Kane schießt die Bayern bei Aufsteiger Elversberg zum Auswärtssieg

I still remember the PC Gamer cover from October 2006 featuring Company of Heroes as the vanguard of the "RTS Revolution." This was back in the day that I would walk down to the local grocery store to grab each new physical issue off of the news stand. I had just turned 17. I was already failing trigonometry. And in my free time, I was building a lightsaber hilt out of parts from the hardware store for Halloween… and trying to keep my airborne troops alive behind German lines on my first proper gaming PC. blablasex.es

At Relic Entertainment in Vancouver that same fall, as one designer recalled, Wagner's 'Ride of the Valkyries' played over the PA system as part of a ritual when one of their games finally went gold. I didn't encounter anything quite that dramatic when I visited earlier this summer to talk with the team about the 20th anniversary of the franchise, but even through all the ups and downs, I did find myself surrounded by people very excited to be making a World War 2 RTS.

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A lot of the earliest history of the franchise has been scattered to the wind, unfortunately. The genesis of the idea, I was told, was a story only recalled by a small number of people who have since moved on from Relic, if not the industry altogether. I did learn that the original prototype was created in the engine from Impossible Creatures, a very strange 2003 RTS about creating hybridized animals to fight for you. But Company of Heroes certainly wears its influences on its bloodstained sleeve in a way that remains apparent even today.

"We were highly influenced by Saving Private Ryan and Band of Brothers," principal programmer Ian Thomson recalled. "That was the era where big leaps in visual quality were arriving, with the Half-Life 2 presentations blowing our mind with characters and physics. We wanted to bring that to RTS in a World War 2 setting."

I was barely old enough to see an R-rated movie on my own, of course, and I hadn't, at the time, watched either Spielberg's epic or HBO's landmark series. I was very familiar with the visual language of them, though, having grown up on Battlefield 1942, Medal of Honor, and the original Call of Duty. But even in shifting the perspective on those brutal D-Day landings from first-person to a bird's eye, I remember very little was lost in terms of drama and terror in the opening moments of the campaign.

The Human Element

Relic describes this phenomenon that got its hooks into me as "Humanizing the Battlefield," which they consider a core component to the franchise. In Company of Heroes, the audio and the animations, even outside of cutscenes, made me feel like these little soldiers I was ordering around were real people with lives back home they hoped to return to. They would take cover. They had morale, and could get pinned down or flee if they came under heavy fire.

Your average marine in Starcraft is basically an action figure. But when I zoomed in really close to an infantry squad in Company of Heroes, I found myself imagining: that one is Joe from Tennessee, and I could picture his cat, and the signed baseball on his dresser, and the kinds of pies his mom made for Thanksgiving. It sounds a little twee and overwrought, maybe, but they sold the illusion.

Relic was in the middle of a generational run, too, having almost completely reinvented the RTS formula a few years earlier with the original Dawn of War. After years of Warcrafts and Starcrafts and Commands and Conquers, Ages of Empires, they threw out a lot of the basic design of resource harvesting and base building and made a new breed of strategy game that was all about cover, momentum, and territory control. Another piece of why Company of Heroes felt so much more real is that its incentives led to the kinds of maneuvers and firefights a real battlefield commander might employ.

As for how they pulled this off, it may have simply been the boldness not to cut any corners.

"One of the defining characteristics of the CoH team was that nobody knew how to say no," principal programmer Remy Saville recalled. "Every time someone had a cool idea, we'd find a way to squeeze it in. Cover systems, destructible environments, squad tactics, all of it. The result was a game absolutely packed with features because the team was constantly pushing for more."

Apparently they really knew they had something when, Saville reminisced, people stopped taking lunch breaks just to stay at their desks and play more Company of Heroes. This same maximalist attitude, however, might have contributed to getting the team in trouble down the line. But for now, things were only looking up. Company of Heroes shipped as the highest rated RTS in PC Gamer's history with a 96—still one of the highest scores we've ever given to this day. It would receive two successful expansions, with Opposing Fronts in 2007 and Tales of Valor in 2009.

