In February, we announced that our Coral Viper (1.6.0) PC update would come as quickly as March, which would include features like Vote to Surrender, Automatch Cooldown, Pathfinding improvements and Mission Select. As excited as we were to get these features and improvements into players’ hands, we felt we wanted to do more to address player feedback.
Therefore, our team has decided to move the release date of Coral Viper to April 23rd, 2024. This move will allow us to add more features and content to the update. Let’s run you through our decision-making process.
Player Feedback
Back in December of 2023, we released a large-scale survey to measure your interest in features and content, while also gauging your general satisfaction with Company of Heroes 3. This survey helped us reinforce our confidence in the player feedback we had already gathered and, along with other information and data, helped us prioritize our next updates (1.5.0 and onward).
From your feedback, Hammer & Shield needed more faction related content to match the addition of the Battlegroups for the US Forces and Wehrmacht. We’ve also noted a keen enthusiasm for content, like maps, including community-made maps, and a steady cadence of Balance changes. As for features, Vote to Surrender, Automatch cooldown (leaver penalty), Map preference (veto) topped the requests.
Coral Viper Content
Taking all that feedback in, we’ve decided to review our plans for Coral Viper, and we’re happy to share them with you today. First, here is the content we had originally planned to include in Coral Viper, if it had released in March.
Coral Viper - Before
Content
3 new Community Maps
Features
Vote to Surrender
Automatch Cooldown
Mission Select
Accolades (Player Progression)
Gameplay
Balance Adjustments
Pathfinding Improvements
Coral Viper - After
Now that we have moved the release date to April 23rd, here are the additional items coming in Coral Viper alongside the original planned content.
New Content
2 Battlegroups – British Forces & Deutsche Afrikakorps
3 Community Maps
New Features
Map Preference (veto)
Difficulty Selection for Coop vs A.I.
Vote to Surrender
Automatch Cooldown
Mission Select
Single Player Challenges
Accolades (Player Progression)
Gameplay
Balance Adjustments & Additional Balance Tuning
Pathfinding Improvements
System
Some A.I. Improvements
UI Visual Improvements
Polish and bug fixes
We hope that these additional items will prove to be worth the wait. As we are moving this update from March to April, we are also working on delivering a small 1.5.0 hot fix to address menu lag related to the friends list. You can expect this hot fix before the release of Coral Viper.
Battlegroups
We’re happy to announce that the new Battlegroups planned for Coral Viper will be available for free (0 Merit) for all players via the in-game Store. This is our way of thanking you, our players, for sticking with us as we continue to work to improve the game and create additional gameplay content. This offer isn’t planned to expire for now, but if we change the price later, we will give you ample notice. Anyone who unlocks the Battlegroups for free will be able to keep them, even if their price is adjusted in the future, so be sure to claim them upon release!
We know delays can be frustrating, but in this case, we hope the planned additions will make up for it! Thank you for your continued support and feedback. Be sure to keep an eye on our channels for Coral Viper sneak peaks, videos, livestreams and more throughout all of April!