Author: Trafficblast

The Next Star Trek Movie Will Be Helmed By WandaVision Director Matt Shakman

WandaVision director Matt Shakman has been tapped to direct the next installment in Paramount and Bad Robot’s Star Trek film series.

This news comes by way of Deadline, which reports that Shakman’s Star Trek movie is being fast-tracked, with production set to begin next Spring. This is especially surprising news as Star Trek 4 was reportedly canceled as of 2019, but it seems Shakman’s run on WandaVision inspired new interest in the Star Trek film franchise.

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The script for the currently untitled Star Trek movie will be written by Lindsey Beer and Geneva Robertson-Dworet. Previously, it was reported that Legion creator Noah Hawley was set to write and direct the next Star Trek sequel. Before that, The Revenant writer Mark Smith was set to write a script for the Quentin Tarantino Star Trek movie that doesn’t seem to be happening anymore.

Shakman was no stranger to directing before WandaVision — he’s directed episodes of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, Game of Thrones, Fargo, and The Great — but it was the Disney Plus series that seemingly launched him to new heights. Just today, it was announced that WandaVision had picked up 23 Emmy award nominations for Disney Plus, which nabbed a total of 71 nominations.

Deadline reports that Shakman chose to direct this new Star Trek movie over “several other offers” and that Paramount’s selection as him for director was especially pushed hard by the studio’s chair, Emma Watts.

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Watts must be feeling pretty great knowing she backed a director whose Disney Plus series was nominated for nearly two dozen Emmy awards, but only time will tell what this movie turns out to be.

While waiting to learn more about this movie, catch up on all the reporting circling around the fourth Star Trek film from Paramount. In March of 2020, Simon Pegg casted doubt on the future of a fourth Star Trek movie, stating that “Star Trek movies don’t make Marvel money.” Pegg said this a year after it was reported that Star Trek 4 was canceled after its director left to direct a Game of Thrones prequel pilot.

Meanwhile, Quentin Tarantino was sharing his vision of an R-rated Star Trek movie. Unfortunately, for those curious of what that might look like on screen, the director said in 2020 that he just doesn’t think he’s “going to direct it,” despite thinking “it’s a good idea.”

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Wesley LeBlanc is a freelance news writer and guide maker for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter @LeBlancWes.

Company Of Heroes 3 Combines RTS And Turn-Based Gameplay To Give You Full Control Of The Mediterranean Campaign

A lot of the gameplay in Company of Heroes 3 is what you’d expect. It’s the return of Relic Entertainment’s brand of World War II real-time strategy, requiring tight command of squads and vehicles that’s more about directing your soldiers to cover and executing flanking maneuvers than fast movement, tons of units, and lots of mouse clicks. What’s striking about the next entry in Relic’s long-running strategy series is that it’s basically two games in one, with a whole additional turn-based strategy game on top of the RTS. That new second half works to give you more control over the flow of the war effort–and lets you essentially create a single-player campaign of your own.

We recently spent around four hours playing an early preview build of Company of Heroes 3 on PC, which gave a look at how Relic’s return to World War II will function. It contains a lot of alterations that give you greater command of the battlefield, both squad-by-squad and on a much larger scale. The changes make Company of Heroes 3’s single-player mode feel pretty enormous, while giving you a huge amount of control over how your campaign plays out.

CoH 3 puts you in control of the Allied campaign in the Mediterranean, a portion of the war Relic says has been neglected in media over the years, and which contains a lot of lesser-known but no-less-heroic stories. Our play session had us pushing up from the coastal city of Naples in an attempt to capture the mountain cathedral stronghold of Montecassino. That campaign through coastal towns was handled on the Dynamic Campaign Map, which is reminiscent of what you might see in big turn-based titles like the Civilization series. It shows towns, roads, and your military forces almost like pieces on a game board, giving you a broad-strokes idea of how the war is playing out and operating as each side takes turns moving forces and attacking different locations.

The campaign map gives you options for how to direct the war effort according to your strategy. As you capture towns, you increase the resources at your disposal and the territory you control. Those resources can be spent on deploying different kinds of military units: Companies are your main forces and can be moved around the battlefield to engage other forces and come in varieties such as special forces groups, tank squads, and paratroopers. Detachments are smaller units such as .40-caliber machine gun squads or medic groups, and can support your companies with their specializations, like healing them or providing artillery support.

