Company of Heroes 2: how Sega's millions helped Relic's RTS get in great shape

A few hours after Sega bought Relic Entertainment, the Vancouver, Canada real-time strategy specialist whose fate had been up for sale thousands of miles away at the THQ bankruptcy session in Delaware, Company of Heroes 2's designers got back to work.Game director Quinn Duffy and the rest of the development team were in the middle of what's called a "finaling exercise". Amid the uncertainty around the future of the studio, amid the chaos of the collapse of its publisher and owner THQ, all Relic could do was assume Company of Heroes 2 would be released. Indeed it had to - and soon.It had been one hell of a busy Christmas. THQ's high-profile demise had been sniping at the developers' attention for months as Relic battled to get Company of Heroes 2 ready for release before the end of March 2013. "There was a strange mix of feelings on the team because we were all a little bit nervous about what was potentially going to happen," Duffy tells Eurogamer in the basement of a fancy Covent Garden venue converted into a make-believe World War 2 bunker by Sega's marketing and PR teams."We had a sense it was going that way. We didn't know what the end result was going to be. We knew there was going to be a big transition or change of one kind or another. Either THQ was going to resurrect in a completely different form, or we were going to end up somewhere else.""You can't help not think about it," says lead designer Jason Lee. "We're all professionals, so in the end you have to block that out and grind at it. But it does affect your work. You don't know if the project is going to take off."

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/20...in-great-shape