Sonic Dream Team developer Hardlight and Total War studio Creative Assembly have been hit with a round of layoffs by publisher SEGA Europe, affecting around 240 roles across Creative Assembly, SEGA Europe, and Hardlight, via IGN.
Staff were notified by an email sent around this morning from SEGA Europe’s managing director Jurgen Post, alongside the news that Relic Entertainment, makers of Company of Heroes and Dawn of War, would be sold. As IGN point out, SEGA Europe studios Sports Interactive and Two Point Studios, makers of Football Manager and Two Point Hospital respectively, were not mentioned in the email.
]]>Earlier this month, we asked you to vote for your favourite strategy games of all time to celebrate the launch (and glorious return) of several strategy classics this month, including Relic's WW2 RTS Company Of Heroes 3, Blue Byte's The Settlers: New Allies and Cyanide's fantasy Warhamball Blood Bowl 3. And cor, I've never seen such love for individual expansions and total conversion mods among mainline RTS games and 4Xs. As with all strategy games, however, there can only be one victor - and you can find out what that single strategy game to rule them all is right here. Here are your 50 favourite strategy games of all time, as voted for by you, the RPS readership.
]]>The RPS Time Capsule returns for its first outing of 2023, and this time we're casting our minds back to the hallowed year of 2006. Little did we know it at the time, but this is the year we start to see the birth of certain game series that are still alive and kicking today (just about), as well as the nascent beginnings of now beloved studios honing their craft on some of their very first titles. But which of those games have earned themselves a spot in the eternal RPS Time Capsule? Come and find out which ones have stood the test of time, and which, after reading this article, have been consigned to the smog-filled trashfire of future Earth.
]]>UK retailer Gamesplanet is running a medieval and strategy sale in honour of their 15th anniversary, including a pretty outstanding offer - get the excellent Viking strategy game Northgard for free when you spend more than £3.50 and use code NORSEGODS. There's plenty discounted in the sale too, including some of the best PC strategy games ever made, so take a look!
]]>The Total War series are the Kinder Eggs of strategy gaming: a layer of delicious, map-based strategy, with a dramatic RTS toy hidden inside. It's a tasty formula, and I've often wondered why more games over the years haven't adopted it. I'm not alone in this: David Littman, executive producer at Relic Entertainment, always wondered the same thing. But then along came Sega, gulping down strategy studios like a big mad whale, and Relic ended up in its belly - right next to Total War devs Creative Assembly. So he asked them about it.
“Turns out,” says Littman, “it’s because it’s really hard to do”. So there you go. But Littman was not deterred. Working away in the leviathan's guts, with the famous motto of the SAS in mind - “You’ve got to at least have a go, even if it's really hard” - Relic learned from their fellow strategy Jonahs at CA, and set about applying the knowledge to their landmark WW2 strategy franchise, Company Of Heroes. Now, the Sega whale, she is a-rumblin'. Sometime next year in late 2022, she will belch up Company Of Heroes 3, and it will have a brand new, Total War-style campaign map. I've ventured down the whale's gullet to have a go, and I think it looks promising.
]]>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.
]]>Relic’s resilient RTS series Company of Heroes looks like it’s getting a new game, or at the very least a new expansion. The developer’s Twitch channel has kicked off a 24-hour countdown, showing off a map centered on Italy, with a large slice of North Africa and Albania on either side. Overnight it has slowly zoomed in on Italy. We’re probably a few hours away from Company of Heroes 3, set in Italy.
]]>Strategy games is an enormous genre in PC gaming, with real-time, turn-based, 4X and tactics games all flying the same flag to stake their claim as the one true best strategy game. Our list of the best strategy games on PC covers the lot of them. We like to take a broad view here at RPS, and every game listed below is something we firmly believe that you could love and play today. You'll find 30-year-old classics nestled right up against recent favourites here, so whether you're to the genre or want to dig deep for some hidden gems, we've got you covered. Here are our 50 best strategy games for 2023.
]]>Hello. This is Spawn Point, a new not-quite-regular feature in which we take a genre, series or other facet of gaming culture, and try to convince you to give it a shot. It might be those hero shooters you’ve always wanted to get into, or that terrifying space game played by thousands of jerks. We’ll briefly explain the thing, followed by some ways for you to breach it.
First up, it’s... the real-time strategy.
]]>For the third day in a row, our outpost was under attack. Some enterprising yanks had discovered they could take opportunistic raiding parties through an undefended snowy field and get within grenade-throwing distance of our forward operating base – a walled-in barracks full of tiny toy soldiers all sitting around grunting that they didn’t have enough rifles, ammo, or best friends to clutch to their breasts as they died in the snow. Someone lowered the iron gate for me and I drove the truck into the compound, during a mercifully quiet and shrapnel-free moment.
“Who wants b-mats!” I shouted, employing the shorthand for ‘basic materials’ I’d learned from wiser, fightier men. “Get your b-mats here!”
Everyone in the compound rushed to the truck.
“Oh YES,” said an engineer, as he unloaded the essentials he needed to build up defences and do his own job. “Buddy, you are the real MVP.”
