The second expandalone (YES I SAID THE DEVIL-WORD) for Relic’s sumptuous World War II RTS hit our excited PCs late last week. I duly celebrated Easter by killing a lot of men in it. Is it the meaty expansion we’ve been praying for, or money-grabbing tokenism? My hammer of ultra-judgement falls on it below…
When a game’s called ‘Tales of Valor’ and over two-thirds of its running time has you playing as Nazis Germans, it’s hard not to wonder if there was some sort of breakdown in internal communications. We’re by now fairly accustomed to and comfortable with occasionally stepping into Axis jackboots in World War II games, but to have an entire game place them largely centre-stage and thus the de facto heroes of the piece is a really odd decision, to say the least.
Quite obviously, it’s not that Relic are all secretly Axis fanboys, or that they think their players are. Perhaps its genuine boldness, or a decision that these were the most interesting tales to tell, but frankly I’d imagine it’s more just one symptom that Company of Heroes perhaps isn’t being as finely-managed as it once was, now Dawn of War II’s the new baby. Similarly, this standalone expansion (though it does plug into existing COH installs if you have ‘em) is a strange hybrid of inventiveness and incoherence.
As a result (or perhaps a cause), it’s remarkably hard to identify quite why Tales of Valor exists. I’ve personally settled, poisonous little cynic that I am, on there being a dictat from above that more COH would make money, so someone threw something together. It’s not a failure, not at all – it’s simply a little pointless.
The main conceit is the titular stories of heroism – three short singleplayer campaigns, of around 90 minutes each, presenting some of World War II’s most theoretically thrilling scuffles within a heavily-scripted, heavily-cutscened series of linked levels. Lately, Relic have been experimenting heavily with ways to reinvent singleplayer strategy, as it’s something that often struggles to make the same impact as the multiplayer component. Dawn of War II’s campaign borrowed heavily from Diablo, Soulstorm tried the Total War thing, and now this is about the most tightly-scripted RTS ever made. No glorified skirmish maps here – every enemy, and every enemy movement, is pretty much pre-determined.
In fact, it’s closer to the excellent Men of War than Company of Heroes – base-building is excised in most of the maps, and there’s a gentle focus on acquiring weapons and ammunition (for special powers rather than units’ guns) from what’s already on the map. While it’s a more fulfilling approach than the original COH’s singleplayer, these two styles of strategy don’t quite mix seamlessly here, and it’s yet another affirmation that MoW is a far better singleplayer game than CoH has ever been. The blend of organic, what-you-see-is-what-you-can-use with abstract, icon and resource-based special abilities is uncomfortable. Imagine a first person shooter where grenades were an intangible, invisible essence that gradually replenished over time, rather than something your character had x number of.
While it’s very different to Dawn of War II’s weirdy-beardy semi-RPG singleplayer, there is a similar sense of disjointedness, of a collection of strong ideas that don’t mesh together as smoothly as they could. And honestly, when 3 hours of your 4.5 hour game are spent playing as the Nazis Germans, you’re either astonishingly confident or perhaps not entirely clear what the audience wants from a WW2 game.
None of this is to say it’s not enjoyable. There’s a likeable, natural flow to it, in most cases each new sub-level of the three tales being a reaction to some misfortune that has befallen your small army. The opening Tiger tank campaign begins with your being all-conquering in your steel goliath, then moves onto a desperate escape when the tank’s trashed and its surviving crew need to flee for safety from a rampaging Allied force. There’s no investment in the characters – all blandly stiff-upper-lipped spouters of exposition or military derring-do – but there is in the situation. You remain on the same map throughout a campaign, its shape and content evolving as the war over it progresses. Unlocks carry over between sub-levels, so throughout those 90 minutes you’ll escalate from having a handful of guys with popguns to levelling the land with artillery strikes called in from off-screen. It’s more satisfying than the hard-stop, reset the tech tree come the next level approach of traditional RTS singleplayer.
That said, there really isn’t a lot of variety in how you best the challenges, so replay value is essentially nil, bar possibly tackling the campaigns again at a higher difficulty. Again, this is a curiously purposeless expansion, ultimately coming across almost like an appetiser for COH’s main course rather than the filling desert it should be. It should be profiteroles – instead, it’s Nazi-themed garlic bread.
