It’s been eight years since Company Of Heroes 2 came out, and now finally we have some news about Company Of Heroes 3. The third addition to the WW2-based RTS series is headed to PC next year, and will come the series’ biggest campaign yet, as well as a new and improved tactical experience for long-time fans. You can read Nate’s hands on preview impressions of Company Of Heroes 3 if you want meaty gameplay details, but we also had a chance to chat with some of the developers at Relic about bringing the old series back to life – and they told us that they want to keep players entertained with a new, non-linear approach.
“A linear campaign is good for getting people started, but not for keeping people entertained,” executive producer David Littman tells us. “For us, it’s not enough to just keep delivering what we delivered eight and fifteen years ago [with the previous COHs].
“We need to adapt, and our singleplayer mode takes a new direction to more of this hybrid experience. This is where we think we can take the future of Company Of Heroes, because it gives a little more than we’ve ever given before.”
This approach extends beyond the game’s story to the new “Dynamic Campaign Map” too. It lets players command ground, air and naval forces and make long-term choices that will affect the rest of the game. It’s a similar system to Total War, and Littman tells us that Relic actually got some advice from the developers at Creative Assembly, who are also fellow Sega stablemates.
To find out more about that, however, it’s worth taking a peek at Nate’s hands-on Company Of Heroes 3 preview. He had a whale of of time with it, giving high praise to its excellent use of British vernacular (“they called buildings wankers”) and the game’s replayability:
“The Total War games are pretty much the only RTS games I go back to time and time again for single-player campaigns, thanks to the capacity for each run to unfold in new and exciting ways. If Company Of Heroes 3 can now pull off the same trick, only with more tanks, I’ll be a happy man indeed.”
Company Of Heroes 3 is set to release sometime in 2022. You can find out more on the official website, or check out the Steam page, and you can also sign up to try the same preview build Nate played with the pre-alpha demo. Plus, if all this talk of a third game has you itching to find out what the rest of the series is all about, there’s currently a handy Steam sale taking place, too.