“The encirclement is almost complete, but the amount of devastation wrought on the Germans is immense, almost tragic.” And the impact it should have on the player.

In the mission design document for the Falaise Pocket map, for example, significant attention is given to the theme of the battle. Relic placed a lot of importance on missions evoking the right tone. You look at World War 2 and look at the references, and you look at… all the stuff we gathered, immersing ourselves in it – it was all about trying to capture the tone, and you can’t do that with explicit counters and 400 APM and exact build orders. We were trying to make RTSs experiential as opposed to rote build orders and APM. “It was all the vision and inspiration for the game and trying to contextualise the experience.

“It was all subject matter,” Duffy recollects. It was actually World War 2 itself that drove many of the changes that set the game apart from other RTSs.

And though its inspiration was history, Company of Heroes proved to be extremely forward-facing. Relic was looking for a new game to pitch to THQ – also publishing Dawn of War at the time – and it was clear that World War 2 was in the public milieu, with Saving Private Ryan only a few years old, Band of Brothers still new, and a wave of World War 2 first-person shooters imminent.Īfter Homeworld, Dawn of War and Impossible Creatures, it was a dramatic change to a less fantastical, Earth-bound setting. While an alternate World War 2 with bizarre chimera sounds a bit brilliant, the actual origin of Company of Heroes is a little more down to Earth. “It was set in the ‘30s in an alternate timeline.” “It was originally a continuation from Impossible Creatures,” jokes game director Quinn Duffy, Company of Heroes’ senior designer. We’ve talked four of the original developers into taking a trip down a potholed, tank-lined memory lane with us. 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. It remains one of the most acclaimed RTS games of all time, lavished in 2006 with glowing reviews and heaps of awards. Relic celebrated the game's tenth anniversary this month. 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. 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.

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