Perhaps that’s the point – it’s an easy-in to lure new players into picking up COH and Opposing Fronts, rather than aimed at veterans. The didacticism and relative ease of the campaigns would, at a guess, very much appeal to an older gamer who wants a neatly encapsulated World War II battle rather than the complexity and micro-management of COH vanilla. That title is key – this is not war, but war stories.
So, really, it doesn’t expand upon the Company of Heroes experience enough to be an advisable sale to long-term players. You’ll have a better time playing team versus with some chums, creating a unique and far more epic narrative rather than simply experiencing the arbitrary defeats and victories Tales of Valor has pre-determined you’ll experience. If you want a glorious, involving and hellaciously explosive singleplayer World War II experience, Men of War is absolutely where to go.
There is, though, one thing that makes this a little more noteworthy to CoH old hands. Amongst some token new multiplayer units and maps is the Stonewall mode (there are also new hero-centric and tank-centric modes, neither of which are quite as elegant) – defending a fixed, pre-built base against escalating waves of invading Nazis Germans. Every building lost brings you not so much closer to defeat, but rather loses you access to specific units and upgrades. You can survive the loss of a few, but each one that crumbles is a harrowing punch the gut.
It can be played solo, but it’s best tackled as a co-op game – an Alamo moment, stood shoulder-to-shoulder against impossible odds. It’s as thrilling gruelling as Company of Heroes gets, but it alone is not enough to justify the asking price if you’re not fussed about the campaign gubbins. It’d be ideal, and celebrated with tears of joy, as patch content – but that’s unlikely, outside of third-party mods.
It’s unlikely that this is Company of Heroes’ last gasp, given how long Relic strung out Dawn of War 1 for, and the menu system is now positively setup for plugging in new micro-campaigns as and when. If buying Tales of Valor wins you access to new ones for free, it’s an investment worth making – 90 minutes of 1940s explodey fun every now and again.
Perhaps best, then, to wait and see what happens, and what Relic’s plans for COH are. It still looks amazing, it still plays with satisfying polish and freshness, and there’s still a crapton of WW2 it hasn’t documented, so there’s scarecely a need for a sequel just yet. Let’s hoping this good-natured mild misfire is just Relic treading water while they decide exactly what COH’s next move proper is.
Tales of Valor is available over Impulse or Steam now. For far too much money, quite frankly – fortunately it’s much cheaper from etailers such as Amazon and Play.
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So not only have they ripped off a significant chunk of gameplay from Soldiers: HOWW2, they also ripped off one of the best German campaign missions!
Great…
Relic is a trash developer now. No longer intent on making quality games that stand the test of time, they’re focusing on the quick loot grab from the ADHD set and moving quickly on. And when they don’t support their buggy games, they can always blame GFWL or Steam.
I really don’t think Alec Meer understood the point of Tales of Valor. It’s quite clearly aimed at newcomers to the series.
It’s incredibly cheap compared to most games (especially if you’re coming from the console side), adds several less competitive gamemodes to easy people into what ToV is there for: Get them to join the multiplayer, which is what ToV buyers are already set up for since it gives them access to all the factions.
It’s the Company of Heroes Starter Package.
It’s also pretty clear that Alec is rather stricken with Men of War – but calling it, and it’s utterly atrocious voiceovers, the better singleplayer game is pure lunacy. It’s a better sandbox game and a better coop game – but a better singleplayer experience it is not.
@SpessMahrine, I assume by “not support their buggy games” you mean their patching frequency which is factually higher than even Blizzards?
I’m not sure if I like being called an “older gamer” (get offa my lawn!), but this is the first CoH-related writeup I’ve seen anywhere that really lined up with how I felt about that game. I tried really hard to enjoy the original CoH, but when I realized that it was more of a spiritual relation to Command and Conquer than to Close Combat — i.e., a pretty standard RTS with a coat of World War II paint — I lost interest pretty quickly. Showing my age, I guess…
Seriously? Bitching about playing as jerry? When i play multi i hit random, they are just little computer mans. Also, i like not being able to plan too much. Men of war will have seriously eaten into coh’s profits if the world has any justice. I feel sorry for relic thq are in shit and are probably riding them hard. But if they make a great homeworld 3 (this means full 3d movement is required) then all is forgiven.
