Publisher Sega and developer Relic Entertainment today published the first Company of Heroes 3 developer diary, discussing their CoH-Development initiative and how they plan on involving the community in the upcoming strategy game’s development.
Powered by Games2Gether, platform used to great effect by developer Amplitude Studio when developing its Endless 4X series and the recent Humankind, CoH-Development started with 10 members of the community before growing to a team of 70 that had early access to Company of Heroes 3.
At the same time, Relic sent out surveys to existing players who weren’t part of CoH-Development, receiving feedback from over 60,000 of them, which ultimately informed the direction of the strategy game.
In the developer diary, community caster Stormless explains that his contribution to helping design a new faction, which included putting together a 9-page PDF full of suggestions, made its way to the development team. On a similar note, community caster A_E also mentioned his feedback on UI design being taken into consideration.
Gameplay Designer Kyle Fehr explains that Relic gave community members involved in CoH-Development an early build of Company of Heroes 3 “within months” of starting development and playtested alongside them to get feedback on unit rosters, additions, which abilities worked and which didn’t.
“The first thing I noticed is that we were replicating the best things from CoH and CoH 2 and not really adding anything new,” streamer Luvnest said. “I wanted to improve the infantry gameplay. Two months later, we had a completely new tier structure, which was amazing. You could test those ideas right away.”
Executive Producer David Littman also explained how Company of Heroes 3 features a dynamic campaign map that encourages replayability came from the community’s positive response to the idea.
If you’d like to take part in Company of Heroes 3’s development, you can still sign-up up on the CoH-Development website, where you can exchange ideas with both the development team and 200,000 other community members.
Company of Heroes 3 is currently slated to launch on PC at some point in 2022.
Keep updated on the latest PC Gaming news by following GameWatcher on Twitter, checking out our videos on YouTube, giving us a like on Facebook, and joining us on Discord.
