we were working on. The work is just on hold for now until we are ready to get back to it and was removed from the list.
What is next?
The most recent Development Priorities list, as shown on last week's livestream
Balance Update
- We released a Balance Update last week on April 20th
Next update
- Remaining On Target items will be included in the next PC update.
As outlined in the above list, our focus right now is on improving the overall gameplay experience, rolling out fixes, adding additional quality-of-life features, and bringing new content to Company of Heroes 3. This means some requested items like Replays, Observer Mode or Ranked seasons aren’t on our short-term list for now. Those features are still important to us, but we feel that focusing first on improving the overall quality of the game will have a much larger impact on all our players' experience in CoH3.
Hopefully, this rundown of the Development Priorities list sheds some light on how our team prioritizes features, defines what those mean, explains how items make the list, and outlines when you can expect them to be delivered. Our team hopes to continue sharing more insights like this in the weeks and months ahead via blogs, developer livestreams, and more. Our next update to the Development Priorities list will come shortly after our next major update, Operation: CLASSIFIED, which is in the works. Stay tuned and we will have more information for you soon!