Into the Cold

Discussions of a sequel were already in motion not long after the first game shipped. And while the first had focused mainly on the British, French, and American experiences on the Western Front, it seemed natural to head East for the next chapter. It would be a long wait for 2013's Company of Heroes 2. Long enough that the kid from before who had been failing trigonometry had made her way out to San Francisco to be an intern at the very magazine she'd once walked to the store to snag every month.I still remember seeing the demo for CoH2 in the office for the first time, before it had even been revealed to the public. It is a very different game. And in keeping up with a bit of a pattern that started with Dawn of War 2, it became another Relic sequel that took some big, divisive swings, and I ended up enjoying even more than the original.

The Eastern Front as Relic depicted it was a warscape defined just as much by Mother Nature's contributions as our own manufactured lead and steel. Infantry left out in the cold too long could actually suffer frostbite. Frozen lakes and rivers could be blown up with grenades, sending tanks plunging into the icy depths. I absolutely loved it. It's still my favorite game in the series, and we might never get anything like it again. But it was not universally embraced, especially by the competitive multiplayer community.

This put Relic in a bit of an awkward spot that I've seen various studios have to navigate. When you release something as genuinely iconic and beloved as Company of Heroes, the follow-up can't just be more of the same. It has to bring something new to the conversation. And inevitably, not everyone will love those new things. Where once the spirit of throwing every cool idea into one game had produced a hit, now it had resulted in a wave of backlash.

Far from being panned, however, our own Rich McCormick wrote in his review, scoring an 80, "sometimes clumsy, a game that can't maintain all its systems, with too many disparate moving parts to feel consistently coherent. But the final result, despite the small losses along the way, is a winner."

Still, the narrative had started to crystalize in the ice that maybe Relic had lost a little bit of that magic from the 2000s. Company of Heroes 2 was good, but not as good as the original, so you'd hear around RTS enthusiasts. And with Dawn of War 3 turning out even more disappointing a few years later, that started to become something almost like common wisdom.I wasn't fully buying it, though. And the biggest reason was a little expansion pack released in 2014 called Ardennes Assault. Taking place on a dynamic map meant to simulate the Battle of the Bulge, it allowed you to move troops around from province to province between RTS skirmishes to cut off enemy retreats and reinforcements. I distinctly remember this as the peak of Company of Heroes as a franchise. Its voiced commanders with rich backstories, reactive campaign AI, and the way it really forced me to pick my battles wisely kept me coming back to it even years later.

Bella, Ciao

When it came time to start thinking about Company of Heroes 3, that spirit of wanting to go big hadn't left the team at all. Looking at the positive reception to Ardennes Assault, an idea started to form of an even larger dynamic campaign set during the lesser-known liberation of Italy. At the time, Relic was working with Sega, who was also in charge of the Total War series. And from my perspective, the influence of modern Total War campaigns seemed apparent.

The problem is that it just didn't work very well. I remember being asked what I thought of Company of Heroes 3 at launch by a colleague and saying the RTS battles were as good as they'd ever been in the series, but the Italian campaign… well, that was kind of rough. Our own Fraser Brown concluded, in what was otherwise a mostly positive review, "right now it's impossible to look at it as anything other than a failure."

"Yeah, we bit off more than we could chew," Relic CEO Justin Dowdeswell told me very frankly. "The idea was great. The spirit of it was good. The team was energized. It was just more than we could get done in time, and that's it."