@DK
I can’t tell if you’re serious or trolling.
Having just read Antony Beevor’s fine book on the fall of Berlin, it’s pretty hard to assign moral superiority to any side of that sad conflict. Yeah, Nazis are basically horrible, but I can’t say as I’m a massive fan of the rape squads on the other side either. Not to mention the whole grabbing and subjugating Eastern Europe part by Stalin’s gang.
I think these things work best when you just click the mouse and leave the moral calculus behind — if at all possible.
It’s a bit of a ripoff for those of us that have the previous games (okay, a TOTAL ripoff), but a very nice package for anyone that has only one or none of the previous games. But they new units should be available for free in a patch. Bad Relic!.
Ok, now give us Russians and Japanese, and CoH2!. No more expansions, damn it!
Shouldn’t Godwin’s Law have kicked in before now?
No-one in WWII are blameless, Allied and Axis killed lots of people – the Western Allies even doing so by forcibly ‘repatriating’ refugees back to Soviet hands, many of whom were simply executed on the spot.
BTW, I always play the Axis side, from Squad Leader through HPS to Steel Panthers and The Operational Art of War. It’s all just little counters in a game, right?
well, then.
since the sight of Germany or Germans being portrayed as dutiful, brave or even virtuous — and yes, unfortunately for many of the agenda-driven folks even here, many of them were during those times — i look forward to the day when i’m able to play a member of the North Vietnamese Army or Vietcong. i’d enjoy playing a mission where my objective was to investigate reports of US troop movements around My Lai, or to sabotage shipments of unusally large amounts of chemical defoliants.
or maybe for a change of historical scenery, an Indian insurgent or Afghan soldier fighting against the policies and wars of Lord Bulwer-Lytton.
or were those conflicts too morally ambiguous?
There is a reason German soldiers looked for Us and British squads to surrender to. USSR wasn’t much better than Nazi German but they were a ally we needed if we were going to defeat Hitler. Also he kind of stirred up that hornet’s nest on his own ;P He should have taken a lesson from Napoleon and left it alone.
If you take a quick look at total military death tolls from WW2. The Soviet Union lost 10,700,000 soliders where as Nazi Germany only lost 5,533,000 (only?) The United States only lost 416,800 , UK only lost 382.700. What am I trying to get at with these numbers? Soviet Union conscripted everyone they could and sent them to fight off the Nazi’s regardless of their wishs regardless of tactics and if we’re to believe the movie Enemy at the Gate they didn’t even give half their soliders guns to fight with and shot them if they retreated! I dunno if that is true but it could be. I’d rather play as regular German army unit that a Soviet commander any day.
Well playing as any patron from WW2 could be designated as poor taste if the games were designed as such.
I think just playing a game as a good side or bad side has no moral repercussions. A game based on history which is what it is.
Now if you had a specific missions set playing as Nazis, to go in to a village and kill off all the “Jews” (aka named bystander civilian npcs). This would be over the line.
Or playing as Japanese where you have to sneak into a US outpost, capture the officers and return to your camp only to end the mission by beheading them in the name of the Emperor. What about guiding a small Russian team of infiltrators into the outskirts of Berlin, mission = Rape at least 25 women and kill 50 men / children.
Anyways… Relic did copy Soldiers and Faces/ Men of War for that fact… look at the Direct Control as an obvious clue.
I used to like COH and Relic but I agree agree that Relic has gone down hill fast since the original COH.
(And btw I like playing all sides of WW2… good or bad… not for the moral aspects but for the historical learning experience of their tactics and armaments of that time period)…
/SOAPBOX
The Soviet Union did conscript everyone …
It was a live or die situation.
Either you lived for the preservation of the USSR…
Or you died as a traitor.
Quick question,if I buy this solo,will I have acces to all armies?
If you think about it the whole War Gaming genre is kind of morbid. I wonder what veterans of WW2 and victims of it think about the whole thing. I know some of them have been interviewed for games so it may not bother them to much. I think they will be remember as heros and villians (depending on which side they were on) for a long time to come. Will they last as long as the ancient Greek heros that still have movies made about them ? :) I think so, they are real heros, for the most part.