]]>This is The Mechanic, where Alex Wiltshire invites developers to discuss the inner workings of their games. This time, Company of Heroes [official site].
The Tiger tanks come rolling in, the artillery comes thundering down. Walls are blown wide open, buildings collapse on themselves. In Company of Heroes, the battlefield is ever-changing, munitions cutting into the map new opportunities for flanking and to be flanked. Confident pushes turn to disaster as the enemy punches through rear guards, and last-ditch defences are saved as the cavalry smashes through barricades. Company of Heroes is a deeply dynamic RTS, something that’s all down to:
THE MECHANIC: Destructible environments
]]>Have You Played? is an endless stream of game retrospectives. One a day, every day of the year, perhaps for all time.
Pew pew pew pew pew! That’s nothing like any of the sounds that happen in 2006 real-time strategy game Company of Heroes. I just like pretending to shoot you.
]]>Another Humble Bundle is offering friendly game-making tools for cheap. Following a GameMaker bundle last month, now they're back with the the Humble Clickteam Fusion 2.5 Bundle. As you might guess, the pay-what-you-want bundle is built around the game-making software Clickteam Fusion, also packing some games built with it - including Metroid 'em up Environmental Station Alpha, jumpscare 'em up Five Nights at Freddy's 3, multiplayer adventure The Yawhg, and citybuilding puzzler Concrete Jungle.
And now for something completely different: Humble also has loads of Company of Heroes games bundled up, celebrating ten years of the fine WW2 RTS series.
]]>In 2001, Band of Brothers was still airing on HBO and Canadian developer Relic Entertainment was finishing up development of Impossible Creatures, its freaky animal RTS. Space and sci-fi had been its muse for years, but it found, in the increased cultural interest in World War 2, another setting and the impetus for Company of Heroes.
Relic celebrated the game's tenth anniversary this month. It remains one of the most acclaimed RTS games of all time, lavished in 2006 with glowing reviews and heaps of awards. I’ll mostly remember it as the reason I got chewed out by a lecturer for dozing in class, after a long night of liberating Europe.
We’ve talked four of the original developers into taking a trip down a potholed, tank-lined memory lane with us.
]]>If we seem cynical and suspicious of the many Warhammer 40,000 games we've seen in recent years, it's because we judge them against the high-water mark of Relic Entertainment's 40k games. Dawn of War with its real-time strategising, Dawn of War II with its added action-RPG-ish flair, and Space Marine with its head-stomping are as good as we've had 40k in recent years. So huzzah! For the next week you can get the lot for just a few quid.
The latest Humble Weekly Bundle focuses on Relic, with a load of Dawn of War, Space Marine, and Company of Heroes games depending on how much you fancy paying. CoH is good too.
]]>The Western Front isn't as quiet as you may have heard from other sources but the Eastern Front is almost certainly a great deal louder. That's what Company of Heroes 2 would have you believe at any rate, with a flashy new engine and a great deal of clamour presenting its conflict. But does the long-awaited sequel add anything more than enormous flurries and drifts of snow? I donned my thermal underpants and went to war.
]]>It's a dark time to be a mulitplayer server. From the day you're born, you're living on borrowed time, and that goes double if any sort of sequel has your cushy spot on the rack in its sights. Which brings us to the original Company of Heroes. It's coming up on its seventh birthday, Company of Heroes 2 is about to drop a fresh blanket of powder on the hot summer months, and a sudden publisher shift threw everything out of whack. It is, in other words, a prime candidate for the big server farm in the sky. But hark, against all odds, there is hope. Relic's keeping its relics up and running by switching services. So long, apparent Aztec wind deity Quazal. Hello, Steamworks.
]]>One of the many unhappy aspects of the death (sort of - the name still exists and I wouldn't be terribly surprised to see it return in some form later on) of THQ is that it had several projects really very close to completion when the axe fell. Foremost, perhaps, of those were Metro: Last Light and snow-bound WW2 strategy game Company of Heroes 2, but fortunately (we hope) both have found new homes. Metro's with Koch, and Company of Heroes 2 is with SEGA, as is all of Relic - making the house of hedgehog, who also own the Creative Assembly, an unlikely bastion of real-time strategy.
COH2 has a new release date - later than planned but not very far away. It is... Read the rest of this entry..
Nah, only joshing. It's in June this year.
]]>OK, hold onto the floppier parts of your brain, because this is about to get a bit complicated. So remember how THQ went bankrupt and fell into bed with "stalking horse bidder" Clearlake Capital? Well, the primary intent of all that was to keep THQ in one piece while dealing with that nasty little "having basically no money" thing, but - at the 11th hour - there was a twist. Creditors decided THQ's all-or-nothing sales approach wasn't fair to them (it'd probably pull in less money, after all), and a US bankruptcy court judge agreed. So now THQ's gone from monolithic one-gulp meal to easily chopped up buffet, and rumor has it that a number of major players are interested in various series, games, and franchises.
