At the risk of simply repeating some marketing blurb, “Humanising the battlefield” is apparently one of Relic’s three key “franchise pillars” for Company of Heroes. The other two are “emergent storytelling” and “cinematic warfare,” for those interested, and while those two probably sound a bit more exciting for the average player, it’s the first that probably holds the most importance today.
This is because the setting for Company of Heroes 3 is a delicate one. There are two campaigns, one in Italy and the Mediterranean, and the other, where this preview focused, in North Africa. The North African “theatre” of the Second World War is one dominated by armoured warfare, and is also the place were Erwin Rommel, the commander of the Nazis’ Deutsches Afrika Corps (DAK), earned his reputation as the “Desert Fox”.
The delicacy here comes from that reputation. Rommel’s Afrika Korps was something Relic described as “heavily requested by our community,” while Rommel himself was built up by the Germans, and then Allies, as a brilliant but detached tactician who sought to wage a “war without hate” and an almost victim of Nazi rule – something since referred to as the “Rommel myth”, given the fact that plenty of war crimes still persisted in that region throughout the period of his command.
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