Company of Heroes 2 beta

[Queequeg]

That's really disappointing.

[Razgovory]

The game does have some good sides.  The winter mechanics are neat, the AI is much better, the graphics are improved and the game has the same excellent sound and voice acting (Well the accents are a bit over the top at times).  I suppose the biggest problem with the game is that doesn't exceed or even equal the previous entry.  So I came away disappointed.   I'd wait till you can find it for under 30 bucks.

[Queequeg]

Do the NKVD really have posh accents in the finished game?  Does Relic understand how Communism works?

[Razgovory]

Do the NKVD really have posh accents in the finished game?  Does Relic understand how Communism works?

No, and no.  Their history is dodgy just like in the first game.  I remember the cutscenes from the first game would show military counters moving across the map, but it was clear the developers had no idea what they meant.

[Queequeg]

Decided to wait, I think.  Really disappointed.  CoH was one of my favorite games from the last decade, and the East Front is obviously one of my many obsessions. 

[Queequeg]

Bought it.

Better than expected.  I think the campaign is a bit offensive, tbh; the American campaign is YAHOO AMERICA Band of Brothers sillyness, while this starts off with a Jewish Soviet officer asking if the war was worth it, which makes him a total fucking bitch; very few Soviet Jewish families survived the war intact.  The portrayal of ethnic Russians in generally seems a bit problematic; some things that really should be heroic are just "meh, we're not real people anyway" stupidity. 

The skirmishes are actually pretty fun.  There's certainly a Starcraft 2 lack of ambition problem; I'd expect a lot more scorched earth and partisan options for the Soviets, and generally speaking they're a bit too similar to the Amerikantsy. The lack of static defense options seems a bit silly, given their importance at Kursk, and dealing without dedicated anti-tank infantry was fucking difficult at first, but the strength of Soviet artillery is pretty neat.  I just recently discovered how useful the Su-76 is, and it's a thing of real beauty; flanked by a scout and some penal infantry it's pretty great.  I was static defense-artillery focused both as an American and British-Canadian player, so it's tough dealing with lack of static options, but the depth of Soviet artillery options is pretty neat. 

[crazy canuck]

I have really enjoyed the first CoH.  After I have played out EU4 I will probably pick this up when it goes on sale

[Razgovory]

Bought it.

Better than expected.  I think the campaign is a bit offensive, tbh; the American campaign is YAHOO AMERICA Band of Brothers sillyness, while this starts off with a Jewish Soviet officer asking if the war was worth it, which makes him a total fucking bitch; very few Soviet Jewish families survived the war intact.  The portrayal of ethnic Russians in generally seems a bit problematic; some things that really should be heroic are just "meh, we're not real people anyway" stupidity. 

The skirmishes are actually pretty fun.  There's certainly a Starcraft 2 lack of ambition problem; I'd expect a lot more scorched earth and partisan options for the Soviets, and generally speaking they're a bit too similar to the Amerikantsy. The lack of static defense options seems a bit silly, given their importance at Kursk, and dealing without dedicated anti-tank infantry was fucking difficult at first, but the strength of Soviet artillery is pretty neat.  I just recently discovered how useful the Su-76 is, and it's a thing of real beauty; flanked by a scout and some penal infantry it's pretty great.  I was static defense-artillery focused both as an American and British-Canadian player, so it's tough dealing with lack of static options, but the depth of Soviet artillery options is pretty neat.

Yeah, I can understand how some Russians are unhappy with their portrayal.  The main character is sort of a analogue for Vasily Grossman, but his disillusionment with the Soviet Union came from the antisemitism of the post war more then anything else.  My biggest beef with the game is that the mechanics seemed to have been pared down, and I have no idea why.

[sbr]

"Streamlined" for the "mainstream" audience.

[Razgovory]

"Streamlined" for the "mainstream" audience.

I have a feeling that it has more to do with the chaos of shifting publishers, production difficulties, and a different design philosophy.  For instance the singleplayer Soviets and the Skirmish Soviets play very differently.  I suspect there was a difficulty in balancing the Soviet faction in skirmish so they ended up reducing a lot of it's distinctiveness.  The developers were also shifting direction which could be seen in the previous title Dawn of War II which lacked base building at all in the single player instead developing a weird little RPG type game and an over reliance on scripted events.  I can't help but think there was an effort to make a Call of Duty RTS, which I don't care for.

[Syt]

http://www.polygon.com/2013/7/25/4553536/is-company-of-heroes-2-anti-russian

CCompany of Heroes 2 found broad favor with the media, gaining an 80 percent average on Metacritic. But there's one group of people who really don't like the game.

Critics in Russia and the countries of the former Soviet Union say its portrayal of the Eastern Front in World War II plays to Western bias about history and clichés about the Soviet war effort.

