Let me preface this by stressing that I am not a game developer. But I am a gamer, and I know that there is a right way to make a game and a wrong way to make a game, as I have played many well-designed games and many poorly-designed games.
I recently purchased the game Company of Heroes: Opposing Fronts. I had purchased the original Company of Heroes quite a while ago, but I had never finished it. So, I decided to re-install the original before dealing with Opposing Fronts. After a rather arduous process of patching, I was ready to play. Upon loading it up, it seemed that the patches had installed data for Opposing Fronts as well as the original, since the menu included the campaigns from the new game. I couldn’t play them without an Opposing Fronts CD key, but I didn’t want to deal with that right then. I played the game (picking up where I had left off) and finished the campaign. Now for Opposing Fronts.
I stuck the DVD into the drive and the autoplay came up. However, there was no option to install. There was an option to play the game, which seemed to verify my theory that the patches had installed the Opposing Front data. All I needed to do was stick the CD key in. I started up the game and did just that. After a short time, everything was in order. The main menu had a different background image (that of a British soldier instead of an American soldier) and the Opposing Fronts campaigns were available. I clicked on one and got the following message: “Notice: You do not have the necessary data to play this campaign.” Er, what? Didn’t I already have all the data? Why on Earth did I put the CD key in if not to unlock the data? Why didn’t the Opposing Fronts DVD ask me to install the game?
Answers were not easily found. After quite a bit of searching online, I eventually found that the Opposing Fronts DVD has the data for both the original Company of Heroes as well as the standalone sequel. The original game disks didn’t have any of the sequel data. Thus, the only way to play the later campaigns is to uninstall the original, install from the Opposing Fronts DVD, and patch everything once again. Seriously. This solution is so absurd I refused to believe it was the only way. Why would a game developer force people to uninstall the original game so they could play the sequel? No other game I’ve played has done this. If a sequel is released, you install it separately from the original or as an expansion. In any case, something needs to be installed. Since I wasn’t prompted to install anything after putting in the Opposing Fronts DVD, I didn’t think I needed to do anything. But I did, and now I have to patch my game all over again, which was not a short process the first time around…
Honestly, Relic, you could have done better than this. Company of Heroes is an excellent game. But the installation process almost makes me want to throw both games in a dark drawer and forget about them. If you’re looking to lose customers, there’s no better way to do it than to pretend updating is easy when it’s maddeningly roundabout. Seriously, what’s up with the bit about being able to add the Opposing Fronts CD key in the original Company of Heroes install? If I need to reinstall all the data, why not say that outright?!
Anyways, I figured I’d write this since there is very little information available on this message. As far as I could tell, none of the posts related to this issue had any comments by Relic employees, which is pretty bad. Perhaps they realized they made a rather egregious mistake in the way this was all set up? We may never know.