The road only got rockier in the aftermath of what ended up being a rough launch for Company of Heroes 3. The studio faced two rounds of layoffs, representing a large percentage of their overall staff, in 2023 and 2024. Many of the people I remember talking to regularly when covering Company of Heroes 3 were no longer around when I visited to discuss the current state of things. After the announcement that Dawn of War 4 was being developed by German studio King Art Games—I was later told Relic passed on it as they simply didn't have the bandwidth to take it on alongside other ongoing projects, mostly related to Company of Heroes—I was wondering if there even would be a Relic anymore.But in the meantime, they have split from Sega and become independent again. And while a smaller team than they were at their height, what I saw in Vancouver this summer was a company of coders, artists, audio engineers, and programmers who seemed to be in high spirits. While the ordeals of the last few years would be enough to break the morale of even seasoned troops in the streets of Carentan, they all seemed to be excited about continuing to work on this franchise.And it's still chugging along, with the recent release of the wave-based Final Stand mode last month.

Battles to Come

The picture isn't exactly clear yet for what the next chapter of Company of Heroes might be called."The last chapter was called 'Chaos,' I know that," Dowdeswell quipped.

But there is a team with a drive to write it. The franchise, at the moment, might seem like it's knee-deep in seawater, under heavy German machine gun fire, just trying to make it to that shingle, especially without a large publisher like Sega providing air support.

"We will survive and thrive based on the success of the decisions that we make along the way," Dowdeswell said of their newfound independence. "And I think there's been, I don't know if it's a cultural shift, but a mood shift at the studio once everyone really started to see that it is up to us. The things we do can make a difference for the better, and when things go well, it was us. And I think that it removes any sort of question around, well, whose fault was that? Or whose win was that? Well, it's ours, either way, and I think that's more empowering than difficult."As a Company of Heroes fan, I hope to see this scrappier, independent Relic push forward to victory in spite of the setbacks they've faced since they first got off the landing craft 20 years ago. It won't be easy. But the commanding officers at the front seem to have no delusions that it will be."The industry's in turmoil, and this wasn't a guaranteed outcome for the studio," Dowdeswell concluded. "So I'm really pleased that we're here, able to support the games, and able to celebrate this 20th anniversary."

So am I. I'll crack a cold one to remember my boy Johnny Vastano from Ardennes Assault and send my best wishes to all the former Relic devs who I couldn't share one with on this trip, as tumult continues to follow after just about anyone involved in making games. We've lost a lot already, and I'd hate to lose Company of Heroes. So it's good to see that they're keeping up the fight.

Rockstar wants people to love GTA 6's Jason and Lucia just as much as they did with Red Dead Redemption 2 protagonist Arthur Morgan.

Red Dead Redemption 2's Arthur Morgan is one of the most beloved video game protagonists of all-time. Even as someone who did not completely love it as a game at times – I often describe it as the game I love that I hate the most – Arthur was a character that really stuck with me and remains one of my all-time favorites years later. And while Rockstar has done great characters in the past like Niko Bellic and John Marston, Arthur is on a whole other level.

So after a protagonist as acclaimed as Arthur, following up on that is likely a point of stress for the developers, and speaking to TroisCouleurs, Rockstar North co-studio head Rob Nelson explains: "We wanted to take the depth that we were able to add into the world of Red Dead Redemption 2 and the ability to interact with the world in a much more significant way, but then also this sort of emotional connection that people end up having with Arthur."

Nelson continues: "We knew we wanted to come back and continue playing with the idea of multiple protagonists," and that, with a couple, the studio could make the protagonists' actions a bit more impactful than what we saw with GTA 5's trio. The interviewer cites moments shown, like Lucia and Jason getting ready to go out, with a level of intimacy between the characters, unlike the GTA 5 protagonists, who tolerated each other at best.

Nelson says these quieter moments are intentional, as they make the intense bits even more impactful, explaining, "when you see her get thrown down the stairs and then you switch to him, and you can’t hear her, it’s the feeling of concern."

Nelson adds, the quieter moments "were some of the most compelling aspects of Red Dead Redemption 2 and we wanted to see if we could bring some of those elements into GTA 6."

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Ashly Burch's first encounter with PC gaming was playing a Donkey Kong knockoff on a PC her mother had bought to practice typing. But the first PC game that truly resonated with her was LucasArts' Day of the Tentacle: "That was the first time I played a game that I can remember that had a narrative and comedy," she says. "It was one of those things where, when you're younger, you find something that expands your concept of what a thing can be."

