As you can imagine, last week was a difficult time for our team, and we want to thank players for their support and positive messages as we took a few days to regroup. Today we want to address a highly discussed topic in our community — what’s next for Company of Heroes 3? As mentioned in the message posted to Relic’s Twitter, Relic and SEGA are fully committed to supporting Company of Heroes 3 on PC and console. We know there are areas of the game not meeting your, or our, expectations, and we will continue to iterate, improve, and communicate with you as we take on your feedback and plan future updates. Please understand that following this week’s studio events we are still adapting and organizing, and our goal is to answer some of your questions on our upcoming priorities and game updates as best we can.
What’s Next for Company of Heroes?
Company of Heroes 3 - Console Edition release
Console Edition is releasing tomorrow, and we’re excited to welcome new players to our community. A welcoming, supportive, and growing community will allow us to continue supporting our game for years to come.
Brass Leopard PC Update (1.1.5)
This update is on target to release on June 6th and will include a new 3vs3 co-op map, changes to gameplay (including Planes and Loiters), quality-of-life improvements, audio improvements, mod tool improvements and several bug fixes. You can check out our preview livestream here. We will be posting patch notes and a more robust overview closer to the release.
Emerald Bear PC Update (1.2.0)
The Emerald Bear PC update following Brass Leopard is in its alpha stage and planned to be released in July. We will share more details about its contents once we complete our final testing. This patch is too far along in development to change any of its priorities; however, we are already reassessing priorities for subsequent updates. Once everything is locked in, we’ll share its release date and give you a sneak peek at what’s coming. Based on community feedback, we've dropped "Operation" from our update names to reduce any confusion about their size or scope.
Communications Cadence
We intend to adhere to a more regular schedule of communications to ensure our players are kept up to date on all the latest news and updates.
Bi-weekly Wire Reports (starting June 9th) – these blog posts will aggregate news about the game along with the best player content we’re seeing. It will include answers to frequently asked questions, and occasional insights from our developers.
Bi-weekly livestreams (starting June 15th) – showcases, play sessions, Q&As with the Dev team, and more.
Be sure to let our team know what you think of our future updates, the sneak peeks, the before/afters we’ve showcased, and our livestream previews from Brass Leopard. If you liked these types of previews, we’ll aim to have more in the future!
The Road Ahead
Our team is committed to supporting Company of Heroes 3, and part of that support is building trust with our players and community. As mentioned above, we are reviewing and reassessing all our priorities for the game that are not already locked in for the June and July updates. You can see below that our Development Priorities roadmap has been adapted to reflect what content is coming, what is back on the table, and what has needed to shift.
There are a lot of topics on the table right now and plenty of conversations for our team to have. Those include (in no order of priority): additional multiplayer maps, a replay feature, vote to surrender, additional balance updates, planning for additional content, and how/when we could integrate community-made maps to the game.
We are also working on a longer-term roadmap to share with all of you, which will include descriptions of planned content and target dates. We are aiming to release this roadmap shortly after the July 1.2.0 PC update.
This overview is just the beginning, and we understand it does not cover every concern that the community has raised. What hasn’t changed is our team’s commitment to supporting Company of Heroes 3 and continuing to improve the experience for all our players. Thank you again for your kind messages and continued support as we focus on the road ahead. Join us tomorrow to welcome our new console fans to the community and get ready for next week’s Brass Leopard PC Update!