When it comes to tackling World War II, Relic Entertainment strives to do it respectfully. The studio’s Company of Heroes franchise is a testament to this, with previous titles in the real-time strategy franchise presenting the battles, heroes and horrors of the Greatest War to players in ways that felt more lifelike -- and, consequently, more unsettling -- than many had come to expect. Of course, as a company whose goal is to create video games, Relic must make its titles fun -- something that can easily take away from the authenticity of the experience.

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Bread, Bullets and Battlefields

How do they do it, then? How does a team that’s built a name making some of the most critically acclaimed and authentic strategy games take what they’ve learned from travelling around the world -- studying the weapons, mechanized monsters and battlefields where millions laid down their lives -- and apply it to the upcoming Company of Heroes 2 Now we present Duffy's insight, alongside some of Relic’s photographs, sound design clips and videos they’ve used to inspire, create and shape the direction of Company of Heroes 2’s Eastern Front.When you're making a game about the Eastern Front, it's safe to say one of the best ways to get an understanding of it is to saturate yourself in it. To gain valuable insight into the Russian people of the past and the present, Relic did just that in March of 2011, when the team leaders traveled to Russia and Germany. "We went to St. Petersburg, the former Leningrad, and went to a number of battle sties in and around the city," Duffy detailed, with regular stops to museums so they could, "see and feel and get reference images of all the equipment" for the game.

It didn't even take all that much effort to find what they needed in Russia since, as Duffy put it, "[the Russians] just went gangbusters on celebrating the Great Patriotic War." The Relic crew found ample material in an array of museums that cataloged everything from specific types of weapons to what Duffy refers to as "dark stories." In one instance Duffy and the Relic team got to see the food ration given to the people under siege at St. Petersburg, which he described as being "smaller than your computer mouse...125 grams of s***ty bread a day for non workers. A million people...a vast number of people starved."

“ They went gangbusters celebrating the Great Patriotic War.

The Human Element

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The Company of Heroes franchise has always had much more believable infantry than most strategy titles, with soldiers who react to being shot at, scream when they're harmed and generally act like you might imagine soldiers did those 70 years ago. Like the previous games, Duffy said the goal in Company of Heroes 2 is to get across "real soldiers, real battlefields, real war. The team therefore added a lot of animations and contextual speech to "create this sense that these guys are really aware of their environment." Watching real combat footage, the team at Relic has seen the way panic affects soldiers, the way that people can become a bit confused, and they try to integrate that into their characters. Though Duffy does acknowledge that their characters have "a bit of that Hollywood" layered in since in real combat "you rarely see the enemy, guys aren't moving around a ton," and, "you don't have the sort of second-to-second type of reactions that you want in a game."The foundation for more realistic characters may have been in place from their previous games, but Relic really wanted to take the knowledge gained from traveling and reading memoirs from people involved in the war and instill, as Duffy says, the "fatalism" and "unbelievable bravery" of the Russian people. Duffy said this will come across in "their speech, their acknowledgements, their griping, their bitching," all of which the team wrote to set the tone for a people pushed to the brink. Duffy wants to get past the Russia we know from movies like Enemy at the Gates, so that "you start to see the reach character, that these guys were soldiers like any other soldier," who "faced the most unbelievable hardships."This philosophy and understanding of the Russian people has also played into the new mechanics for the Red Army. Duffy really, really didn't want "automagical b**lshit kinds of things going on" with how they functioned. The last Company of Heroes games gave you abilities to break suppression, for instance, where troops pinned down by machine gun fire could overcome their fear by pressing a button. This time around Duffy wants to avoid "the magical button," instead focusing on providing context for why soldiers are less likely to be suppressed. An example given was Soviet penal battalions, who had to fight until they either died or succeeded -- regardless of the situation. Contextually it would make sense why they're more likely to go through gun fire brazenly, as opposed to standard Russian infantry.