The turn-based map gives you a top-level view of everything going on in the war, allowing you to create supply lines for your troops and disrupt them for your enemy, capture airfields to bomb enemy positions, and make plans for how you want to take on tougher foes or assault important locations. You can use bombers and detachments to soften up an enemy company, for instance, and then move your own ground forces in to engage them once their power has been reduced.

Combat between smaller units happens on the campaign map, and you can even destroy groups of soldiers with smart plays in the turn-based game. But for bigger, more important, or more nuanced engagements, you’re pulled into more intimate RTS missions. These battles happen when you attack specific towns, take on side objectives, and hit important moments in the campaign, but there are also smaller “skirmish” RTS missions created any time one of your companies meets with an enemy one. It’s in these RTS missions where you’ll see more of Company of Heroes’ classic gameplay.

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This is also where a lot of the dynamism of the turn-based game starts to have serious effects on your RTS battles; you can choose when, where, and how to fight the enemy, and while you might hit certain chokepoint missions in the campaign like big historical battles, you’re not necessarily required to fight every engagement that really happened. And your choices are reflected back in the choices of the enemy–allow a company to retreat after kicking their garrison out of an airfield, for example, and you’ll be giving them time to heal up and gain experience to become a more formidable foe later on. How you choose to fight through the Mediterranean determines what battles you’ll face and what story you’ll ultimately tell.

“The distance between landing on a beach and reaching the mission objective is a heck of a lot of distance in terms of the kinds of challenges that commanders had, the kinds of things they needed to be concerned with,” lead campaign designer Andrew Denault explained in an interview with GameSpot. “And so for us, it was how can we get that, in terms of gameplay, in front of the player in an interesting way, to generate some fantastic connective tissue between missions that focuses on the players manipulation of their companies? Am I in supply? Is my company in good health? Et cetera, et cetera.”

“We wanted to widen the gameplay angle for the player, rather than seeing the gameplay experience as a linear number of missions with interesting cinematics and then pulse-pounding RTS and great action and all the cinema that the player’s accustomed to,” he said. “We wanted to expand on that and allow the player to fill in the blanks with regards to some of the narrative.”

The story of your campaign through the Mediterranean is also determined by how you approach different objectives and what you value in your campaign. As you play, you’ll be contacted by three different sub-commanders who serve as advisers, each with a different general agenda. They provide you with their own ideas and battle plans as the campaign progresses, while also bringing your attention to side missions that they think are important. The American general on your team might try to send you to take out a high-level German officer, while the OSS operative wants you to help Italian Partisans resisting German occupation on the ground.

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You won’t have the time or resources to take on all their missions, and often each one’s view of the best option to meet an objective is at odds with the others–so who you listen to and what you choose to do will shape how your campaign plays out. That’s controlled by a system Denault called the Event Director, which pays attention to your behavior and actions, logs whose advice you listen to, and makes tweaks to the campaign as it’s playing out.

So you’ll have big RTS missions like Montecassino, which is a major point in the story, but it’ll be informed by smaller missions you play along the way to do things like build a Partisan information network or capture a nearby airfield. Then, as you approach Montecassino, you’re given options based on what you’ve done. Should you bomb the position to weaken the enemy forces there? Should you fly recon to see what you’re up against, but risk a plane? Should you send in Partisans to learn about the situation, and the possibility of civilians in the area? What you do determines how the battle plays out and can influence what information you have so you can make better battlefield decisions.

“The Event Director will generate events that [the sub-commanders] will attach to and say, ‘Hey, that’s important to me. You should totally do that. You should focus on shoring up your supply lines here. You should really capture another seaport on the east coast. These partisans are in trouble. You should be focusing on supporting the partisans and the resistance effort,'” Denault said. “And so the storytelling, of course, is going to be a huge component of our missions, but a lot of the story is going to be living in the map. We’ve used this terminology in studio of a living world, and the concept that the player can be moving from mission space to mission space, triggering not only the more dynamic skirmish missions that don’t have as much story encapsulated in them. But we’re still leading up to these moments on the campaign map with these events, constantly giving the player an idea of what’s going on in the world, that the conflict wasn’t really just about these epic battles, that there were smaller stories to be told. And so I think it’s really us focusing on building up this connective tissue between the missions.”

