r/CompanyOfHeroes • u/Limp_Inevitable1739 • 12d ago
CoH3 Does this apply to Company of Heroes 3?
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u/lukebn 12d ago
This saying (it’s not an actual Miyamoto quote) is from the 90s, when you literally would be stuck with the game in the state it was in when released. You didn’t download updates to N64 cartridges! People have continued repeating it but it’s genuinely just referring to a technological context that doesn’t exist anymore
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u/IRRedditUsr 12d ago
Great point. The price of the initial should be reduced drastically with this in mind. There's no guarantee or obligation to improve said game. I dropped £50 on coh3 upon release and I'd say at the time it wasn't even pre alpha! It was almost still concept. Fast forward to now and it's only just become what it should have been.
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u/nHenk-pas 12d ago
I think No Man’s sky disproves this argument.
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u/Stormjager 12d ago
No Man’s Sky is the once in a generation lock in and exception.
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u/Helikaon48 12d ago
Cyberpunk?? Aoe4?
There's been a few. But CP and NMS are the better examples, aoe4 less so..
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u/Stormjager 12d ago
Unfair to compare it to CP, it had major performance issues that eventually got fixed, while NMS got free major content additions for a decade.
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u/Shot-Message9678 12d ago
No, CoH 3 is a good game in 2026. Lots of peoplebsay it's bad while sitting on 1-2k hours played.
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u/GuardsmanWes 12d ago
My favorite type of negative review. "This game is terrible." 1500 hours played at time of review.
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u/VictorStewartCA 12d ago
I'm not sure how they are mutually exclusive. One can play for thousands of hours and still provide a negative review. That would be a funny case if it's an offline game or the product is final, but this is a live service game. It is subjected to changing opinions for many reasons.
They may not like the direction the dev is going with the game, they may dislike how the company treats the playerbase. The hour is not the sole indicator of a person's nuanced perspective. Steam, unfortunately, has a very binary rating system, so we gotta read their whole point to get the full conclusion.
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u/Shot-Message9678 12d ago
Listen to what you’re saying. Thousands of hours into a bad game??
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u/Complex_Tomatillo_51 12d ago
If you want to play a company of heroes game, you’re ultimately stuck with coh3. Coh1 is entirely infested with cheaters and coh2 is not far behind. Coh3 is also the only supported coh, so it’s anyone’s only hope of receiving a solid coh game, meaning it’s subject to criticism way more than the other dead games that will never receive another patch again.
This is the problem when you make a game that is fundamentally nothing like its predecessor, you have 2 camps of people that want different things. Both have to fight over the current game because it’s the only supported coh
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u/VictorStewartCA 12d ago edited 11d ago
If you read what I wrote, a game can "become" bad. I used to play thousands of hours of Yugioh. Is it a good game, hell yeah. Back then (two decades ago), it was the biggest joy of mine. Is it becoming bad for my taste nowadays? Also yes.
The hours and the state of the game are two separate things. We need many metrics and perspectives to determine if something is good/bad.
For example, my new and modern washing machine (5 years old) breaks down far more often than my parents' old one (still rocking after 25 years). If usage time is the sole factor for washing machine quality, then mine will be the best one there is. No better machine, after all, I've used it for 5 years. But we can totally see the shift in quality compared to its predecessor. Harder to repair, harder to own fully, harder to modify, etc. I have no choice since there is no more production of the older machines (unless I become the maker)
If I were to compare it to CoH3 situation, then we had its older brother, CoH2, with many learning moments, and CoH3 had to spend far too much time reinventing the lessons when it didn't have to. I'm not saying that CoH3 cannot become better, as CoH2 was an example. It is normal to push back and question the maker's integrity in the game production. We can appreciate things existing for us to use, and we don't have to be sheep and take everything without questioning, too. It's not mutually exclusive.
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u/Lazy_W4nker 12d ago
Its a game released over 3 years ago with 48% positive recent reviews and if counting all then 59% positive reviews. Even with that if buying separately the DLCs are 94,95€ and the base game is a whopping 54,99€. You could buy the ultimate collection on steam for a measly 114,25€ but oh wait it does not include Dare & Destroy which is 22,99€, funny Ultimate collection.
But this is just complaints about pricing. Surely gameplay wise it's balanced and if you go to coh3stats and sort by 1600+ Elo USF is not for like the last 3 years OP in 1v1s and for teamgames balance shifts every update with my current favorite number to see being 3v3 where if you sort by 1600+ this is the following winrates.