I can’t remember his name but there is one solider from WW2 that was fighting for American or Britian (can’t remember) then he was captured by Nazis, taken to Eastern front where he was rescued by Russians, then he faught out the rest of the war as a russian solider and has medals of honor from both countries ;) Talk about a war hero!
Wacky… I don’t think so… you would have to have all 3 expansions…. but in this one I assume you have American and German and fixed units at that rate.
Your better bet is to persue Men of War or Blitzkrieg.
You’ll get all the armies for skirmish and multiplayer if you buy Tales of Valor. All you miss out on are the singleplayer campaigns from previous games (Caen, Market Garden, Normandy).
I always want to play all sides in a conflict, particularly in an RTS. Frankly, CoH not shipping with a Wehrmacht campaign was every bit as disappointing to me as Dawn of War not shipping with Chaos, Eldar, and Ork campaigns. (And look! They did it again with DoWII.)
Nazis are admittedly a bit closer to home than the psychotic demon worshippers of Chaos, but it’s the same principle.
There are new maps too. If, like me, you just play an RTS for skirmish against AI and mu;tiplayer, then extra MP maps that you know everyone has are like gold dust.
So far I’m intrigued by the new game modes, although havent tried the tank one yet, but having new maps and new units for multiplayer is cool.
I don’t see why they arent also working on a russian expansion though. Hardcore COH pklayers would happily have bought this AND a bigger eastern front expansion.
If you don’t already own COH this is a huge bargain, albeit its stupidly cheaper to buy it on disk from amazon, then just insert the cd key. I havent even needed to take the disk out the box. Stupid retail/online price discrepancy crap.
Look, the whole point of strategy games is to play the armies, not the political agenda of their masters.
There are other sorts of games for that.
These arguments are ridiculous.
To me. Tales of Valour seems to be an attempt by Relic to wring every last drop of money out of the franchise and the current engine before they let it die.
They have behaved with breathtaking incompetance towards CoH since just before the release of OF. They have constantly screwed over the community, the fact that its a mostly single player expansion is telling. The fact that they add a few new units, make them overpowered and make you buy the full game to get them screams that they are trying to blackmail the harder-core into buying it.
Er. The Soviet Union was in a desperate situation. Morale was essentially at rock bottom. Arguably, without conscription, barrier troops, and everything, they could not have held out – and even with those, it came crazy close.
Before we all go whitewash Germany’s actions on the Eastern Front, remember that 11 million Russian civilians died. The German army killed two Russian civilians to every Jew.
I’m glad Relic isn’t afraid to put the German armies in the player’s control. It’s a break from the norm, and there’s so much more unexplored territory there rather than just having another Call of The Duties of Heroes That Are Also Brothers In Glory.
Finally being able to play the axis is nearly worth buying the expandalone-thingy – but seriously, 3h ?! Like 0,5h play time per GB ? 25€ for 3h ?! I don’t think so.
‘When a game’s called ‘Tales of Valor’ and over two-thirds of its running time has you playing as Nazis, it’s hard not to wonder if there was some sort of breakdown in internal communications.”
I think that’s some of the most callous, short-sighted, incredibly dogma’d things I’ve ever read on this site. Firstly, don’t you play as the Wehrmacht and not the “nazi’s”? Unless the game circulates around your Waffen-SS troops, I’m pretty sure you’re commanding farmers, blacksmiths, factory workers, and general populace of Germany. Secondly, who the hell are you to determine which army in a 60 year old war is deserving of having it’s victories valorous?
Do you see what you’re doing here? You’re saying an entire populace is unworthy of praise for how they fought, bled, and died on a battlefield.
I’m so sick and tired of people carrying some bizarre propaganda from 60 years ago that anyone born in Germany/Austria/etc is some kind of slime-dripping monster that rapes women and eats their children. My best friends grandfather was a civil engineer from Gratz in Austria, a non-NAZI party member, who won the Iron Cross for fixing a vehicle under fire, being hit mutiple times, then driving the wounded wehrmacht soldiers under his care from Stalingrad, ultimately saving their lives.
For you to decide he’s some worthless sub-human because the leader of a political party that took over his country was a NAZI is the most ridiculous and pregudiced thing you could possibly say.
