Company of Heroes 3 developer admits "it was a lot" to make the 3.0 overhaul patch alongside regular updates, singleplayer DLC, and a whole spinoff game

Three's a crowd

The Company of Heroes 3's 3.0 update is huge. Touching virtually every part of the three-year-old RTS, the patch notes are longer than, well, my arm isn't a great measure of patch note length. Let's just say the headline features of overhauled VFX and audio don't really cover it. It also comes with new autumn and winter biomes, an updated grand strategy campaign, improvements to unit AI, and a whole host of other changes.

Talking to Relic ahead of the 3.0 update's launch I learned a little more about the scale of work that went on behind the scenes to make it happen, but also a little more about why Relic are still supporting the game three years after it was released and two years after separating from Sega.

The team began planning the 3.0 update two years ago, seeing the series' 20th anniversary as an opportunity to make a significant update to Company of Heroes 3, and focus on issues players had flagged since launch. "The VFX were called out," executive producer Denise Christie tells me. "Same thing with a lot of our audio."

Relic were already releasing patches every three months, but the changes they were looking at were much too large for those smaller updates. If they had tried to do the work as part of the small updates, approaching the problems with piecemeal solutions, it would have turned Company of Heroes 3 into a hodgepodge of new and old assets. "We wanted to make sure it was a cohesive package," principal designer Eric Wrobel says. "If you increase the quality of one thing, you have to do it equally across so much stuff." Otherwise you end up with "One that looks awesome and one that's like, 'Oh, this one's kind of gross'."

Complicating matters, though, was that the team couldn't down tools and focus on just these large changes. As well as the small patches that were still going out every three months, both the VFX and audio teams were also contributing the battlegroup DLC packs which added new units to the game. "They would work on stuff and in one branch that was the 3.0 work and then they would go ahead and do some battlegroup stuff and come back to that," Christie says. "It was a lot."

As the 3.0 update grew in scope, it also meant other departments were contributing to the anniversary release while working on the smaller updates and DLC. "For us to create future maps for Company of Heroes 3, we were going to have an issue that our assets were getting stale," Christie explains. So, as part of 3.0, Relic's art department created autumn and winter asset packs, as well as a new Industrial theme. This then created more work for the VFX team, who have added rain and snow, as well as a transition effect showing soil and concrete moving from dry to wet.

Not to be outdone, the design team also made significant changes to the singleplayer Italy campaign. The towns that dot the dynamic grand strategy-inspired map now have individual upgrades, making for more meaningful decisions when it comes to which settlement you capture next. And, responding to one of the main criticisms of Company of Heroes 3's singleplayer, they also updated the computer's AI so it makes smarter decisions in both the turn-based and real-time battles. "We wanted to get this feel like there was that sort of back and forth of the AI resisting you and pushing forward into your territory and actually taking your stuff, which wasn't really happening in any of the previous updates," Wrobel says.

Further complicating matters was the fact that alongside these regular updates, the DLC, and the big 3.0 update release work, was that Relic also released Final Stand in July, a roguelike horde mode spinoff of Company of Heroes 3. "We had to be very careful not to accidentally introduce this 3.0 work that was also happening at the same time," Christie says." The improvements in this update have also rolled out for the spinoff, too.

Naturally, Relic aren't doing all this work purely out of the goodness of the hearts. The regular updates keep players engaged, Christie explains, and "hopefully bring back lapsed players who were frustrated by some of these things." It's something the team have already seen happen before, Wrobel explains. "We saw with the 2.0 update that we had a big spike of users and that was great, but because that improved the overall quality of the game, we saw each month we were selling more copies than we were before. People have been buying these games for years and years and years, so if we invest in this now we're going to see returns for quite a long time into the future as well."

"If we were starting to see that tail down then we probably would have made a very different decision to be honest, but that's not what we see," Christie adds.

The next release for Company of Heroes 3 is a singleplayer DLC, Operation Torch, due out on November 25th. (So, if you're keeping count, that was also in the works while the update, battlegroup DLC, and spinoff were all being made.) Until now, Relic's additions to the RTS have been focused on the multiplayer community, adding new units to be used online or in offline skirmishes. Operation Torch brings new scripted missions that trace a set of soldiers moving through North Africa.

After that, though, I ask if Relic plans to continue adding to Company of Heroes 3 or if they're ready to move onto a new project. "Well, it's both actually," CEO Justin Dowdeswell tells me. "We would love to continue with Company of Heroes 3 and not solely as a place for us to experiment. That's one of the advantages of being smaller, and being able to make decisions. We're not going to leave Company of Heroes 3. It's an and function. We are going to embark on the next thing."

So, it doesn't sound like Relic are taking anything off their plate…