As Denault mentioned, the journey from the beach to the objective was a long one in our preview. Fighting through occupied territory on the campaign map can be a long, arduous process, with a lot that can go wrong. Take the most obvious path toward an enemy position and you might hit landmines used to block off a road, or wander right past a hidden machine gun nest that rips into your company before you can get clear. Those strategic missteps have consequences, too–when you inevitably join an RTS mission with a damaged company, you might find your soldiers with lower health, or your squads spawn with fewer soldiers than when you’re at full strength.

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Fans of the Company of Heroes franchise will immediately recognize many of the elements of CoH 3’s RTS gameplay, though; while there are a lot of big changes to how the campaign flows to make it more dynamic, those changes are always leading to the tough infantry and vehicle battles the franchise is known for. CoH 3’s RTS gameplay draws a lot from the first Company of Heroes, with base-building and resource management requirements on most maps. You’ll want to take territory to increase your resources, so you can create more units of various types. The longer your squads stay on the battlefield, the more experienced and stronger they become. Taking cover, flanking, and using abilities and different types of units to destroy cover or level buildings is also essential for victory, and Relic has amped up the amount of destruction you can wreak on its maps. You can also use a new tactical breach-and-clear ability to send your squads in to clear out enemies garrisoned in structures to take away defensive advantages.

Even the skirmish RTS missions we played were pretty tough, punishing you for sending squads out into the open and forcing you to find creative ways to deal with enemy vehicles or entrenched forces. Adapting to changing battlefield conditions is part of the feel from past Company of Heroes games, but in CoH 3, Relic has worked to make the game a little more approachable even if you’re not a seasoned vet. Apart from the dynamic campaign map, the most obvious new change is the Tactical Pause feature, which allows you to stop the action at any time in an RTS mission. With the game paused, you can catch your breath and assess the situation, and even take a minute to queue up actions for your squads to move them around the battlefield and send them to key positions.

You don’t have to use the new pause feature, but it does give you opportunities in RTS missions to avert disaster–and it allows you to be a little smarter in your strategies. So much of Company of Heroes 3 is about outthinking and out-positioning the enemy, so the pause feature often gives you a chance to look around big mission maps and move your squads to smarter places to fight. Things can change quickly, so you still have to be on your toes, but the tactical pause gives you the opportunity to handle the battle more intelligently, especially on big maps with multiple objectives. Of course, though, there’s no tactical pause in multiplayer, so don’t expect to force other players to freeze while you figure out how to counter their Panzers.

Even over just a few hours, though, Company of Heroes 3 felt remarkably large, expansive, and adaptive. Relic says it’s designing the game with its focus on providing tools for CoH 3’s sandbox, which means that there are a lot more moving parts in the game at any given time, and that battles will feel different from one another because of all the elements that could potentially be in play. From what we’ve seen, CoH 3 captures the intensity that has made the Company of Heroes franchise popular among RTS fans, while adding a lot of new ideas that provide plenty of different, additional strategy gameplay to the mix. This feels like an enormous, dynamic strategy title, and it’ll be interesting to see just how the Mediterranean campaign plays out when we’re given full control over the war effort.

Look for Company of Heroes 3 on PC sometime in 2022.

Xbox Update Gives Parents More Control Oer Kids’ Spending

A new update for Xbox consoles is aimed at giving parents more control over their child’s spending habits. With the new update, you’ll be able to add money to your child’s account directly through the app, which they can then spend as they’d like on games or in-game items. The new settings can be adjusted through the Xbox Family Settings app on iOS and Android.

According to the Xbox blog, you can view your child’s account balance and spending history. You can also turn on an “Ask to Buy” feature that will let your kid request a purchase that they’d like, and then you can either approve (and add funds) or deny the request. The blog also suggests parents may want to integrate this system into things like a reward structure for finishing chores or doing well in school.

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The increments shown for adding money to your child’s account are $10, $15, $25, $50, $75, and $100. The family settings app also allows you to manage settings like creating child accounts, setting screen time limits, and managing who your kids can play with online.

Meanwhile, we recently got an early look at Xbox future firmware with the latest Xbox Insider update, which addresses an issue with Quick Resume among other various fixes.

Deadpool Finally Crosses Over To The MCU For Free Guy Trailer Reaction

Ryan Reynolds has released a new video of himself as Deadpool, talking about the actor’s favorite subject: Ryan Reynolds. The nearly five-minute clip has Deadpool teaming up with actor-director Taika Waititi as as Korg from Thor: Ragnarok and Avengers: Endgame doing a reaction video for Reynold’s upcoming Free Guy, which is due in theaters on August 13.

