Company of Heroes 3 - Missions: Balancing History vs Gameplay

If you've ever wanted a deep dive on how our Mission designers work, you're in luck! Here's a detailed breakdown from Benoit! - JohnT_RE

Overview

My name is Benoit, I’m one of the Mission Designers on Company of Heroes 3. Today I would like to get into a bit more detail about what that means, and how the Mission team plans and builds out the content you’ll get to play. This post today is going to cover how we balance the contrasting demands of representing history and making a fun and interesting experience for players. In the studio we refer to this balance as “Historical Authenticity.” Let’s dig into how Historical Authenticity is approached in each stage of our development.

Phase 1: Research and Exploratory Layout

When doing research for a mission, we’re mindful of a couple vectors:

1. We want to evoke a cool historical moment, but the timescale needs to be adjusted to be something that hits the beats in an hour rather than the literal days and weeks of the war.
   
2. We also use topographical images, maps, and wartime visual resources as a starting point for several of the maps, but again in consideration of our time scale, we are going to compress the distance to bring together as many important geographical elements as possible. A lot of stuff gets squished together to help the player engage with some of the more interesting historical beats of a conflict.
   
3. A focus of Company of Heroes 3 is the destruction of buildings, and a level of urban density is required to really show that off. A lot of historical “Battles of X” would not take place as close to the named cities as we are, but this is an intentional liberty to show off our exciting new tech for presentation!
   

The goal is to drape the mission in an unmistakable texture of these real-world locations and events, and to do so we have to be very selective about what we choose to interpret. Today I’d like to share Anzio with you, made by another of our talented mission designers David M!

First off, here’s a good look at a battle map for the Anzio landing. Note the three points of Allied entry. This kind of thing is a great springboard for map development, as it creates an opportunity to use some of the real-world geography to create an appealing mission space that will be unique to the map.

When adapted for the Anzio pitch, the map ends up looking something like…

This! You’ll notice right away that the orientation has been adjusted. Some important lessons we’ve learned through the history of the series is that the player has a natural inclination to push up! 

You’ll also notice that the player entries, depicted as boots, only cover the lower entry points. The Northwest landing is far enough away from the other starts that it serves as a good way to “checkpoint” player progress, so a secondary objective is proposed here that will give the player resources and allied support to help them make the final push.

You might have noticed that running through the center of the map is a rail line and a mysterious marker called “Annie.” One of the exciting parts of this research phase is you learn about unique weapons and tactics of the war, including a massive rail based long-range gun lovingly named “Anzio Annie” by the allied forces.

The appeal of novel technology has a few hooks that make it deeply important to our game. Firstly, we’re ultimately a creative reinterpretation of the events of the Italian theatre, with our players taking the role of the military powers and exercising whatever strategy they wish. This means at their discretion, they can utilize anything they can conceivably have built or captured. This makes Annie a significant attractor! Who doesn’t want to capture (and later use) a piece of weaponry that huge!

Secondarily, this presents a natural opportunity to make a unique component of the mission that will make it interesting and memorable, standing out against other missions in the same geographical area.

In summary, the layout was built to evoke the multiple pronged landings of Anzio, in such a way to facilitate a well-placed secondary objective in a linear push up the countryside. Mission designer David also knew that he wanted Anzio Annie to play a strong role not simply in the mission, but outside the mission to mark this area of the campaign as unique and unlike any other. 

Phase 2: Greyblocking the Exploratory Layout

At this point, we’ve only ever seen the mission layout as the image above. It’s been reviewed and well considered by a number of people, but it’s just not the same in terms of understanding the actual space and how it’ll appear to the user. The best way to verify our plans and layout is to get it in game! At this stage, a Mission designer is taking a flat grey piece of terrain and molding it very intentionally to mimic the layout they have proposed. To accomplish this, we often take the image we drafted and turn it into a simple texture, which we superimpose on the terrain in the map.