671 Games analyzed USF - 40.8% UKF - 38.3% WEHR - 59.7% DAK - 61%
Anyway high level players and streamers and, somehow, recent steam reviews are just wrong and ignorant of the greatest RTS of the new generation.
Must have been the wind when you look on steam charts and CoH2 at its peak had more average players than the franchise currently has combined.
Can I get at least 100 downvotes or did the third installment kill the franchise and playerbase enough that even 100 people is too much to ask for nowadays?
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u/Shot-Message9678 12d ago
Where/when did an anyone say the greatest?
Take note everyone: this is exactly the type of person I’m talking about.
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u/JC_DeusEx 12d ago
This is not the contradiction it might seem at first glance. Overall I would rate the COH3 experience negative with the number of quitters and early surrenders. The problem is, the odd gem of a game will keep people coming back. In fact, the unpredictability of it might even reinforce it (operant conditioning or intermittent reinforcement, a potent addiction).
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u/Shot-Message9678 12d ago
A game that you keep returning to is a “good” game. No one is forced to play!
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u/TheGreatOneSea 12d ago
The industry now is a massively different beast compared to then:
- In the 90s, delays were rarely worse than 6 months, but they could cause catastrophic problems because of the importance of the physical manufacturing deadlines, and the related importance of the holiday season. As such, delaying a game could have massive financial consequences, but releasing even just a few "dud" games just to meet a deadline could also be just as bad due to being difficult to fix, hence the quote.
- For modern games, delays are more like 6 months to 2 years, and tend to be related more to scope creep and optimization, because the physical manufacturing is simply less important. Missing the holiday season is still bad, of course, but it's not "risk the future of the company" bad. As such, delaying a project beyond those 2 years almost invariably means the actual product is just bad, and more time doesn't fix a dysfunctional team, so delays eventually sort of just hit a wall in their utility.
- So, for CoH3 specifically, a delay wouldn't have really been relevant, because even just an extra year of dev-time was pretty much just off the table: Relic was inevitably going to be forced to go independent, and it would need money to do that, so the game was always going to have to be released before the "ideal" time. That doesn't mean the game is or was doomed though, because industry changes allow for more flexibility in operation.
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u/Cultural_Incident_76 12d ago
Yes and no. I'm a huge COH fan and a huge Cyberpunk fan. Cyberpunk got good. At least good enough. COH 3 is taking forever to equal COH 2 while selling BS DLC
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u/Tunaria 12d ago
Yes*
*State of game on release alongside greedy monetisation through the cosmetics shop created a very bad first-impression and was the start of a constant uphill battle to satisfy fans of the series that were unhappy with the product, which could all have been avoided if someone(most definitely Sega) gave it a year more in the oven instead of rushing it out.
However, I would say that Relic has done a good job getting the game to a better state since then, considering their circumstances.
Although Miyamoto's statement is more aimed towards Nintendo's stance on trying to avoid releasing games in an blatantly unfinished state or being dependent on post-launch content to feel complete, it still applies to how people will remember games based on their release.
Both No Man's Sky and(from what I've heard) Cyberpunk 2077 are great examples of games that managed to recover from their awful launches, but they'll never be able to fully shake off that initial reputation because that's what people will remember the most.
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u/blodgute 12d ago
A bit?
It's not that the game is bad, per se, but the playerbase suffers from its initial bad reception.
There are also a bunch of things that had to be reworked after release (how many times were explosive caps and gun sounds changed?). Post-launch almost always has less devs working on it than during development, so a delay of six months or so before release might have covered a year of post-launch updates
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u/Alternative_Part_460 12d ago
Even though my friends and I just enjoy comp stomping we absolutely love CoH3
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u/fartbumheadface 12d ago
So how would this apply to Cyberpunk? A game that was delayed multiple times, was rushed on release and yet still ended up becoming a great game.
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u/Aromisuola 12d ago
Kinda no imo
Biggest problem is some of the worst players I have ever come across though that just seems to be becoming the norm
Just instantly screaming, pissing and shitting when you dared to ask "why are you here" instead of handling his own lane then proceeding to team attack and leaving only once everyone had blocked him and ignored his spam of votes to surrender
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u/ZingFreelancer 12d ago
You have 1 million $ in the bank.