The video, which Reynolds uploaded to both Twitter and YouTube, has a teasing caption describing it as “two members of the MCYouTube react to the upcoming film Free Guy.” While this framing is certain to drive plenty of wild speculation–it’s Deadpool’s first official crossover appearance in the Marvel Cinematic Universe–it is worth tempering future rumors and speculation by stating that while Waititi and Reynolds do both star in Free Guy, they’re in completely different roles. Check out the video below to enjoy all the meta goodness, which mocks the movie’s repeated delays, tropes of movie criticism, and Disney+.

Free Guy stars Reynolds as Guy, an NPC in a violent video game who becomes aware of the world around him and breaks free of his NPC life. Waititi plays Antoine, the game’s publisher who wants to shut down the entire game due to the ensuing chaos caused by Guy no longer sticking to the script. The film also stars Jodie Comer (Killing Eve) and Joe Keery (Stranger Things).

The movie is directed by Shawn Levy (Stranger Things), and the first trailer arrived in December 2019. It will finally hit theaters on August 13.

Wheel of Time Getting a Movie Trilogy Penned By X-Men: First Class Writer

X-Men: First Class and Thor writer, Zack Stentz, has been tapped to write a script for the first movie in a new Wheel of Time trilogy.

According to The Hollywood Reporter, Stentz will write a script for the first movie of three called Age of Legends. News of this Wheel of Time trilogy comes at a time when fans of the book series are still waiting for the first season of Amazon’s Wheel of Time TV series, which has already been greenlit for a second season, to premiere.

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“I’ve been a fan of Robert Jordant’s work for many years, and it is especially his allusions to the origins and backstory of The Wheel of Time that I have always found most intriguing,” Stentz said in a statement. “I’m excited to be bringing this era Robert Jordan conceptualized to life.”

Age of Legends will be produced by Larry Mondragon and Rick Selvage of iwot productions alongside Ted Field and Justin Smith of Radar Pictures. James Leon, Eva Longoria, and Mike McGuiness are set to executive produce the movie.

A studio or distributor for the movie has not yet been decided, according to THR, but the movie is set to “complement the storylines” that will be featured in the upcoming Amazon series.

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While Age of Legends isn’t necessarily the name of a book in Robert Jordan’s fantasy series, anyone familiar with the series will recognize the title. That’s because the Age of Legends is a period of time within the lore of The Wheel of Time.

THR’s report states that the movie “will be set several millennia before the time of the books in a futuristic utopia powered by a magical force shared by men and women known as the One Power.” When an evil is released to the world, the men using the One Power begin to destroy the planet.

A small group of women fight back against this evil as the world’s last hope of survival.

While waiting for Age of Legends, check out this group photo of the Amazon Wheel of Time cast uniting for the first time and then read this story about how the series’ showrunner posted a photo of Rand al’Thor on set. Catch up on everything you need to know about Wheel of Time after that.

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Wesley LeBlanc is a freelance news writer and guide maker for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter @LeBlancWes.

Company of Heroes 3 Playable Demo Available Today as Relic Wants Your Feedback During Development

Before any battle plans were even drawn up for Company of Heroes 3, Relic flew a small group of series veterans into Vancouver to get their feedback on what the next installment should be. Thus, this long-awaited sequel has been a sort of collaboration between the devs and fans since basically the very beginning. It was players they selected who voted overwhelmingly for the Mediterranean theater as the setting, and gave them detailed feedback on the playable armies to make sure they were fun on the field and felt the way both history and RTS enthusiasts felt they should.

Starting today, you can be a part of that process. Even I was raising an eyebrow when I heard Company of Heroes 3 was being announced in summer 2021 for a late 2022 release. But all that lead time is so Relic can put some unfinished slices of the campaign, skirmish, and PvP modes on our plates and collect our feedback on everything from the strategic layer to the match pacing.

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LEND LEASE

This isn’t your typical Early Access situation. You’re not going to be charged for it. Relic has kept an eye on what their sister studio Amplitude has been up to with Humankind, and we can expect something similar to their OpenDev scenarios. Each preview will be a self-contained slice focusing on a particular aspect or aspects of the final product that will be available for a limited time. The devs didn’t give us a specific roadmap, but they did say future slices might focus more on PvP than the one you can play right now.

