Why do people hate Company of Heroes 3?

Company of Heroes 3 has received some interesting criticism since its launch last week, as well as some very positive critic reviews - so I decided to look into what's going on with this follow up.

00:00 Introduction
03:21 Bugs
03:43 Graphics
05:18 Sound
06:56 Content
7:55 UI
08:33 Some things I forgot

Gameplay recorded on PC | Audio recorded using a Rode NT-USB

#companyofheroes3 #rts #realtimestrategy

[robodrome]

Speaking of bugs, there was a weird one when my American mortar crew kept speaking German at me. Must be a traitor legion.

[adriankoch]

"From the people that brought you Dawn Of War 3"... 3 - Oh oh. Now in a Relic throwback we'll have to cross our fingers that Homeworld 3 won't suck when it finally releases.

[hungryhedgehog]

It looks alright, I find it disappointing that they lean even more into the whole commander thing, I think that was the worst aspect of 2 and that it looks like they made engagements even closer? It just looks silly to me when 2 infantry groups out of cover shoot at eachother 5m away and have issues killing eachother. That was an issue in 2 as well but it feels even closer here idk, mostly played with mods that made engagements happen at longer distances.

[Spectre]

There are also people complaining about the complete lack of a German voiceover. The german version of coh 1 and 2 has full German voiceovers for all factions and all campaigns and the voiceovers were quite good as well, for example in coh 2 the British hq voice in the German version is done by the voiceactor who also does the German voiceover of captain price in the call of duty games.

Coh 3 has no German voiceover whatsoever.

[havoc]

The most egregious bug I have found, was spawning into a MP game as one faction, but receiving another faction's battle groups essentially boning me from any of those bonuses.

[WuCSquad]

There's no Italian faction in a game which focuses on the Italian campaign.... but there is a shop build into the game.... It just reeks of a DLC hell to come.

[MasterSteve_]

It's not only vehicle explosions. It's also the impact explosions of artillery, mortars and howitzers. Also i noticed the ragdoll effects seem not to be present or atleast not in a satisfying interpretation. Place a bomb (satchel charge or a goliath) beside 2-3 squads of riflemen in coh2 and in coh3. The Destruction is WAY more satisfying in coh2. All in all. My biggest complaint is the lack of love for detail. I think many new players who came to the company of heroes franchise can't see the differences in detail as how the community does, because lack of knowledge/experience.

[jace]

This is a mobile version compared to coh1-2, dumbed down for consoles.