Following a video posted by 'Bad Comedian' in Russia, fellow countrymen bombarded Metacritic, dragging the game's user score down to 2.2. "The story is not true and is a complete falsification of the history of Russia and its methods of warfare," wrote one. Another added that the game had taken "dirty myths about war and turned the story into ideological rubbish."

Thousands of people have signed a Change.org petition that attempts to persuade Steam to block the game in CIS countries. The petition brands the game as "disgusting."

Sergey Galyonkin runs a popular games blog in Ukraine and works for Russian developer Nival, which has created military games like Blitzkrieg. "CoH2 manages to use almost every single Russia-related trope," he said. "Gulags, army without any weapons, Russians shooting their own soldiers in the back. By the third mission I was honestly expecting to see bear cavalry."

He points out the differences in CoH 2's narrative compared with the first game, which dealt with Western forces in France. The original Company of Heroes has a definite Band of Brothers vibe that portrays men and officers working in harmony.

The second game focuses on the brutality of the Red Army's generals, including tactics like sending soldiers into battle without weapons and mass shootings of retreating soldiers. The game's story focuses on the Soviet Union's repressive political climate and how this played out in the field of war.

Relic says that the game reflects historical realities, and points to historical research and personal testimony from Russian soldiers.

Its critics say that while the Eastern Front did see unprecedented barbarism and cruelty, Relic has been selective in its narrative choices, preferring to ignore what people in Russia celebrate as a noble sacrifice that did more to save the world from Nazism than the American-led invasion from the West.

In Russia and other former Soviet countries, the Great Patriotic War is about a heroic unified cause, not about repressive leaders throwing men against machine guns. The issue is complicated by Cold War myth-making by the Soviet Union and by Hollywood. Facts are obscured by a long, hostile political climate that has always sought to make claims on history.

For decades, the most reliable testimony to come from the Eastern front was sourced to Soviet dissidents or Germans. Official Soviet documentation was censored and colored to the point of absurdity.

Even today, attempts to portray the Red Army negatively cause outrage in Russia. Current president Vladimir Putin wants to pass a censorship law making it illegal to portray the Soviet war effort as anything other than a glorious march to victory.

National myths are extremely powerful, and never more so than with World War II. For America, the war validates ideas about the struggle for freedom. For Britain, it represents pluck against terrible odds. For France, the nobility of resistance. In Russia, it is about the necessity of sacrifice.

Around 20 million Russians lost their lives in World War II. That's about 14 percent of the population at the time. The United States lost 420,000 lives, about 0.3 percent of the population. Russia's war, of course, was fought on Russian soil.

Lukasz Markiewicz is Polish (and Poland, he says, has "the fewest reasons to say anything good about the Soviets"). But he charges Relic with distorting the facts about the Eastern Front.

"The campaign is basically one giant, offensive stereotype," he said. "The events on the Eastern Front were likely the most grim four years in the history of mankind. There is nothing wrong with trying to recreate that. It is wrong however to essentially reduce it to the lazy stereotype of German Übermensch Wehrmacht and SS against the Soviet Horde."

A common criticism on Russian forums is that the game takes its cues from Western movies like Enemy at the Gates (pictured above), in which soldiers are sent against German machine guns, without weapons, hoping to pick up a rifle from a dead comrade.

"There was no such things as one rifle for two men, except in rare cases of total logistical failure," said Markiewicz, a 27-year-old tax officer with a BA in ancient history [The Fuck?]. "There were no 'human wave' attacks on MG40 nests, unless the NCO fucked up royally, which was grounds for demotion or a military tribunal.

"There are plenty of examples of staggering Soviet brutality and incompetence," he added. "If you pick and choose your evidence, you can weave a narrative similar to that in Enemy at the Gates. I'm not trying to engage in some sort of historical revisionism. The Eastern Front was a confrontation of two murderous, totalitarian regimes. The problem is, this brutality gets turned up to eleven and ends up being a parody."

David Stone is a professor of military history at Kansas State University, specializing in the Soviet Union. "Designers and developers have to look to ways to make what they're doing stand out from the crowd." he said. "That means that an Eastern Front game is going to have to play up elements that are stereotypically part of the Eastern Front to make it look different from all the other combat games out there, even if that does some violence to the historical record. So in that sense, it makes sense that Relic would emphasize snow, political commissars and lack of equipment even if it's exaggerated."

He said that much of Relic's portrayal is rooted in fact, but soldiers being sent into battle without rifles is "something that really belongs to Russia in World War I, not the Soviet Union in World War II."