“I am simply saying that it is highly unusual to have the majority of the game put you in Axis shoes, given its main audience is British and American (even the cover image suggests the 3 campaigns are Brit, US and German, interestingly).”
It’s main audience is going to be WW2 nerds. And WW2 nerds (myself included) are just as interested in the German side as any other. They know who’s going to buy ToV, and rightly decided to add in lots of Axis content.
“It’d surely be far more multiplayer focused otherwise, rather than the tightly hand-held singleplayer stuff it predominantly is.”
I think you got it backwards bud. I spent a couple hours beating the campaigns, and then have been playing the new multiplayer modes ever since, just like everyone else. In a couple months no one will care about the 3 mini-campaigns, but people will still be playing Panzerkrieg, Assault, and Stonewall.
It’d be like calling CoD4 “predominately singleplayer.”
@Erlam: I don’t think anybody wants to say anyone is “sub-human,” given the disturbing history of that term. It’s a question of motivation and complicity. Recent scholarship has pretty clearly and overwhelmingly shown the Wehrmacht’s important role in atrocities and the widespread ideological motivation of its soldiers. The relationship between the party (and Hitler as a figurehead) and the citizens of Germany was complex and dynamic, but it’s not accurate to say that the people were terrorized into support or that power was “stolen.” I dunno. Strategic bombing was and is awful and the sufferings endured by the Germans during the war are not debatable, but it’s worth remembering that those sufferings became the main subject of post-war memory, and not the sufferings inflicted on others.
It’s important to remember that the depiction of the decent soldier as opposed to the Waffen SS was itself motivated by the politics of the Cold War. The West decided it needed to rearm Germany and in turn needed to provide a palatable basis for a German military. It’s strange how things seem so distant now; it’s hard to remember that things like Bitburg or the Waldheim affair meant something. But so much nonsense was done in the name of the Cold War. Blah.
@Aufi, I’d like to see any of those games. Or maybe a level where you play as . It comes down to identification, I think. Nobody wants to think of him or herself as bad, and so nobody wants to play a bad protagonist. And nobody wants to lose; games are supposed to be enjoyable. Most games just let you have it all and set everything right. If you didn’t, you would have failed, which would violate the pleasure principle (hah). How then to deal with the fact that bad things happen? There’s only second-person, unfortunately. Call it Kane and Lynch syndrome – playing a “morally ambiguous” character just means being an asshole.
Sorry. Should have said “where you play as
Oh, come on.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugh_Thompson,_Jr.
Interestingly Men of War is a game in which you actually play as the Nazis, because the German campaign frequently puts SS soldiers under your command.
“Interestingly Men of War is a game in which you actually play as the Nazis, because the German campaign frequently puts SS soldiers under your command.”
Ouch.
So does every game that gives you command of a Tiger or Panther. Please read up the difference of the SS and Waffen SS as it couldn’t be any bigger and avoids any more senseless discussions that are related to blatant uneducation in this topic.
Now how about cutting a bit of the N-word and discuss the main issue?
Thanks!
So does every game that gives you command of a Tiger or Panther. Please read up the difference of the SS and Waffen SS as it couldn’t be any bigger and avoids any more senseless discussions that are related to blatant uneducation in this topic.
Um, admittedly I only went as far as Wikipedia (I know, lazy resource for lazy people), but the Waffen-SS were always kept under Nazi party control (Himmler) as the parties armed wing, even if the Army had front-line command for the war.
Unless the game makes an explicit statement that the SS soldiers are conscripts, then they are pretty safely definable as being ‘true’ Nazis.
I think the main point in the review wasn’t so much that playing as “the nazis” was morally wrong more that he didn’t think it was “target audience”.
Probably better to disagree with him on this point (as I do :P) than to go down the moral route which I don’t think he was arguing. “Your stick has been graspeth at the wrong end”
Give us CoH: Eastern Front and I’ll buy it instantly. I will give this a pass though despite my CoH cravings. Tales of Valor seems somewhat similar to Men of War, which doesn’t warrant a new purchase.
I’m fine playing the “evil” side, as long as I’m not forced to execute people and get told it’s something good. I don’t even wanna count the number of people I’ve driven over in GTA 4.
Why does any WW2 game or franchise descend into pointless arguments about WW2 being done to death?
