[GameSpot] - Company Of Heroes 3 Has Some Impressive Building Destruction Features

[343iBot]

As work continues on Company of Heroes 3, developer Relic Entertainment has shared a few details on the most important part of the game: making things go boom. While the first two Company of Heroes games had impressive building destruction elements that reminded players of the warzone that they were in, the third game is looking to amplify the devastation that'll occur in each battle.

"The first thing people will notice about CoH 3 destruction is how real it feels," lead environment artist Patrick Lopetrone wrote in a forum post. "Although CoH 1 and CoH 2 included destruction ahead of their time, they didn’t have the benefit of real physics debris. In CoH 3 we fracture the entire building which results in real geometry pieces of debris as opposed to FX debris used in the past. What makes our debris pieces look even more realistic is that they retain the same textures from the healthy mesh."

According to Lopetrone, physics have also been applied to buildings so that the game has a satisfying feeling of destruction, that realism is being taken a step further by ensuring that all buildings have multiple layers of materials used in their construction. In practice, a building that has been hammered by artillery will explode in a shower of brick, mortar, and plaster using the power of Relic's proprietary Essence Engine. Buildings can still take a fair amount of damage, but eventually, they'll collapse into a pile of rubble.

Aside from the rampant destruction that players can inflict on the Mediterranean countryside, Company of Heroes 3 will also feature a Tactical Pause function in single-player for making crucial decisions--think They Are Billions when it comes to catching your breath--flanking maneuvers, infantry breaching mechanics, and a dynamic map that creates sandbox-style gameplay. There's no concrete release date yet for Company of Heroes 3, but a pre-alpha preview has been running since last year.

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