It’s important in this stage that we keep things as loose and as light on artistic elements as possible. A lot of things are going to get ironed out in this stage as simply not working or needing changes, and it’s always relatively simple for a mission designer to go in and re-sculpt a flat grey space than it will be to suddenly need to move hundreds of art objects.

Already in this phase, some issues were emerging. As we move into the next phase, you may notice significant changes made to the position of the rail line, as well as explorations of trench structures to the East.

Phase 3: Incorporating Art and Playtesting

So we’ve had some opportunities to test out the size of the space and call out some obvious problems/address them at a point where it’s easy. Now it’s finally time for Art to step in and make the greybox pass slightly less grey and slightly less boxy. While we in Missions have done research into events, tactics, and topography we can represent in game to make exciting missions, it’s the art team that has been researching more down-to-earth details like the ways in which the German defenders might arrange trenches and sandbags, how to represent some of our trickier terrain features, and what kind of structures and houses make sense in areas of the map.

As they come in, it becomes a process of give and take based on the encounter and tactical needs of missions, and historic and geographical flourishes to help characterize the space as rooted in Italy during WW2.

This is ultimately another way that we strive for “Historical Authenticity.” This give and take will ultimately produce something even further from the actual history, but with elements of research that help evoke the history.

It is also at this time that unique issues emerge when trying to represent Anzio Annie with an eye for accuracy. Paraphrased with permission from the designer of this mission, David M!

Finding a way to effectively use Anzio Annie was a challenge. Initially Annie was only a side objective, it would fire on the beach and then begin rolling along the tracks trying to leave the mission area to escape. That's more in line with the history.

There were a few problems with that though. The gun can't shoot while it's moving, which means that it's not actually a threat to the player. If the player catches up to it early then the objective is over and the gun effectively played no role in the mission. If the player doesn't manage to catch up to it, it may as well not have been in the mission at all.

I scrapped the movement and escaping aspects of the objective and turned Anzio Annie into a big stationary gun in the town. It provides a constant threat to the player by firing, and the player will be able to actually capture and see it. It's a bit less of an historically accurate representation of what happened with the railway guns around Anzio, but provides a better gameplay experience. - David M, CoH 3 Mission Designer

As you can see, our ultimate goal is to serve an exciting moment to moment experience for the player, and sometimes we have to make difficult decisions that err us on one side or the other. For the most part, we have chosen to make decisions that serve the player experience. You’ll probably see this a lot throughout the game, and I hope you do so with understanding to how difficult it is to balance two conflicting goals!

Early Pre-Alpha Game Capture of Anzio. Not indicative of final game at launch.

Part 4: Iteration

Moving forward, we enter a loop of playing the mission, gathering feedback from our peers, and tweaking things to make a more balanced and exciting gameplay experience. In this way we are moving further and further away from the historical account, and working more directly to address feedback like:

1. Ensuring there is enough viable cover. It’s very important to the balance of our game mechanics that the player have access to cover. Sometimes you can see this in the way we use tank traps and other pieces of hard, static objects that fit visually if they are placed in the middle of the scene.
   
   
   
2. Introducing gameplay elements at a pace similar to the rate of player production. On several occasions, you will see that we specifically don’t bring in heavy vehicle presence in the beginning of a mission. This is because we often try and have the mission flow mimic the flow of a multiplayer match, where the player starts with basic infantry and techs into their various options. Don’t worry though, there will be exceptions to watch out for!
   
3. Making sure the mission fits the overall campaign progression. The player is going to start a campaign at their smallest and most limited, but that’s going to change over time as they expand companies, gain veterancy, and unlock various Company perks. This creates a satisfying sense of growth for players, but conflicts with more realistic depictions of technological advancement over the course of the war. Missions are tuned against their relative place in the campaign to provide an interesting and engaging challenge appropriate for the strength of the player’s forces at that time.
   

Early Pre-Alpha Game Capture of Anzio. Not indicative of final game at launch.