// PC GAMER — GAMING
Relic thought Company of Heroes 3's ambitious dynamic campaign would eventually come together, but it didn't: 'We bit off more than we could chew'
Conceptually, it was great, but it was also quite broken.
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When I got to play a sliver of Company of Heroes 3's dynamic Italian campaign for the first time, it was hard not to be impressed. The team had taken all the best parts of Company of Heroes 2: Ardennes Assault, expanded it, and then added all sorts of novel new ideas. It felt like I was playing Total War: World War 2.
A year later, once I'd been given unfettered access to the campaign for my review, I was less impressed. Player feedback had inspired Relic to remove one of the new features I dug the most—controllable detatchments—but there was a larger, more fundamental problem: the dynamic campaign wasn't dynamic. The fascists largely sat back and let me liberate Italy.
The RTS battles remained incredible, and the second more traditional campaign was excellent, leading to me giving it a score of 82% in my Company of Heroes 3 review, calling it a "failed experiment but a great game". Broadly, though, the player reception was not great, and user reviews on Steam continue to sit at Mixed.
"We set out to build the biggest Company of Heroes game ever," Relic CEO Justin Dowdeswell tells us. "More factions at launch. Two full campaigns playable at launch. I think it was an ambitious goal we set, and that showed up in some of the issues of launch around the level of polish and some of the bugs that the players were encountering. We didn't quite land it."
The Italian campaign was conceived early in the game's development, but actually getting it to work was a "stumbling block" that never quite got resolved, Dowdeswell says. "Yeah, we bit off more than we could chew. The idea was great. The spirit of it was good. The team was energised. It was just more than we could get done in time. And it wasn't nearly as polished as it needed to be at launch."
Relic thought, or at least hoped, that everything would fall into place eventually. "For so many of us in the industry, things come together kind of late in the project," Dowdeswell says. "So when it's not there and you still have time, there's this belief: well, we'll get there, we always do. And this one, we didn't."
When that didn't happen, Relic had to deal with the fallout. "It's disappointing for sure," Dowdeswell says. "It's so much work. A big team spent years and years making that game, and to see it not land well with players, it hurts.
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