Company of Heroes 2 uses a mechanic that allows the player to deploy soldiers using 'cheap' conscripts, as opposed to building them at your base. This useful boost is balanced cleverly, by invoking 'Order 227.' Any retreat during this phase carries a reasonably high chance that your forces will be executed by the high command.

Order 227 was issued by Soviet dictator Josef Stalin, and created penal battalions whose purpose was to prevent retreats by Soviet forces. From a military point of view, it was not a successful tactic. The game's use of Order 227 is, according to Stone, realistic, although specific only to certain points in the war.

"That did happen, particularly in spring 1942 around Stalingrad," he said. "Soldiers and officers who retreated or deserted might also find themselves assigned to punishment battalions which were used for particularly dangerous or bloody missions. The Soviets also used 'blocking detachments' on occasion, particularly behind punishment battalions, to shoot those retreating. Definitely happened, not necessarily common."

Galyonkin says the mechanic is overblown. "The story creates a fictional army bent on self-destruction," he said. "The missions show Soviets killing more of their own people than the enemy. Nobody does that, not even Russians. It makes no sense."

Relic argues that Company of Heroes 2 is historically balanced, and rejects the charge that the game wraps its narrative around isolated incidences. "In a war the scale of the Eastern Front, we had to choose specific battles and incidences to deliver the breadth of the narrative," said game director Quinn Duffy.

He said that the campaign was inspired by the writing of Vasily Grossman (pictured below), a combat journalist who spent three years on the front lines and had "unparalleled access to the commanders of the various fronts." His work, said Duffy, "illustrates the unparalleled bravery amongst the front line troops, but also cruelty, petty disputes, competition and egos clashing at all levels of the military hierarchy."

Duffy said that the game seeks to explain the "awe" the team feels about the efforts of Soviet men and women who were "faced with a hardened German enemy and some of the mistrust and cruelty exhibited by members of the Soviet leadership." He also said that he read dozens of books on the Eastern Front, from all perspectives so that "we were as fair as could be."

So what about those soldiers being sent into battle without rifles? "It's entirely plausible to believe that happened," said Duffy. "It might be cliché, but it illustrates the challenges the Soviets faced." He said it was "also a way to demonstrate their resolve. It's not about cruelty or incompetence, it's about desperation and bravery." Duffy cites various sources that spoke of severe equipment shortages as the Soviets fell back in the face of rapid German advances, in 1942.

It's clear that Relic did more to research its game than watch some Hollywood movies, and that most of the game is based on real differences between the strategic and tactical environments of Eastern and Western Fronts. But storytelling and emphasis are always tricky things, especially when it comes to a subject as colossally emotive as The Great Patriotic War. The comments on forums and on Metacritic are testament to the strong feelings that the war still generates.

Although Relic says it's celebrating the bravery of the Russians, critics of the game in that country view it as yet another negative portrayal of themselves, the sub-human Slavic obediance-bot, primed for violence, ever-ready to throw his own worthless carcass into the mill for the greater good. There can be little doubt that this stereotype is alive and well in Western contemporary entertainment.

Duffy believes the main differences between the first and second games are more complex. He said that the second game is painted on a broader canvas, with its narrator exploring the brutality of the war and Soviet state terrorism, which certainly existed. In contrast, the first game focused on a small group of soldiers and did not seek to take a wider view.

"The big difference for me was when we looked at early narrative ideas for Company of Heroes 2, we couldn't find a direct correlation of a unit to follow the way we could in Normandy. It's rare to find a Soviet unit that survived the war intact," he said.

And he points out that reactions from the East are not entirely negative. "We've had a number of tweets, Facebook and forum posts that talk very positively to the tone of the experience we've portrayed," he said. "One gentleman showed his grandfather, a tank driver in WW2, the game and he was enthralled. That's enough for me."

[Razgovory]

Russians really need to come to grips with their own history.  A lot of the stuff in the game is exaggerated, but the Soviets did execute vast numbers of their own soldiers and did use human wave tactics a lot in the desperate days of 1941, and 1942.

[Queequeg]

I think a middle ground is probably about right.  There's a lot of offensive, silly stuff in the game that is all the weirder because of the completely un-nuanced campaigns in the original CoH and it's expansion. 

[Queequeg]

Also it's really weird that people just switch back and forth calling the Red Army "Russian."  It really wasn't. 

[Razgovory]

I think a middle ground is probably about right.  There's a lot of offensive, silly stuff in the game that is all the weirder because of the completely un-nuanced campaigns in the original CoH and it's expansion.

The first game wasn't exactly historically accurate.  I did find it annoying that the main character equates the Soviets with the Nazis at the end of the game.  No Jew would have done that.  Now that I think about it, the game dwells on the brutality of the Soviet army, but really doesn't discuss the predatory and psychotic nature of the German occupation.