Company of Heroes 3 delayed to February 2023

Sega has announced a three-month delay to Company of Heroes 3, which will now arrive on 23rd February 2023.

Announcing the hold-up this afternoon, Sega said Relic Entertainments real-time strategy threequel was currently “not quite up to our players or our own high standards”, with “bugs to squash, pixels to polish, gameplay to adjust and feedback to address”.

On that last point, Sega says developer Relic is continuing to react to community feedback on improvements to the games dynamic campaign map, a stronger visual focus on “grit and details” during battles, an overhauled light system, plus tweaks to the HUD and UI.

Sega says Relic has already reacted to players who tried the games multiplayer pre-alpha test in November 2021, who “helped the team make significant improvements to Battlegroups, their upgrade trees, units, and call-in abilities”.

The team is also still “reviewing and improving” dialogue to ensure voice work “authentic to specific characters and their native accents [is] featured in the game”. Thats plenty to be getting on with, then.

“We know we want to deliver the best game possible, and we feel that we are not there yet,” Sega noted in a Q&A document shared with Eurogamer. “Your feedback helped guide our decision to ensure CoH3 is up to the high standards of both the development team and our players.

“This additional time allows us to work on overall improvements, balancing, and fine-tuning of CoH 3 to ensure the game will meet player expectations and deliver the deepest tactical experience in the series yet.”

Dont expect this time to be used for adding any new features, modes, factions or units, the publisher continued. Company of Heroes 3s launch content is now locked, and the hold-up is simply to “polish, tune and bug-fix” what is already in the game.

“Working with the CoH-Dev community over the last years has been an invaluable experience and were immensely grateful for all of their contributions to CoH3 so far,” said Relic boss Justin Dowdeswell. “We want to deliver the biggest and most immersive game in our franchises history, which means we need a bit more time for bug fixing, balancing, and polishing to ensure our players have a fantastic experience at launch.”