Burch came to the world's attention through the online, gaming-themed sketch show Hey Ash, Whatcha Playin', before making her videogame acting debut as Tiny Tina in Borderlands 2. Since then, Burch's roles have included Chloe in Life is Strange, Parvati Holcomb in The Outer Worlds, and Aloy in Guerrilla Games' Horizon series.

More recently, Burch returned to sending-up videogames in Apple TV's game-development comedy Mythic Quest, and is currently working on her passion project I'm Happy You're Here—a YouTube comedy series that explores coping with mental health issues: "They're easy, shareable, hopefully easy to understand distillations of complicated concepts, and yeah, they're all for free on YouTube," she says. "It's something I've wanted to make for a long time."

Burch took a break from puppet psychotherapy to show me around her Steam library. We deliberated the benefits of notebooks in detective games, vetted cosy gaming's dating profiles, and discussed the secret sauce behind Slay the Spire.

What game are you currently playing?

The Incident at Galley House. I just started playing yesterday. It's brand new. I'm at that part that I think happens with every detective game, where you're like, "I have too many leads".

I'm overwhelmed. I resist having a notebook at first when I do detective games, and inevitably I have to cave and start physically writing stuff down. I did that with Blue Prince. I had a massive notebook for [that], and Lorelei and the Laser Eyes, I had to have a massive notebook for that.

Why do I resist it? Is it laziness? It might be laziness. There's a part of me that's like, "It's fun that a game is complex enough that you have to keep your own personal notes." And then there's another part of me that's like, "But shouldn't that all be internal to the system?" Like, shouldn't whatever mechanism you need to track things be housed within the game? But there's no rule for that.

I love detective games. I think the first one I fell in love with was Return of the Obra Dinn. And then I think when I played Chants of Sennaar, I was like, "This is my new favourite genre." It often felt like adventure games could be a bit arbitrary. It wasn't necessarily logic that would lead you to the solution for something. It might be brute forcing, just being like, "I don't know where the fuck I'm going—rubber chicken on every single thing that I find."

When it's a good detective game, you really feel like a detective. You really are putting clues together and creating logical connections … and especially in Return of the Obra Dinn, when you get things correct, you're like, "I'm a genius".

What was the previous game you played, and is it still installed?

I just uninstalled it because I put too many hours into this game, and I can't look at the little icon anymore. It was Fields of Mistria.

I usually seek out cosy games when I'm using my brain a lot in my day-to-day, if I'm in a writer's room or I just feel like my brain is full of too much stuff. I will do a cosy game to just zone out.

What I really liked about it is that I find sometimes in cosy games, if there are romance options, there's like two characters with distinct personalities, and everyone else is the same. They might have different hobbies, but they don't fundamentally feel like different people. And I feel what Fields of Mistria did well is that—and it's not perfect, I still think there's a handful of characters that feel similar—but more than most games, I would say half the characters are distinct.

And the other thing that's interesting—this is a strange compliment—but they managed to capture the kids very, very well. There's three kids in the village, and they're maybe the most interesting.

A difficult thing with writing is that often people feel like their characters are distinct because they have certain backstories or they have certain interests, but if you don't pull those things forward and have them affect the way that they speak, the way that they act, they way that they move, they don't end up feeling different. I think often games can fall into that trap. These characters look, even just aesthetically, they look really different, so that should be enough. And it's like, well, you have to write them differently. I really liked that about Mistria

What is the oldest game (by release date) currently installed on your PC?

I mostly play on my Steam Deck. I think the oldest game currently installed on my Steam Deck is Kentucky Route Zero. Don't take my gamer card away, I never finished it. That's why it's installed, because I was looking through my library and being like, "What games do I need to give another crack at?"