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And what does this slice consist of? Well, it’s a fairly sizable portion of the Italian campaign that begins with capturing an airport to stop the Axis from bombing the city of Naples, and builds up to a climactic and iconic battle at the ancient abbey of Monte Cassino. In between, you’ll be sending elite sniper teams to assassinate a Nazi officer, rescuing Italian resistance fighters under siege by the Wehrmacht, and planning your campaign across a strategic map that rivals Total War in detail.

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The American and British forces will be playable. You can actually hire a mix of divisions from both nations in the same campaign, though you’ll have to pick a specific company to lead the charge in each RTS mission. Each nation has two divisions to pick from, including the U.S. Airborne – who can now actually drop behind enemy lines on the campaign map if you have air superiority – and the Indian Artillery fighting for the British, bringing some new cultures and nationalities to the fight.

GOING IN HOT

It’s a pretty sizable chunk. I had a hard time completing it in a single day the first time through, and there are enough different ways to make your way up the Road to Rome that it’s worth repeating a few times. There are some planned features that haven’t made it in yet, like the partisan units and the full integration of the character-driven story. But Relic wants our feedback on basically everything they’ve put on display so far. The campaign map, unit balancing, new features like tactical pause and breaching – check out our preview for more – you name it.

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All you need to do to get started is to head over to CompanyofHeroes.com and sign up. Optimization and graphics settings are usually one of the last things to get nailed down before a game releases, so this preview doesn’t necessarily reflect how the final game will perform on your rig of choice. As such, Relic recommends at least an Intel/AMD 4 core/8 thread CPU running at 4.00 GHz or higher, 16 GB of RAM, and a GeForce GTX 1070 or equivalent with 8GB VRAM for the ideal experience.

For more on Company of Heroes 3, check out all the ways it’s taking after Company of Heroes 1 instead of the sequel.

Company of Heroes 3: The First Preview

My U.S. Airborne Company isn’t having their best day of the war, as a strafing run from the Luftwaffe forces us out of our strongest position in the middle of the map and a pair of panzers starts to roll right up our right flank. We’ve been sent here from Company of Heroes 3’s dynamic campaign map to capture an airfield, which would not only stop these attacks from above that keep plaguing us in every mission, but allow us to drop behind enemy lines or resupply by air. Even in its pre-alpha state, this dust-up in Southern Italy shows off a spectacular, layered warscape where small decisions made at the unit level can echo all the way up to a grand, strategic theater.

Company of Heroes 2 toyed with the idea of doing a dynamic campaign map in the Ardennes Assault expansion, but Company of Heroes 3 has gone all out. We don’t have a lot of footage of the campaign map yet, but I got to play around with it quite a bit and I’d compare the scope and complexity to something like Total War. Companies and specific leaders level up and gain new abilities. Special, optional missions like an assassination or extraction will pop up from time to time. Capturing a town and breaking an enemy supply line can be a clutch play. There are even new unit types called detachments who can fight each other in auto-resolved battles on the campaign map, or join a full-fledged Company as a roster modifier in real-time battles if they’re close by. Small skirmishes between detachments allow much more strategic decision-making without bogging down the pace with dozens of RTS missions per turn.

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On the battlefield, Company of Heroes 3 feels more evolutionary than revolutionary. In some ways, it’s actually a bit of a throwback. Based on fan feedback, Relic wanted to create a game with an emphasis on infantry and pacing closer to CoH1, as opposed to CoH2 which could escalate into a giant tank war pretty quickly. The intimacy of war this series has always been so good at portraying is all here in higher detail than ever, with heartbreakingly realistic animations and unit calls. However, the carnage unfolds across a generally much brighter, more colorful backdrop of Italy and North Africa.

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Modern tech has allowed Company of Heroes 3 to really amp up the destruction from an artillery barrage or armored push. Driving a tank right through a building might be a viable way to smash an enemy hard point, and a soaring villa can be rendered into a cascade of falling plaster and roof tiles by artillery. Relic hasn’t decided yet how they’re going to handle things like damage from falling debris, and it may work differently in single-player and multiplayer modes.