It was the last global conflict with clear moral issues and significant technological advances. The weapons, ships and vehicles of the war are iconic. I would much rather play that period than yet another modern warfare game with M16 wielding marines gunning up arabs in some desert.
Just stick to the topic and stop bashing the sub-genre for existing.
As for ToV – I am a big CoH fan and I agree with the main points in the review. ToV is kind of nice but also kind of lacking. It really does feel like something cobbled together to try and bring in new players, rather than a full expansion like OF was.
I wish I could get my head around Men of War, but it just seems too fiddly and the voice acting makes me want to bash my own brains out rather than put up with it for more than a few minutes.
Unless the game makes an explicit statement that the trooper was a party member, we can pretty safely say they’re not. Since 1940 Waffen-SS recruited conscripts and even fully foreign divisions and by the end of the war over half the force were non-German.
Leadership of the organization were Party members, troopers were not.
Messed up quotations and edit seem to be misplaced, the previous was an answer to this:
“Unless the game makes an explicit statement that the SS soldiers are conscripts, then they are pretty safely definable as being ‘true’ Nazis.”, by aldo_14
Piispa; at the moment I’m trying to root out the composition of the Waffen-SS on the western front at the end of the war (to be really nitpicky, I think foreign Waffen-SS divisions had flags on their helmets rather than SS-symbols). However, one thing regarding foreign divisions is that i’m pretty sure quite a few of these (about 125,000 on the western front) would be volunteers, and from that you can insinuate some degree of pro-nazi leanings. I’m not sure where the 220,000 eastern european volunteers were used.
I’ve been able to glean that some foreign conscript divisions were created for propaganda rather than military use (i.e. British POW-formed divisions). i’m not sure on the German volunteer/conscript ratio.
That said, from a gameplay conceit I’m pretty sure we can at least presume any Waffen-SS unit in the game will be all-German (French, Spanish etc would be needlessly confusing for a player), so it removes the foreign W-SS issue.
All that aside, as a (initially volunteer) organisation which was an express entity of the Nazi party, and declared as such (sans conscripts) at Nuremburg, I think if you can label any one German military group as ‘Nazi’ then this’d be the one. Also, if you are controlling a Waffen-SS unit in the game then there’s an argument that you’re representing (in a sense) the Nazi party (although it’s equally valid to say you’re representing the Wehrmacht).
@aldo_14:
We can only guess the individual reasons for any volunteer to join the German ranks but I can definately say that the minorities previously under Soviet rule in Eastern Europe and Russia had some strong resentment towards the Soviets which created a strong will to join the fight on the German side when Operation Barbarossa begun.
After Finno-Russo Winter War ‘39-’40 ended there was some definite will for rematch in the air which resulted a Finnish Battallion under Waffen-SS “Wiking” division and I can pretty surely say the Party members among those were quite limited and the main reason for joining was the eagerness to fight Soviets. I can imagine same kind of voluntary base from Estonians, Lithuanians, Latvians, Hungarians and whoever joined the ranks of foreign Waffen-SS divisions from the Eastern Europe.
What comes to Nuremburg and war crimes, they are unquestionable but examples from the opposite can be found even from the high ranks of the Waffen-SS:
Felix Steiner was the first Commanding Officer of the “Wiking” division after founding, a traditional prussian soldier since the first World War, decorated as innovative and skillful commander who was imprisoned but cleared of all charges in Nuremburg.
Even the high ranking German officers, even in the Waffen-SS, included those who only did their job – the professional soldiers, not child eating monsters.
This thread stopped being fun when it stopped being about CoH and turned into a discussion on the morales of the Wermacht and the atrocities of WWII.
I think we’re all aware of what happened, although one could argue the new generation are even more distanced from it then us older folks. Having said that, let’s talk about the game, eh?
I’m loving it. Do I have problem with most of being about the Axis? Nah, I love that. They generally had better gear anyway so it’s great to play that side of it, especially with the Tiger and Direct Fire, oh my. I would have liked to see Ruskkies though, especially as the very first cut-scene of Tiger Ace has T-34s.
Oh and yes, I think as Cliffsky said, the value in this for me is more about the added maps and new game types for co-op play. That’s why I bought it and that’s why it will keep me from the debacle that was console-oriented DoW2.