I was a lot younger because [it was] 13 years ago, and I think I just couldn't latch onto the abstract David Lynch-y vibe of it. I think I was more impatient with games too back in the day. And also since 2020 I've become a reader. I didn't really read books very much before 2020. I was just so tired of looking at screens that I was like, "I have to put my eyes anywhere else."

So now, I think I've built up more patience and attention span, frankly, from reading. I am curious about how I would feel going back into Kentucky Route Zero now that my frontal lobe is completely developed.

What is the highest number of hours you have in any given game, according to Steam?

Fields of Mistria isn't as bad as I thought. Slay the Spire 2 is as bad as I thought—270 hours. I got really obsessed. I loved Slay the Spire very much, and then, actually I'm curious because I don't just play PC. I'm all over the place and I don't have my old Xbox anymore. I wonder if Spelunky would have more hours? Probably.

But yeah, it was one of those things where I would be like, "Well, I'm waiting for this thing, I'll do a run." Then there were definitely nights where I was like, "I have to get to Ascension 10" and do 10 hours or something. I would like to say that part of it is because it has co-op, and I played a lot of co-op, but I haven't played that much co-op. Most of those are singleplayer hours.

It's such a well-designed roguelike. I mean, Slay the Spire 2 is still in early access obviously, so it's not as tight necessarily as Slay the Spire 1. But it's still quite comparable. And it's so addictive too. It has this thing of the luck and skill are in perfect balance in that game. It's the consolidation of many, many different, smart choices that make it a good game. And I don't think you can point at any one main mechanic or something.

The other thing—it's such a small thing—but what I really love is that, again, it's the thing of distinct characters, you get the idea of who these people are through how they play. There are these little sprinkles of characterisation that just make it feel fuller. Like the Regent is a new character, and he's sort of a prissy, shitty king. It took me many playthroughs to realise that the throne he's sitting in is being held up by two little minions whose legs are constantly shaking because they're having trouble holding him up. That is such a fun little detail, you get so much information about who this guy is from just looking at him.

I think we can get trapped in, with games, this stoic, cool character [archetype]. There's a lot of stoic, cool, badass characters. You know what I mean? So when there's a shitty little posh prince, I'm like, "Yes! Give me more of that." I want more shitty little bitches.

What game will you never, ever uninstall?

It's probably League of Legends because I play ARAM with friends. I haven't played in a minute. I need to get back on it. But for a while that was my after-work ritual—I would get on with a few friends and we'd play a couple of games of ARAM.

I remember being in a group chat with them or something [during the pandemic] and they were like, "You should learn [League] because what the fuck else are we going to do right now?" Which I'm glad about because it's so much to learn. And truly I would not have been able to if we were not in a global pandemic and I had time to do it. I just don't like the number of characters, and they're always releasing new champions, and then you have to know how the champions work, and then you need to understand all the items, and thank god I don't have to worry about runes anymore. But now I have the hang of enough champions, and I know enough about how the other ones work, that I can hold my own.

What's a piece of non-gaming software installed on your PC that you simply couldn't live without?

This is kind of a lame answer, but I have Audacity, which is how I record my voice auditions, and I've used it now for so many years that I'm sure I could use a different program. I just don't want to because I'm not doing anything complicated.

How tidy is your desktop screen?

Quite tidy. There's a draft of something I'm working on. So on the left side of the screen, I have like two documents and Fade In. Oh, I guess this is another answer to your previous question. I don't use Final Draft for writing scripts, I use Fade In. So this is probably another program that I would never uninstall.

Final Draft is so expensive, and it feels like every two years they force you to update and then force you to buy it again or something. Fade In is like, I think when I bought it, it was like $60, and then you're done. I don't know how they make money, frankly. And it's like the same thing with Audacity, which is like I just need you for script format. That's all.

I can't handle clutter. When I start to write something, especially, the space around me has to be clean or I can't focus. And if my house gets too cluttered it's the same thing. I have to be tidy before I can do anything else. I do have OCD, so that might be why … it really calms my nervous system down.