company of heroes 2 - ardennes assault & bonus content single player

Blatantly fishing for clues on CoH's future, I ask Duffy how he pictures Company of Heroes 2 five years from now. It's a promising trend for a game that wants to become a World War 2 platform, capable of travelling between the war's varied theatres over the course of a long life of updates. Incremental updates have tightened up performance, a new server system has improved online drop rates, and numerous balance tweaks have polished it up very nicely. That ought to make it easier for players that traditionally only fight the AI to hop into CoH2's expanding multiplayer ecosystem, or so the designers hope.Īrdennes Assault marks the end of a busy year for Company of Heroes 2. The resulting campaign is hopefully better for the six months of player metrics and playtesting, but should also bring the single-player and multiplayer armies closer together. This reflects a new “cadence” of releases that sees Relic building multiplayer armies, and then designing single-player campaigns around them later. Consequence adds tension, it adds drama, it adds to that mission narrative because there's things at stake in a way that we haven't done.”Īt a glance the US force closely resembles the one released in the recent Western Front Armies standalone multiplayer release, which marked a return for fan and dev favourites like Paratroopers and, as Duffy describes it, the “much-maligned” Sherman tank. For lead campaign designer, Mitch Lagran, permadeath fulfils one key purpose: “we want there to be consequence to decisions. It's a better fit for the US forces in the Ardennes, famously cut off from reinforcements during the siege of Bastogne. I'm reminded of 1998's Warhammer: Dark Omen, which carried a particularly gruelling implementation of a similar system.

When you get one of those setbacks the hope is the player's going to reassess their situation.” “There's not a sort of hard line 'you just played a mission and completely screwed yourself', it's a lot of setbacks. If you're looking for that type of experience, similar to XCOM, you can have that,” he says. An obvious first question for game director and Relic veteran, Quinn Duffy, then: if you keep throwing men recklessly to their doom, can you completely screw yourself before the campaign is done? “You can screw yourself over and you can sort of lose, and we've built it with the hardcore audience in mind for that.

Company of heroes 2 - ardennes assault & bonus content single player