ActionTrips' E3 Review

[KON Air]

Another high-profile game that I saw yesterday was Relic's new WWII RTS, Company of Heroes. If you need a short description of it, it's Call of Duty in RTS format. The longer version goes something like this.

The main thing about the demo as far as I'm concerned was the completely destructible environment. Huge chunks of building fall off as tank grenades detonate and basically, the environment feels like a real battlefield. In the words of the Relic designer, "if you run into an obstacle, and you can't get past it, just turn it into a pile of dust and rubble." While this certainly looked impressive I could not help but notice that the high-end machine that the game was running on was choking, like it didn't have enough RAM. Bear in mind however that the game won't be out till the next year, so that could be its redeeming factor. We'll just have to wait and see.

Hmm... never thought about system specs. Oh, whatever.

http://www.actiontrip.com/features/e...ofheroes.phtml

Edit; Doh!... It should have been Hands-on Preview...

[TheDeadlyShoe]

Relic's always been pretty good about scalable games. Perhaps they can even scale down the physics engine if need be; reducing complexity.

I mean it just doesn't seem workable to exactly sync things like debris fall over the net... so with that fuzziness factor you should be able to reduce detail. Well, you could use a seed kinda thing, but I dunno.

[Tranj]

Hmm... never thought about system specs. Oh, whatever.

http://www.actiontrip.com/features/e...ofheroes.phtml

Edit; Doh!... It should have been Hands-on Preview...

You may remember that DoW was choking the then top end machines at E3. Since we don't need to optimize the game for E3 (we get to use killer hardware), we don't waste time optimizing the game until later on. We certainly do profiling to make sure that the features we implement will run in our target spec though.

[Bonnet]

To expand on tranj's point, its pointless and painfull to optomize untill all the bugs are sorted out as well.

[KON Air]

To expand it even more with a single word; Alpha