Company of Heroes: Opposing Fronts

Whatever campaign you’re playing though, Relic is working hard to make each level unique. Carota explains: “In this game, I’m really concerned with making sure that every level you play is memorable, so that when players go and talk about it with their friends, there won’t be any confusion between different missions. They’ll be like, ‘You know, Caen counter-attack, at night when the lightning’s coming, and then the King Tiger rolls in. Oh, I crapped my pants!’” As you can tell, the crapping of pants is a big deal at the home of Relic.

War has been described as 90% boredom, 10% terror. With the former in mind, OF will offer a wide variety of combat scenarios, including the counter-attack missions seen in levels such as Carentan, epic tank battles, elite infantry skirmishes, fighting over bridges, a level in which troops and tanks arrive via gliders and lots of conflict in the forest. Mosqueira adds: “In CoH, we had very little forest-based fighting, but now we’ve implemented it properly.” Hippies might want to look away now, as it’s pretty certain that a lot of trees will snuff it. Mosqueira also quips that we’ll “get to see what happens when a Sherman attacks a windmill.” We’re putting our money on the Sherman.

Other additions will include “tactical sound” (enabling the astute player to recognize the type of machinery firing from its unique sound effects), a full selection of weather effects, complete day-to-night transition (finally enabling missions that say “hold the town until daylight”) and a complete overhaul of the vehicle AI.

Carota continues: “We spent all this time doing the believable squad movement, and the vehicles frustrated us, because we had big plans for these formations, but just didn’t have the time to implement it in CoH. Visually, seeing intelligent behavior from your units is very important, and the believability factor was quashed a lot when you saw a whole bunch of vehicles doing the dirty.”

As our presentation came to an end, Mosqueira loaded up a level to give us a quick demonstration of the two new armies in battle. Under the cover of darkness and a stinging rain, a couple of British squads cautiously stalked across open terrain to capture a resource point, with a Cromwell tank and their lieutenant standing watch. Once the point wascaptured, Mosqueira had one squad build a slit trench while the other took cover behind the standard sandbags. Lightning flashed overhead, illuminating the forces at work. Minutes later, a couple of the half-track vehicles of the Panzer Elite rolled into the square, with German soldiers leaning out of them, firing their Panzerschrecks at the Cromwell tank. However, they didn’t last long against the heavily dug-in British.