CoH3 Live Ops - Steel Shepherd Overhaul

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.

Steel Shepherd

The Steel Shepherd release for Company of Heroes 3 was 5 months of work from planning to ship. It was by far the largest update since launch and coincided with the release of the first expansion pack, Hammer and Shield. The focus for Steel Shepherd was to overhaul areas of the game to improve player sentiment and retention.

The group I was leading overhauled the onboarding experience and redefined the narrative tone targeting two key retention drop offs identified in telemetry. This led to collaborative initiatives across all departments where I defined tasks, reviewed work, and managed scope to ensure cohesion between all the pieces coming together.

Onboarding Flow

After evaluating player feedback and telemetry, our team's belief was that the opening of the game wasn’t showing off our best content, and that the tone wasn’t living up to player’s expectations from past entries in the franchise, leading to the steeper than expected drop off in player count.

To address these issues I defined a set of tasks aimed to reworked the first-time user funnel of the game. Our team removed a forced tutorial mission previously in the boot flow and replaced it with the game’s trailer, overhauled difficulty selection screens in the main menu, rewrote cinematic dialogue, and reworked the first mission in the campaign. Essentially reworking the golden path from the boot screens into the campaign.

All elements in this flow received improvements, but highlighted in blue are the areas our team was directly responsible for.

A huge amount of these changes involved collaboration with the UI team. Notably I coordinated the overhaul of various HUD elements as well as the campaign difficulty selection screen. This screen in particular addressed an issue where 70% of players were playing on Easy- an unusually high percent we believed to be due to a lack of clarity in the campaign selection screen.

Before and after difficulty selection screens. The new version added a separate screen, custom icons, difficulty descriptions, and allowed split difficulty options between the Campaign Map and RTS Battles.

Tone Shift

The other part of the changes were focused on shifting the tone of the game. I worked with the Art Director to redefine the target tone for narrative. Aiming for a more gritty, human tone in our dialogue and visuals, taking reference from Band of Brothers and Saving Private Ryan.

A large portion of my tasks for this area involved rewriting dialogue in the opening cinematics. Since we had an hour with each voice actor, I also had the opportunity to review and revise dialogue throughout the game to ensure consistency with this new tone. This all together involved writing around 200 lines of dialogue, along with directing voice talent in recording sessions.

The intent with the cinematic rewrite was to add more human connection to the language through an implied history with 'Maggie'. The characters portrayed are a more naive Joe Conti paired with a mentor in Captain McKay. The message in the first cinematic focuses on setting up the next mission where Joe then gets hit with the gritty realities of war. The second cinematic Joe acknowledges this with a slightly more somber tone and the focus shifts to setting up the overall campaign themes of the bickering Generals and Italian partisans.

The intent with the dialogue rewrites was to tighten up the message and use more serious, authentic language. The voice direction conveys clearer emotional beats with characters immersed in battle rather than narrating the action. Dialogue that issues orders to troops was shifted to Captain McKay, a new character we added for in-game dialogue. Corporal Conti remains our protagonist but his dialogue is framed as one relaying orders, not issuing them, for a more authentic chain of command.

While my implementation focus was on the dialogue rewrites, I also directed the revamp of the first mission in the campaign. My support for this mission involved:

• Reviewing mission, dialogue, and camera sequence iterations from designers

• Identifying UI and Art tasks, like improving the objective and tutorial tip UI

• Identifying engineering tasks, like adding moving landing crafts to the intro

• Coordinating map design support to create an imposing feeling on the beach

The intent for this mission was to present a grittier tone with human characters. It has clear staged beats that introduce no more than 1 new mechanic at a time, both to ease the player into the gameplay and to focus the emotional beat. The length of the mission was also shortened to keep the intensity up and get the player into the full campaign sooner.

Result

The Steel Shepherd update successfully launched in December 2023 and was one of the most rewarding of my career. The team was fully aligned with the direction of the tone change which created incredible momentum. Players also embraced the changes as the game saw a +50% increase in monthly users and a boost in player sentiment.