I've been a Relic fan for longer than I can remember. Homeworld, Dawn of War 1 & 2, CoH 1 & 2 are among the most important games in my life. It really hurts me to see what has become of Relic in the past few years.
I feel terrible for the people caught up in layoffs. But from an organisational perspective, a studio with as little IP and as few releases as Relic can't get away with 2 botched releases in a row. It's especially galling because their community could have and did tell them what was going wrong with these games prior to the release. This was all just so damn predictable.
Relic and Massive were two of my favorite RTS studios but unfortunately they kinda died.
Massive went from ground control 1/2 and World in Conflict to doing pretty poor 3rd person loot shooters for UbiSoft and Relic just did CoH and CoH: Warhammer.
RTS as a genre has died unfortunately it used to be one of the biggest genres in PC gaming but the rise of console gaming and online play seemed to have completely killed it.
It’s now seem more or less relegated to indie games and nostalgia farming (AoE and Homeworld).
And many indie games don’t seem to be able to balance the gameplay well enough. I had pretty big hopes for iron harvest but the balancing is so broken that the game is simply not challenging enough and the maps are often too damn small for any strategic play.
I've been thinking that AI and biological intelligence could work together, as this is going to be the way it is for the rest of human history unless we have like some kind of new dark ages.
So, getting with the program is what I'm talking about. And the program is, generative AIs are going to be everywhere. And we as technologists need to figure out how to make them better.
The console version releases next week. Regardless of how you feel about CoH on a console (personally I think it's another incredibly stupid move on Relic's part) we can only hope that the release will free up resources to fix up CoH3.
But that seems overly optimistic. I will keep playing CoH3 because despite its flaws it's still a fun game. But for now I consider it the next DoW3 and I expect support to be pulled shortly.
Serves them right for going the completely wrong direction with the Dawn of War sequels. (sarcasm)
But really, squad level combat with leveling heroes and skill trees? No, bigger scale! Let me smash companies of Imperial Guards against hordes of xenos.
Anyway, sad to see layoffs at yet another tech outfit.
I feel terrible for the people caught up in layoffs. But from an organisational perspective, a studio with as little IP and as few releases as Relic can't get away with 2 botched releases in a row. It's especially galling because their community could have and did tell them what was going wrong with these games prior to the release. This was all just so damn predictable.