” Also, if you are controlling a Waffen-SS unit in the game then there’s an argument that you’re representing (in a sense) the Nazi party (although it’s equally valid to say you’re representing the Wehrmacht).”
If you just try hard enough you find a nazi in everyone and anything. Just go on excluding every non-nazi and you end up with a bunch of nazis, what a surprise? There is a simple fact, you didn’t need to be a nazi to be a (forced) member of the Waffen SS or Wehrmacht and thus simplifying all to nazis is just non-sense, whatever you try to exclude. Even a lot of hardcore ideology nazis (mostly militarists) were against what the nazi-government did and turned their sides when they found out. The nazi ideology in general was not evil (excluding that an ideology itself is not positive and mostly pervert), but it was used by an evil government that stopped people from seeying the evil things they did by using this ideology.
If there is no glorification of the nazi government or represenation of their ideology displayed in a game than you are simply representing the soldiers and nothing else. The term nazis is simply inappropriate and doesn’t belong to any halfway serious discussion.
“I think we’re all aware of what happened, although one could argue the new generation are even more distanced from it then us older folks. Having said that, let’s talk about the game, eh?”
Yes, please.
It’s quite funny, actually, that the majority of WWII games see Eastern Front as a second-thought at best. Anyone who cares to take more than a passing interest in that war’s history knows that it’s the Eastern Front that held the most important events. I just can’t tell how it’s possible to call your game ‘historical’ in even a smallest way and still hold British-American actions in higher regard than those of Russians.
The British ran from German troops in 1940, betraying Belgium on their way out. They kept playing a I-bomb-you-you-bomb-me game till re-entering the European theatre in 1944. Even than, without Russians intensifying their advance effort after a plea from their allies and thus making Germans withdraw the majority of well-trained troops, the land drop should have failed. Hell, it nearly failed even with second-line German conscripts defending the beach! The war ended with Russians taking Berlin, an action deemed impossible by allied top command. The list goes on and on. The only guys who seem to remember it all were those who have made Close Combat 3, unfortunately.
I understand quite well that the majority of the target audience of such games lives in the West, so this biased approach to history is to be expected. But still, it’s such a waste to dedicate WWII games to Normandy ad nauceam instead of using Russian operations as a background. Just leave out all the nonsense about piles-of-bodies approach to warfare that Russians are believed to follow, please, it’s complete BS.
2prowlinger – can you read anything about WWII and USSR that’s not US standard Coldwar-era propaganda textbook? You definitely should try to before spilling ignorance all over the place.
I mean, there’s plenty of stories to be told about the Eastern front to be sure, but decrying history because a game is about operations by Western powers seems to be one more out of bitterness that your pet game didn’t get made than out of logic.
Honestly, after a dozens of games playing out an American paratrooper of the 101st battling over French farmhouses and/or a infantryman landing on a beach and blowing heads Tom Hank’s style?
There’s five years of war on the European continent and those two poor soldiers get to be the players’ only protagonists again and again.
“World War” could be re-labeled as “a Battle in France around Normandy area”.
OK, maybe I’m a bit harsh there. What I say is, you can’t say that you have described an elephant after painting a verbal picture of the trunk and leaving it at that. Same goes for portraying Normandy as a greatest battle ever held in WWII.
Anyway, may comment is mostly regarding other posts here and the general situation with WWII games, not the Tales of Valour itself.
I think calling them Nazis is not inappropriate, because they fought for the Nazi Administration, and a lot of them were Nazis. The question whether those people were capable of acts of heroism and valour even if they fought in the name of an evil cause is a question that’s been discussed for so long in Germany, I just feel this forum will not contribute anything significant to it.
Here’s another story that makes up the whole:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Battel
It’s odd. Having spent about half of last year actually doing some heavy WW2 research for something or another, it left me with pretty much total contempt for pretty much all sides*. With the possible exception of the Polish.
EDIT: That said, I remember feeling a bit like Alec in the last CoH. Playing Market Garden from the German side, mowing down brainless rush-mobs of paratroopers felt wrong in a game as cinematic as CoH. It didn’t help that I went from watching A BRIDGE TOO FAR to playing it.
KG
*Which is a different thing from saying “They’re all the same”.