Company of Heroes 3 Campaign Interview: The Myth of North Africa

How does Company of Heroes 3 plan to deal with the myths surrounding German general Erwin Rommel and the desert war in its North African campaign? We’ve spoken to the developers about this difficult topic among other things as they reveal Company of Heroes 3’s second single-player campaign.

Anyone who sets out to authentically portray a piece of world history takes responsibility for doing so sensibly – that goes for authors, filmmakers and game developers. Relic Entertainment has been telling stories from World War II for nearly two decades, setting out to provide a humanized perspective with plenty of grounding. So far, the team has succeeded in most cases – only the Soviet campaign from Company of Heroes 2 falls out of line with its flurry of clichés loosely based on blockbusters like Enemy at the Gates.

The Eastern Front – like almost every theater of World War II – is a source of many myths and stereotypes that still persist today due to their constant retelling in popular culture. North Africa, where Company of Heroes 3 locates its second single-player campaign, is far less present in the media today, but in some ways trumps any other front when it comes to the mythology built around it. For the developers, it was like entering a minefield.

This is mainly because it was not only Nazi war propaganda that portrayed and shaped events there according to its own will. In a unique way, the press of the Western Allies adopted many elements of Göbbel’s mouthpieces and ultimately played a leading role in the constitution of the North African myth after the war. At the center of this mythological web was the personality cult surrounding Erwin Rommel. For Nazi propaganda, he was the epitome of the German soldier: a military genius, and his successes a welcome distraction from looming defeats in the East. For the British and the Americans, the propagated image of the genius was an attractive excuse for military setbacks against a numerically inferior enemy, whom one nevertheless defeated in the end and could therefore admire all the more – a pattern that has existed in historiography since antiquity.

But that was not all: Rommel’s enforced suicide and his involvement in the military resistance against Hitler made him an ideal identification figure for a rapidly rearming Federal Republic and its Western allies. Rommel was the ‘good German’ and soon became a symbolic figure for the disgusting myth surrounding the ‘clean Wehrmacht’, which falsely seeks to absolve regular army units of any responsibility for horrific war crimes, putting them solely on the shoulders of groups like the SS. British authors such as Desmond Young and Basil Liddell Hart popularized this view shortly after the war, which had a long-term effect, and thus reinforced a sanitized image of Rommel, the Wehrmacht and the desert war, which was subsequently declared a clean ‘Gentlemen’s War’ without collateral damage – or, in Rommel’s own words, a “war without hate”.

“This wasn’t the ‘Gentlemen’s War’ or ‘Gentlemen’s Theater’ as it’s sometimes referred to – there were people living in this area, it had an effect on them, and it wasn’t just set-piece battles”, explains senior mission designer David Milne to GLHF. “Pretty early on, we decided not to stick to the romanticized aspect of that. Those cultural consultants, we’ve worked with them from a pretty early stage, because we wanted to make sure that we are telling this authentic, humanized story. It was really great working with those experts and making sure that we’re telling this story in the right way and in an appropriate way.”

The developers soon realized, after doing their own research, that they needed support to see through the mythological fog surrounding North Africa. This is all the more important because the campaign set there puts players in the role of Rommel’s Afrika Korps as it advances in 1942, threatening to overrun the British colonial territories. Players are allowed to contribute to the battles for Ajdabiya, Tobruk, Gazala and El-Alamein, among others, which would have made it all too easy for the developers to uncritically adopt the old propaganda to feed their players’ power fantasies.

The stereotypical image of the theater is broken in several ways. Italian troops, for example, who are otherwise often ignored or portrayed as incompetent hangers-on to the Germans, take on an important role as AI allies and can be called into battle as reinforcements. The same goes for units from different parts of the British Empire, such as India, which helps to really represent the actual diverse makeup of the troops fighting there. The design of the maps also assists with this, as Milne explains, because it wasn’t just empty desert areas that battles took place in: “There is kind of a myth around that, too, that it’s just these wide open plains, where there is nothing.” Instead, the campaign also takes you through sprawling coastal towns, small fishing villages, and nomadic encampments – all the while clearly showing the destruction the players’ efforts wreak on these lands. The North African Operation trailer, which follows a local woman who has to witness the destruction of her home, already sets this tone.

North Africa offers significantly different terrain than Italy, where verticality plays a far greater role and where the other single-player campaign is set. The experiences of the two campaigns differ in another critical point: In Italy, Relic relies on the newly introduced dynamic campaign map, which is reminiscent of the Total War games in style and offers players more freedom in the ways with which to achieve their objectives. In contrast, the North African campaign is an old-school campaign as found in previous Company of Heroes games: players advance from mission to mission in a linear manner, creating a focused narrative. At the same time, this gives the developers more control over how the conflict is presented.

For the team, offering two different experiences was a fairly simple decision. “One of the reasons for that is just the variety of it. We’ve certainly put a lot of time and effort into this new dynamic campaign and it’s something we’re really excited for players to finally get their hands on, but at the same time we know our players also love that classic Company of Heroes, more linear, cinematic experience. We saw an opportunity to do both here. Just a ‘why not both?’ kind of scenario, that’s really what it amounts to,” says Milne, who clearly enjoys being in the position to put two such different single-player experiences in front of the community. “It was always our goal to aim for having the biggest amount of content for launch that we can, and this seemed like a clear route towards that.”

Milne says that feedback on the dynamic campaign so far has been very positive. He personally enjoys seeing the excited fan reactions to historical vehicles, units, and moments that he’s put in there specifically for history-savvy users. It’s basically a version of your typical MCU and Star Wars cameos and easter eggs, only for us history nerds. Last year’s demo and the feedback on it have allowed him to create more such moments. His goal is to make sure that “we are representing the width and breadth of experiences in our campaign. In our campaign, certainly in the Italian dynamic campaign map, we’ve got missions of different size, scope and scale. You can have two missions back-to-back and they can be very, very different experiences,” Milne sums up.

You can get a taste of the classic-style campaign in North Africa as well as the gameplay of the German Afrika Korps for yourself right now, as the first mission is available on Steam as a free demo. Here you’ll have to cut off the British forces around the town Ajdabiya in the course of 1942’s Operation Theseus in Libya. Be sure to leave feedback for the developers if you feel strongly about certain aspects of the gameplay slice. One thing is already certain: The team is very eager to listen to every voice out there to ensure that Company of Heroes 3 has something to offer for any taste when the game launches on Nov. 17, 2022.

You can read more about the Afrika Korps’s gameplay and other new features of Company of Heroes 3 in our interview focusing on multiplayer and Relic’s ‘CoH-Development’ approach.

Written by Marco Wutz on behalf of GLHF.