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Many infantry squads can also now breach buildings that are garrisoned by enemy units, kicking the door down in proper war movie fashion and tossing in a grenade before storming it. This allowed me to play a lot more aggressively in infantry vs infantry skirmishes, which feels great overall. It avoids those stalemates where you basically have to wait until you have the firepower to completely level everything to make any progress.

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Vehicle combat hasn’t been left by the wayside either, though. Tanks now have a side armor value in addition to front and rear, which makes tank duels a lot more interesting. I was able to take out that panzer duo from earlier with some hastily-deployed light tanks just by dancing around their flanks and making sure I always had my hardened front end pointed their way. It takes a lot of micro, but Company of Heroes 3 even has new ways to deal with that.

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Tactical Pause lets you freeze a battle in place in single-player and issue a chain of multiple orders to your units, which will be executed to the best of their ability when you resume. This feature won’t be available in competitive multiplayer, and it was described to me almost like training wheels for newer players. But even as someone who has been playing RTSes for most of my life, I really appreciated the more thoughtful playstyle it enables. Late game, Company of Heroes can really get too busy to follow everything that’s going on. And especially with how good this one looks, I’d rather pause, give everyone their marching orders, and then be able to zoom in and watch the action rather than zooming all over the map constantly to put out fires.

You can check out the Company of Heroes 3 pre-alpha preview on PC for yourself starting today! And for more, check out our article on how Company of Heroes 3 compares to Company of Heroes 1 and 2. And for everything else, stick with IGN!

Company of Heroes 3: Why Relic Wants to Make it More Like the Original

When I first got a look at Company of Heroes 3, one of the first things Relic brought up was the decision to make the new game more like the original Company of Heroes than its sequel. Company of Heroes 2 took a lot of chances, and for my part, I really enjoyed it – especially the excellent Ardennes Assault expansion. But it definitely wasn’t as universally beloved as the first, and I can understand why.

First off, Company of Heroes 3 is mostly focused on infantry warfare. Appropriate to the Italian theater in which much of it is set, you won’t see matches quickly ramp up to giant tank battles that trivialize other elements of your roster. This isn’t to say vehicles aren’t getting any love. Tanks, for instance, now have a separate side armor value apart from that of their front and rear, which opens up new tactical possibilities. But the addition of new tools like dedicated bazooka squads and more limited availability of fuel create new niches for light vehicles and keep the riflemen, engineers, and machine gunners at the core of the action.

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BOOTS ON THE GROUND

In service to this philosophy, Company of Heroes 3 will have a greater diversity of infantry units than the series ever has, representing many different tactical roles and the wide array of nationalities that participated in the Italian campaign. I was particularly excited to see the Nepalese Gurkhas, one of the most fabled units of the war, finally making their appearance. And while I didn’t get to play with them directly, it’s also been confirmed that we can gain access to Italian partisan units, representing the local paramilitary fighters who resisted the fascist regimes of Hitler and Mussolini.

Infantry have new tools to take on a wider array of battlefield roles, too. Breaching will allow your squads to kick the door down on a garrisoned building and chuck a grenade in to dislodge or destroy the defenders turtled up inside. In the slice I got to play, I really enjoyed the dynamism this adds and the way it rewards aggressive infantry doctrines, when previously my only option might have been to set up in my own unoccupied building and exchange ineffective fire with the enemy until one of us brought in enough heavy hardware to blow the whole front line to smithereens.

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BASE OF OPERATIONS

Base building is also back, and it works roughly the same way it did in the first Company of Heroes. You won’t be fiddling around with mines or supply depots like StarCraft – your resources still come from capturing and holding points across the map. But you will need to build specific structures to tech up and unlock better units. At least, in skirmish and multiplayer battles that’s the case. There are plenty of scripted missions in the campaign that have you trying to complete objectives with a pre-made force as well.

Infantry and vehicles will also be a bit more resilient than they were in Company of Heroes 2. You’re less likely to see a tank go up in flames from one lucky hit. Infantry squads in good cover can hold their position better until reinforcements arrive even if they’re under heavy machine gun fire and being strafed from the air – as long as those reinforcements get there quickly. The Eastern Front was known for its horrifying body count and human wave tactics, but Company of Heroes 3 is trying to bring back a more triumphant and heroic mood that echoes Band of Brothers, Fury, or even Tarantino’s ahistorical Inglourious Basterds. And that’s reflected in everything from the diverse voice acting, to the powerful score, to the bold use of color.