- Victory points are very fast

No profiles page to see stats or match history present.
No ability to view leaderboards in-game.
No ranked matchmaking in multiplayer.
Fallschirmjagers missing 3D models.
Missing surrender option.
No inventory system - you cannot change the badge, banner, title, basically anything related to your ingame profile personalization.
Only 3 Battlegroups per faction (same amount as in beta). As a result, there are units currently in the game that are unable to be accessed in multiplayer due to there not being a battlegroup made for them.
Only 2 4v4 MP maps (same amount as in beta).
Only 3 3v3 MP maps (same amount as in beta).
No earning of credits after games, meaning no way for us to earn said free credits to later buy things in the in-game store like in COH2.
Untitled Italian unit with Adrian helmet seen in Relic's official COH3 screenshots is nowhere to be seen in the game.
Unable to queue capture orders on the tactical map.
No way to view the map at the end of the game.
No chat room server support.
After the game ends, there is no way to chat with your opponents or teammates.
No ability to name your multiplayer game.
No background sounds of birds chirping, faded gunfire in the distance, etc that was present in previous entries to give off that 'COH vibe'.
No player names showing over units when hovered over them.
No player list in-game in multiplayer (can't tell if human teammate got replaced by AI)
No leaderboards for pre-made teams.
No crushing infantry with heavy vehicles.
Not being able to ram tanks into buildings to create holes anymore (building destruction physics).
Unit statistics not viewable in game, nor what their advantages are.
Not being able to rebind modifier keys like Shift, Alt, and Tab. For example, this makes this a no-buy for some who are left-handed and don’t use a traditional hand placement on a keyboard.
No scroll speed setting (edge panning speed) for those who don't use WASD or arrows as default.
Cannot multi-select control groups with Shift + Numbers, instead it assigns multiple control groups to individual units.
No ability to click on a dropped lmg or anti tank weapon to see exactly what kind of weapon it is.
'Temporary' main menu UI from beta still remaining in full release.
Tiny soundtrack compared to previous COH games.
No ability to have the camera follow a unit you double clicked on (either the unit or it portrait). This was present in COH1/2.
No Bulletin system.
No Observer mode.
Unable to see crew weapons built in post-match stats screen.
No replays (although a workaround is available).
Unable to invite friends from Steam, directly from the steam UI and steam overlay.
Disappointing state of modding tools. Many possibilities were promised by Relic pre-launch in terms of modding, but it seems that turned out to be false and in reality the options are very limited.
Only English language voice tracks.
Bugs:
Devil's Brigade DLC not unlocking for the launch edition of the game for everyone.
Global Unit Control Position keeps resetting itself after each game.
AI failing to attack you in campaign unless scripted.
Custom game server browser broken. For example, you can only see 9 games, no sorting, no searching, no paging of the list. The top 9 games are usually never launched with an AFK host.
Instances where crew served weapons (for example, a US MG Squad and a mortar squad) both got "stuck" in a green covered position (which they were not really stuck or surrounded since it was open behind them) after pressing retreat.
254 Recon Tractor has the ability to call in free offmap mortars, at vet 1 it gains the ability to lock and have an improved barrage overwriting the default one.
US Airborne troops infinite spawn glitch.
Capture point bug. For example, the enemy did not loose tickets. We had 400, they had 39. We still held one, but we tickled down until we lost.
Pings have several seconds of sound delay.
Base building flashing between textures when anti-aliasing is set to high.
Some portraits or icons may appear lower resolution or not scaling correctly to the user interface.
Infantry units having their 'engines be broken'.
Flickering walls bug.
Sound and graphics begin to stutter after certain amount of playtime. Restarting the game fixes.
Airborne models reload their carbines like they are a bolt action.
Some team weapons have their animation speed ramped up way too fast. Example, the Brit heavy mortar.
The Behind Enemy Lines ability for the US Airborne does not function as intended.
When capturing a team weapon, your units adopt previous owner/faction voice lines.
One of the US At gun voice lines is completely bugged, the voice sounds like a squeaky robot.
Howitzers do not angle their guns correctly when firing. They do not match the angle of the shells leaving the cannon.
Some units get stuck when exiting a building depending on surrounding geometry.
Sometimes abilities will overlap existing abilities instead of moving to an empty square in the HUD. This often occurs when upgrading units or unlocking new Veterancy abilities.
Not being able to click on top of the big notifications.
Unable to save skirmish settings.
Icons don’t show when an ability is in use. The only shown the cooldown after the ability end. For example, when I order an mortar to barrage a target out of its range i can’t tell if walked up to the fitting range and started barraging from its icon.
Sometimes cast ability’s are ignored. For example, like when a tank isn’t in range and I cast a Panzerschrank the grenadiers just ignore the order and keep walking somewhere else.
Unit icons inside buildings being off screen unless you can see the whole building, causing you to get suppressed without knowing from where its coming.
No autosave in campaign.
After match stats are hilariously broken and inaccurate.
Minimap has no indicator of which specific unit is selected if you are tabbing through several.
When using "walking stuka" is a circle, which doesn't fit the barrage itself which is instead an oval like shape.

Ultra texture option is locked out for no reason (although a workaround is available).

Pathfinding for vehicles is terrible.

Friends who are online and in-game don’t show up as online or inviteable many times.

Reticle/marker: when you send/direct multiple units to a spot shows only arrow, not the dots+arrow representing each group in the selection.

Things currently in COH3 needing improvement:

In-game visuals look too washed out/bland, require better lightning/contrast. As such, soldiers also tend to blend with the ground, sometimes not being able to instantly see where the model is standing.

Wonky, at times brain dead in-game AI.

Pings are still barely noticeable. COH2 it was too loud and spammy, now it makes barely any sound and hard / impossible to find.

Tank explosions need work. For example, an exploding tank will only become static and give off a tame explosion VFX, unlike in COH2 where it would physically shake, create larger more dynamic explosion, and you would see parts and bodies flying off.

Poor sound mixing. Extremely muffled and needs revamp.

When upgrading some units, such as pios with flamethrower, can’t see a countdown for how long until they’re upgraded.

Zoom level adjustments needed.

Twitchy camera. Camera movement with the WASD keys seems a little 'jumpy'.

Poor response of units when clicking on team weapons and weapons on the ground.

Small unit icons. Need to be bigger, they are even smaller than COH2.

Some of the unit icons need work. For example, the US M3 75mm halftrack still has the CoH2 Soviet SU-76 silhouette.

Clicking on a unit should tell you how many kills it has without having to hover over a certain spot on the UI.

Unique team colours needs fixing. For example, sometimes you can be playing as orange, and a red axis tank will be in the middle of your troops without knowing.