]]>Company of Heroes 2 is coming along marvelously, but let's be honest here: it's not exactly the departure one might expect from the company of game developers that made the brilliantly daring leap from Dawn of War 1 to Dawn of War 2. Instead, we're getting more of what we loved, but with small tweaks, a heaping mountain of snow, and the sobering realization that it's apparently not a good idea to joyride multi-ton tanks across nearly opaque films of ice. During an interview with RPS, however, game director Quinn Duffy said that Company of Heroes definitely isn't stuck in a tiny, World-War-II-shaped box. In the future, he excitedly explained, the series could potentially go "anywhere."
]]>Last week I got to sit down and make my hands do things in Relic's next strategy game, the Eastern Front-set World War II war of men that is Company of Heroes 2. While previously we've been shown frozen landscapes with dramatic new snow effects, this time I got thrown into the mud.
I was in a war, you know. A big war, with explosions and tanks and dug-outs and men with flamethrowers and men with mortars and men with machine guns and men with rocket-propelled grenades. It was awful. So I'm only too happy to go back to it.
In my couple of hours with Company of Heroes 2, I swiftly established that it is very much the sequel to Company of Heroes. Perhaps more so than I'd been expecting, given the action-RPG stylings of Dawn of War 2 was a sharp turn to the left from Dawn of War 1's tried and tested real-time strategising. Company of Heroes is Real War though, so a careful sticking to strategic roots is to be expected.
]]>Once, I thought there was at least some cold, profit-maximizing business precision that guided whatever awfulness-seeking missile explodes games into not-great movies, but now I'm not even sure of that anymore. I mean, don't get me wrong: Company of Heroes is a work of absolute RTS brilliance, but it's not exactly a household name. And yeah, much as I think my most brilliant tactical masterpieces - for instance, a nuanced little number I like to call TANKS EVERYWHERE - are worth their own movie adaptations, the game's brand of top-down contemplaction doesn't exactly make for the best big screen material. Then again, this one's direct-to-DVD, so I guess that solves that. But obviously, making the leap to a new medium required Company of Heroes to take some liberties. For instance, when I say "making the leap," I mean that literally. Across the top of a train. Like Indiana Jones. See for yourself after the break.
]]>Update: I got in touch with the Humble Bundle folks to find out more about how this out-of-nowhere partnership came about. See what they had to say after the break.
Original: I was incredibly tempted to begin this post with a joke about how the charity slider on this Humble Bundle is redundant, because THQ is already basically a charity. That would be mean, though, so I opted to-- oops, I already did it. Hm. Shame backspace was never invented. Anyway, the latest bundle of densely packaged humility puts the spotlight on a decidedly non-indie THQ, but oh well. Indie's a pretty terrible word when it's used to write off great games because they weren't coded by a half-person team in a garage-bedroom constantly beset by subarctic winds and ravenous wolverines. So, right then, let's take a look inside.
]]>Could it really be that Relic are at last working on some manner of follow-up to their very well-received and very well-realised World War II RTS Company of Heroes? It could, claims PC Gamer's print edition, claims Kotaku, claims VG247. I cannot verify this, but on this slowest of slow news days I shall report it nonetheless. There are no details because this is mere rumour, but though PCG are in the habit of eating live babies they aren't generally in the habit of being scurrilous, so let's hope they're on the money here.
]]>Oh, old man Company of Heroes, so good to see you again. Pull a comfy chair up to the fire and tell us another war story. It must hurt, having seen your younger, free to pay brother pass away so unexpectedly last year, but at least we've still got you. And what's that? You're not ready to go gently into that good night yourself yet? You have a healthy new patch laden with six extra maps and a bewildering array of balance changes? Excellent.
]]>Relic are meanies! Meanies! They go and make an exciting-sounding MMO-esque follow-up to Company of Heroes, complete with persistent online characters and ranks, and then they only go and restrict it to China. Meanies!
Oh, wait. They've just revealed a way for us Western-types to have a crack at it, and for free too. Cuddlies!
]]>The second expandalone (YES I SAID THE DEVIL-WORD) for Relic's sumptuous World War II RTS hit our excited PCs late last week. I duly celebrated Easter by killing a lot of men in it. Is it the meaty expansion we've been praying for, or money-grabbing tokenism? My hammer of ultra-judgement falls on it below...
]]>1UP are reporting some interesting tactics by Relic to get into the piracy-warped Chinese games market with the most excellent Company Of Heroes. Apparently they intend to turn the game into an “'experience for online gamers where players will be able to build their character up from private to general through new multiplayer cooperative missions, gameplay modes, and player-versus-player combat’ in a persistent RTS. Presumably, they have a quirky pay-to-play plan to match.”
]]>I somehow missed this in my earlier web-dredging, but there's now a Company Of Heroes: Opposing Fronts demo available for your downloading pleasure. The WWII RTS beast weighs in at a hormonal 1.92gb, or 137 Peggles. The demo contains the tutorial and the first two levels. And by the way, if you've ever played an RTS and not suffered from the experience, then you should play Company Of Heroes. I mean seriously: try it now, it's one of the better ones.
]]>Well, lookie what's gone up on Eurogamer just this minute - it's my review of Company of Heroes: Opposing Fronts, the standalone expansion for what was anyone with a brain's RTS of 2006. Or, arguably, ever.
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