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ITALIAN ADVENTURE

The one area where Company of Heroes 3 takes more after Company of Heroes 2, and specifically the Ardennes Assault expansion, is its dynamic campaign map. The level of detail in the slice we’ve played makes it look almost like Total War: World War II. Similar to Ardennes Assault, you can capture regions to cut off an enemy’s escape route or deny them access to supplies.

But there are dozens of new challenges and opportunities too, like capturable ports and airfields, destructible bridges, and characters such as the Italian partisan leader who will have their own goals and react to the decisions you make. Bombing the ancient abbey of Monte Cassino, as the Allies did historically, might get you to Rome faster and with fewer casualties. But the locals certainly won’t be too thrilled about it, and may be less willing to grant you their bonuses going forward.

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From what I’ve seen and played so far, I think Relic is on the right track returning to the core of what made the first Company of Heroes one of the best RTS games of all time. I might miss a couple things about the sequel. Even if it wasn’t the most popular feature, I enjoyed having to battle the elements at the same time I was battling the enemy. But I love my aggressive, mobile infantry armies so I’m excited to have more tools to facilitate that playstyle, and a tech pace that will keep it relevant for more of each match.

For more on Company of Heroes 3, you can check out our first preview and a breakdown of the announcement trailer.

Company of Heroes 3 Announced

After a cryptic countdown zooming in on the beaches of Italy, Relic Entertainment and Sega have announced Company of Heroes 3, due out in late 2022 for PC. The third installment in their acclaimed action RTS covering the Second World War will be set in the Mediterranean theater – seemingly with a particular focus on North Africa and Italy. In many ways, it’s a return to the style of the original Company of Heroes, but also includes several of its own innovations like tactical pause and a fully dynamic campaign map.

Commanding the Allied invasion of Italy in Company of Heroes 3’s campaign may look more familiar to players of Total War than the past games in the series. CoH has played with the idea of a dynamic campaign map before with the Ardennes Assault expansion, which I really enjoyed, but Relic’s David Littman has described this map as Ardennes Assault “times a thousand.” See the cinematic announcement trailer above.

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In addition to being able to cut off enemy supplies by capturing territory, you can take airfields to gain close air support in RTS missions (or deny it to your enemies), bombard enemy positions with offshore warships, and fight auto-resolved skirmishes with smaller units called detachments, which play a supporting role to full-fledged companies. The campaign is guided by a character-driven story that involves local partisan fighters for the first time, and comes together as a mix of more traditional RTS missions and scripted set pieces like Avelino and Monte Cassino.

TAKING STOCK

In single player, Company of Heroes 3 is introducing a new Tactical Pause system that lets you freeze the battle and cue up orders for all of your units, before hitting resume to let them play out. While Relic is billing this as a way to ease new players into the experience, even as an RTS veteran, I find it really refreshing. Late into a match of CoH 2, I often found that there was really too much going on for me to be able to pay attention to everything and make good decisions on the fly, so I’d end up abandoning some control points simply so I could focus on others. Tactical Pause lets me really orchestrate things in a satisfying way.

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Breaching is another significant change to the RTS gameplay, which allows an infantry squad to kick down the door of an occupied structure and massacre or kick out any units garrisoning it. This puts a lot more focus on infantry, enables some early game aggression against fortified positions, and stops battles from bogging down into a stalemate that can only be broken with tanks and heavy artillery. But for those who like the scorched earth method, a new destruction system will see churches and villas disintegrate and topple dynamically with realistic physics and sound.

BACK TO BASIC

Overall, Relic considers the first Company of Heroes to be the “Gold Standard” of the series and has taken into account a lot of feedback on its divisive sequel. Old school RTS base building is making a return in Company of Heroes 3, and overall it’s a more infantry-focused game. You won’t ramp up to heavy vehicles quite so fast, and they’ve done away with features like harsh weather being able to sap the health of your troops – though they did mention that the harsh conditions in North Africa might play some kind of different role.

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We’ve got a long wait before we can fully dive into Company of Heroes 3, which is currently slated for a Late 2022 release. But Relic wants to have us along for the ride as they put the finishing touches on it through a series of public previews, the first of which will be available starting today. You can check out a portion of the Italian campaign in single-player, with future previews planned to focus more on PvP.

For more on Company of Heroes 3, check out our first preview coming up on IGN in mere minutes.