The Greyhound Challenge

Company of Heroes is a pretty complex game when you get down to it.  It’s one of those kinds of games that you can play for a few years and still find out something new about it.  An example of that would be the Goliath, the remote controlled bomb that the Wehrmacht can create from their bunkers.  Most COH retail players are familiar with it and the explosive effects it can have, but not everyone knows that a Goliath can actually camouflage when in heavy cover.  Some players have actually been reported for cheating by others in our retail game for making use of this little known fact. Part of our challenge with a free to play version of the game, Company of Heroes Online, is to make sure that players get a grasp of the finer aspects of the game before they run off to get beaten up badly in a multiplayer game.  Things like using mines and getting familiar with the various upgrades that can make a squad more effective are important for success.  To that end, the design team has been working on various tutorial scenarios, trying out different methods of introducing parts of the game to players in bite-sized pieces. The Greyhound Challenge is one such example of an introduction to Company of Heroes concepts that we are trying out.  It gives the player a limited number of squads, just two M8 Greyhounds and two Engineers, and sets them on the four player map Lorraine.  The goal is to take and hold the three victory points against the specially scripted AI opponents.  If a player loses both of his M8s or the victory points count down in the enemy’s favor, the game ends in defeat.  The goal is to teach a player to become intimately familiar the Greyhound and learn both its strengths and its weaknesses.

Tags: armored-skirts, computer games, designer, designer-shaun, first-game, game, gamers, goliath, heroes, price, programming, retail, saville, wehrmacht