Online play is an ”important part of the legacy” of Relic, said Duffy, and it’s a ”vital part” for fans. Company of Heroes Online wasn’t a throw away project as lessons have been applied.
Speaking in our interview discussing the newly announced Company of Heroes 2, lead director Duffy surrendered a bit more intel on the long awaited next instalment.
The Relic developer says that fans ”are calling for the Eastern Front.” It’s often forgotten about or at least the scale is vastly underestimated and so the studio decided to tackle it. We’ll only be experiencing it from the Russian side though; no German campaign.
”It was the number one choice for expansion packs. We just couldn’t do it justice, we couldn’t get it to a point where we had the technology to do it right. We wanted to go big with the sequel… but we’ve got a brand new creative vision for the game that can encompass anywhere and anytime,” he explained in our interview.
The nuts and bolts of Company of Heroes isn’t going to radically alter - in fact it’ll remain static.
”…when we said during the presentation that we weren’t going in a new direction we were very serious.”
”It’s about maintaining all the things we love about Company of Heroes, and tweaking and elaborating and presenting them in a better way. There are some changes to parts of the game, and we’re going to talk about them later, but the overall affect is that the pace, the authenticity, everything you love about Company of Heroes is the same.”
Company of Heroes Online may not immediately grab you with its MMO RTS flavouring, but Relic and THQ don’t dismiss it’s had an impact on their designs going forward with Company of Heroes 2.
”Yeah, I mean we were excited about it, but it was something we were trying that was new, it was a new way of presenting the game to a new audience, and there are lot of lessons we will be taking from that particular game. It was a vital learning experience for Relic and THQ,” described Duffy.
Check out our full interview with Relic’s lead director for Company of Heroes 2, Quinn Duffy.