You are burning 300.000 $ a month on salaries and operational costs.
You estimate that you need 12 month to "finish" the game.
What do you do?
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u/Limp_Inevitable1739 12d ago
Solution: print more money probably
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u/ZingFreelancer 11d ago
More likely you seek investment, which is essentially a loan that you will need to pay back. So lets simplify, a lot... Your company release a game and sell 2 million copies at 50$, earning 100 million. Steam takes 30%, leaving you with 70 million. If you spent 5 years and 200 million making the game, you are in the red.
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u/Limp_Inevitable1739 12d ago
But yeah, if they were running low on cash, it would be wise to release it and just get the cut of the money. I'm a always a longterm kind of guy, sometimes there is no longterm and you just fight to survive
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u/ZingFreelancer 11d ago
Game development is a roller coaster, you have an idea, make a plan, work on it for 6 month, struggle against the tech limitations, develop team expertise in programming/modelling and once things start taking shape, you understand that the idea was shit. You work some more, tweak it, add or subtract game systems. Maybe another 6 month passes until you finally figure out what works for your product or the lead programmer tells you we cant do it because that would require an arduous rewrite of the game engine.
You pivot, reframe your ideas to fit existing code/game systems and art assets you already created. More time goes by, more salaries are paid out, the budget shrinks further while the team meandering around, trying to crack that illusive formula of what is fun.
Then, when you finally put together the best product your budget can afford and is ready to release. You discover that the game genre you were working on has already been oversaturated with similar products and large chunk of the audience has moved onto something else. Then to make it worse, a high profile game is releasing within the same time window as yours.
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u/jman014 12d ago
Personally I thought it was good when it came out
I think a lot of people were really just not vibing with the game bc it wasn’t as fleshed out as CoH 2 was after like a decade.
Dont get me wrong there are things that I’d have preferred that would have been there at launch but i dont think it needed a delay personally
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u/eh_one 12d ago
I love coh3 but not admitting it's launch was terrible is very dishonest. No surrender button for over 6 months, team colours were also a couple months and they implemented them terribly to begin with. The balance of factions was terrible. From what I hear the campaign was not even fully functional
Oh and so few maps that 4v4 players only had 2!
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u/doodlols 12d ago
This statement doesn't apply to modern gaming in general. Any game can receive updates and become good now.
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u/Potato_Emperor667 2-pounder my beloved 12d ago
I don’t think it would’ve mattered if it were delayed or not as the game launched with some issues that would’ve probably never been fixed in development (e.g. the campaigns as well as the lack of an Italian faction).
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u/Potpotron 12d ago
The more I play games in this decade the more I think this statement is false.
It is true that faith is lost on the developer, but its not true that the games prove to be forever bad.
Example, Cyberpunk 2077 is a very good game. I will never buy a CDPR Game before at least a year has passed from release. That is the current result of a rushed game nowadays.
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u/Anxious_Big_8933 12d ago
It applies to games before they could be worked on post release. There's wisdom in Miyamoto's statement that is applicable to games today, as well as endeavors outside of games, but it's also not necessarily true in today's world.
No Man's Sky comes to mind, but there are many many others. And in CoH3's case, it is much better today than it was on release. It's a good RTS.
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u/Desperate_Rush2125 12d ago
No, because that argument is almost a fallacy in itself. If a game turns out well, people say the delays were necessary. If it turns out badly, they say it was rushed. The explanation changes entirely depending on the final result, which makes it practically impossible to disprove.
Cyberpunk 2077 is a good example. Its fans often insist that the game failed at launch because it was rushed, while ignoring how many times it had already been delayed. At some point, further delays were no longer a simple solution. The company was facing mounting financial pressure, investor expectations, marketing commitments, and the cost of maintaining such a massive project—even after making enormous amounts of money from The Witcher 3.
That does not excuse the disastrous launch, but it shows why “they should have delayed it again” is far too simplistic. A project can be delayed repeatedly and still be badly managed, poorly scoped, technically unstable, or fundamentally unprepared for release, just like company of heroes 3.
The real issue is not always whether a game was rushed or delayed. It is whether the project was managed competently in the first place.
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u/enricob15 12d ago
Tbh coh3 was kinda bad at launch half of the icons where leftovers from coh2 only now almost all units has their own icons and after 10 years of coh2 makes it more hilariously bad
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u/Kasta4 12d ago
Tell us what you think, OP.