When you give an order to units in that game, they ostensibly follow it.  But oftentimes they don’t, for one of two reasons:

1. You told them to do something like attack-move to the east, and they instead attacked something to the west.
2. You told them to do something, but they are under fire, so they ignore the order (or, do it so slowly that it is ineffectual at best).

These are really two distinct but related flaws.  In the first case, the game is not recognising the user’s intent correctly.  It’s the more minor of the two concerns, since it’s arguable how an attack-move command should be interpreted to begin with.  i.e. does it mean move while attacking, or to attack all nearby enemies and then move only when there are none?  Company of Heroes goes with the later.  I would prefer it be more intelligent, and keeping with it’s faux realism – i.e. units should view an attack-move as a command to take the indicated location, engaging enemies along the way only if it’s either trivial or necessary to that mission.  I’d even accept “necessary to save a friendly unit”, though it risks invoking the second case.

And it’s the second case which is more problematic.  I believe it’s in large part a deliberate design decision.  The game authors have tried to convey their perception of realistic behaviour – that troops under heavy fire will just cower uselessly, perhaps not even returning fire, let alone seeking cover.  There’s even the explicit notions of being suppressed or pinned.  These concepts have been all the rage in real-time strategy for several years now.

I don’t like them.  They take away from the strategy of the game.

Even when not cowering pitifully, if you tell them to sticky-bomb a tank or grenade a fortification, they’ll crawl their way towards it with glacial speed.  That really stretches any representation of reality I can think of.  If you’re in the middle of a nightmare firefight, the last thing you want to do is take ten minutes to actually attack the tank that’s blowing you to pieces.  It would be far more rationale, believable and – from a gameplay perspective – useful if they made an effort to close the distance with a sprint and lob the explosive quickly, then dive for cover.

When I compare Company of Heroes to a premier RTS like Starcraft, a stark difference is apparent.  Units in Starcraft do exactly what they’re told, when they’re told, at their maximum speed.  That might be “unrealistic”, but it makes the game much more nuanced and engaging, since the player remains in control the whole time.  In Company of Heroes, in contrast, you basically arrange your units before the fighting begins, and once it does you have very little control.  About all you can do is order a retreat, though by the time that’s the best option, it’s also generally useless as your troops will often be killed anyway.  It really detracts from the game by drastically limiting the actual gameplay.

It’s kind of like a version of Chess where you play as normal until a piece is taken, and then just whack the board with a shoe, and see which pieces are left standing.  Some people might perceive that it’s a “deeper” form of strategy, having to plan everything far in advance, but I disagree; I think it ends up being a clusterfuck and basically boils the game down to the loathed degenerate form of RTS – build the most of the most powerful unit and hope for the best.  Already this is evident in Company of Heroes where the winning strategy is almost always to just build tanks.  The only time that’s not the winning strategy is when the game artificially limits your ability to build tanks.

It should be a red flag to any game designer if they find themselves arbitrarily limiting the player’s options.  If varied scenarios don’t naturally encourage varied strategies, your gameplay is fundamentally broken.

Unfortunately, performance appears to have come at the cost of reliability.  And boy is it a high cost.

Take Driver: San Francisco and Rage, for example.  Both these games will crash at launch if you have anything other than “English” as your first language in System Preferences.  WTF.  How the hell did they ship a game that won’t even launch if you dare not speak American English as your preferred language?  It’s especially bizarre when you consider that Ubisoft, the publisher of Driver: San Francisco, is headquartered in France.

The fun doesn’t stop there for Driver: San Francisco, oh no.  Even if you can get it to launch at all, it will then not accept any input of any kind while you have a graphics tablet plugged in.  That’s right, any time I want to race around the virtual streets of San Francisco in a crappy 70’s muscle car, I have to not only screw with my system-wide language settings, but disconnect my graphics tablet.  Please draw a schematic diagram indicating how the hell any of this makes any sense.

And the latest crashtastic game I’ve come upon is Company of Heroes.  Once again we get the crash-on-launch mini-game as soon as it’s installed.  Turns out it is allergic to Perian – a Quicktime plug-in providing playback support for a variety of esoteric audio & video formats – and said plug-in must be uninstalled in order for it to run.  Ugh.

Even once you get it running, you’re then faced with periodic hangs.  Sometimes these hangs are so hard they require a hard reset of the entire computer.  Of those that don’t, that I’ve managed to escape from so far, the spindump profile indicates deadlocks in the AI code.

Since that game offers no form of autosave, I’ve lost several hours gameplay already, just in the first week that I’ve been playing it.  It’s getting close to the point where I return the game and demand a refund.

In fairness, I should state that there are other examples of non-existent quality control predating these.  The Civilization series, not to be outdone by these newer games, has been a pillar of both horrible performance and depressing unreliability since version 3.  They’ve also managed to include, in versions 3, 4 and 5, a growing lineage of graphics flaws, including the infamous black ice that foreshadows an imminent crash.  It boggles my mind that Civilization 5 is the top-selling Mac game on Steam, and has been for months and months.  Does that ranking not consider returns?  (does Steam even take returns?)

And Unreal Tournament 2004 had a very special ability to hard freeze my previous iMac.  Although in that case I let the blame slide down to NVidia; as far as I could tell it was their horribly buggy drivers that were the culprit there.

Which brings up NVidia.  I used to at least be impressed by their hardware, but in recent years it has been – even on paper, from a performance perspective – only on par with AMD’s offerings, and the quality has been abysmal.  And their drivers have always, always been terrible.  After having my old iMac die thanks to what I believe is fundamentally a bad GPU, the camel’s back has finally broken.  I will probably never buy another Mac, for myself, containing NVidia hardware.