- The lack of music. Seriously it’s just the main menu theme and one ingame soundtrack. Where the hell is the rest? Previous CoH titles had multiple tracks and even themes for each faction.
- The jump scare endgame scene where you’re taken straight out of the match and can’t view the battelfield.
- The end game statistics are a complete joke and make no sense too.
- Once you’ve done a custom game you’re forced to reinvite everyone back to the lobby.
- The pings on the mini map from you or allies are hard to hear and even harder to see! No difference in the pings themselves. All they had to do here was just copy the same system from CoH1.
- The kill counters are hard to find on units now. You’ve got to hover over the experience bar. Makes it hard for viewers to tell at a glance. Just makes no sense.
- Missing audio cues for grenades being lobbed (specifically satchel charges)
- Units getting stuck after exiting certain houses.
- No ingame leaderboards
- No proper social system ingame to chat with the rest of the community
- No option to rejoin after disconnecting (it’s 2023 we should have this option now…)
- No observer mode
- No proper replay system
- No depth to ingame tips and guides/ build orders
- The tactical map is a mess with unit cards covering other unit cards
- Machineguns in buildings missing their face direction button.
- Random input delay during matches making it unplayable at times.

[wurzelbertwucher]

It always depends on your expectations, I guess. I can understand the disappointment after 10 years for a 60€ game, CoH3 feels unambitious and unimaginative. And CoH2 with all it's content is there and won't go away, so Relic has to give the player a motivation to play this new game.

[ericgonzalez]

It’s weird because Relic had AoE4 to polish some of these complaints before releasing CoH3. We (AoE players) complained about the awfully close zoom, the washed out graphics with no contrast, the seemingly past-gen effects, the uninspired UI. It’s so baffling to see exactly the same issues popping up here now. It’s like they took absolutely no learnings from AoE. That’s to me the worst of it all. The game may be relatively good, but not to the standards long time CoH players expected. There is definitely a systemic problem at Relic and maybe the Essence engine is too old now and in need of a replacement. It smells a lot like a Fallout 76 situation and we all know how that went down.

[QuadDamage]

Graphics isn't bad, the art direction is abysmal. Those are kinda same, but paradoxically, very different things. 3D models are essentially quite binary things - something has the shape of a real thing or it does not. It's hard to get wrong. But It's the artist that takes those real life objects, and uses color and contrast to turn them into flowing river of visual experience. And in a real-time strategy game, there's another layer of actually packaging it as separate bunches of information - the units, the map, the chokepoints, etc. It's an art. Modelling a Sherman tank is not art, even if it takes a lot of skill. It's still just matter of moving vertices of polygons until right surfaces form.

CoH1 did it perfectly - and it looked way more subdued and "washed out". People just don't remember. But the end result looked gorgeous, fed just the right kind of information to player, and glued everything together into epic battle scenes. And that, people DO remember. CoH1 looked actually better than CoH2, artistry wise, even despite having half the polygons for models.
Not so much here, it feels like they went with decent modelers, but forgot to hire an art director. Tanks have the shape of tanks and soldiers have heads and fingers and maps have houses and bushes and explosions have fire and smoke. But there's no (visual) cohesion at all.

[kelthuzad]

why do people hate it?
because they listened to the casuals to appeal to the " wider audience"
instead of listening to the people who actually stuck around playing regularly in COH2

[DeviIotte]

A game shouldn't go backwards in a sequel, it should be better. This reminds me a lot of Command and Conquer towards the end where it went backwards

[Hanfgurkenhasser]

9:17 Seeing shit like this reminds me why I could never get into any vanilla CoH and always preferred the Blitzkrieg Mod for CoH 1.
These folks take way too long to kill each other while literally ontop of each other. Castrated damage has been an issue for me since CoH 2 came out and it seems part 3 continues that tradition.

[robreich]

People hate it because when you make a sequel and have 10 years to work on it people expect massive improvements, design changes, evolution, bigger scale, better graphics, polish and building off prior games.

COH3 has almost none of that stuff, even if it’s technically a decent game. Whenever I play it I just have a desire to play COH2.

[MijnAfspeellijst]

The thing you need to keep in acount zade, is that company of heroes 2 is a great game, so when the developer releases a new game poeple expect improvements.
so if you never played coh2 then yes coh3 is a great game. but the fans of coh2 expect something more

[Marinealver]

It might not be bad, but it isn't great and we did have better.

I mean 2 is better, and while 3 might have statistically better graphics, it doesn't look that way thanks to the art design.

At least it isn't Blood Bowl 3.

[scatterlite]

As someone who has played coh2 lot, i just dont see what this game has to offer.

Ironically this is also a criticism coh2 received initially over coh1, however the game was improved alot over the years.
Right now im struggling to see what coh3 does "better" than coh2 but maybe that'll change a few years down the line.

[myriad]

1:01 Game reviewers are payed off to give good scores, taking their "opinions" on games is akin to trusting politicians.

[diamondninja]

I think with the graphics there is a huge style pivot from COH2, with COH3 being more vibrant and "cartoony". Also it seems like COH3 is missing some shading especially with foliage.