CoH3 Live Ops - Accolades

Company of Heroes 3 is a AAA real-time strategy game set in the Mediterranean theatre of WW2, focusing on intense tactical combat in fully destructible environments. Strategic choices come to the forefront in this installment with the addition of the Italian Dynamic Campaign, allowing players to approach RTS Missions how they choose and tell their own stories.

On this project, I was a Campaign Designer. As the project transitioned into Live Ops I moved into a Product Owner role for the RTS single player area.

In this role I lead multidisciplinary teams of 5-10, pitching features to leadership, prioritizing tasks, and reviewing work. My implementation work generally focused on systems design, Lua scripting, and narrative tasks.

Accolades

One of the major features I oversaw during CoH3’s Live Ops was Accolades. Accolades are essentially a series of non-expiring challenges that must be completed in sequence from 1 to 10. Once an Accolade is completed, a cosmetic reward is granted and the next Accolade is made available.

There is a series of Accolades for each of the 4 factions (40 challenges total) and each challenge targeted ~30mins to complete on average. This allowed us to showcase the flavour of each faction while providing something for players to work towards long term.

My Work

Accolades was completed over the course of 2 months from paper to release. My work included mocking up the UI in Figma, coordinating UI engineer implementation, designing each Accolade, and implementing 20 of them in engine while collaborating with another designer on the other half.

Challenges

This feature originally began as a directive to add monthly challenges, with the goal to improve day 30 retention. After discussing this with the team, we felt this wouldn’t address the root problem, so I designed and pitched Accolades to leadership as an alternative.

The goals for this proposal were to:

• Provide longer-term progression our community had been asking for

• Use this as an opportunity to better onboard new players

• Leverage our existing challenge systems

• Maintain the goal of improving 30d retention

Result

In addition to Accolades, while working with the tools for challenges, I was able to address a minor overhaul to our Daily and Weekly challenges. This overhaul added single player challenges to the pool of existing multiplayer challenges, rebalanced the in-game currency economy, and fixed some annoying completion condition bugs.

The Accolades feature and challenges update successfully released in April 2024 as part of the Coral Viper (1.6) release. CoH3 saw a 33% increase in daily active users that month, and an even higher increase the next month from a Steam Free Weekend + Sale which showed stronger long-term retention in the months that followed.