Relic to continue supporting Company of Heroes' online, servers moving to Steamworks

After the controlled implosion of THQ, you may have been wondering what would happen to the original Company of Heroes, now that Relic and COH2 have been safely gobbled up by Sega, and its chilli-dog scoffing CEO Mr Hedgehog. The imminent shutdown of Quazal, who handled the game's online, hardly helped matters - but thankfully, Relic have come to a solution . Rather than leaving their six-year-old game to die, they're thoughtfully transferring the original Company of Heroes to Steamworks - you'll be able to 'opt-in' to the new service from April 8th.

Relic have teamed up with Smoking Gun Interactive - a studio made up of former Relic staff who worked on the original game - to bring COH to Steam "with as many of the original online features working on the new platform as possible." That means that the full suite of online options likely won't be available right at the start, but in the blog post Relic talk of a "roadmap" for COH1, so hopefully the game will be back to full strength in the coming months. Heroes' old, Quazal servers are set to close on May 7th.

Sadly, the years of accumulated online data won't carry across to the Steamworks version, but Relic are "investigating the possibility of creating an online archive of all the final data from the leaderboards, statistics, etc, to honor the gamers who have played so much for the last 6 years."

As for the sequel, well that's heading for Steamworks too. Company of Heroes 2 is out June 25th, while the date of its closed beta will be announced early next week.

Tom Sykes

Tom loves exploring in games, whether it’s going the wrong way in a platformer or burgling an apartment in Deus Ex. His favourite game worlds—Stalker, Dark Souls, Thief—have an atmosphere you could wallop with a blackjack. He enjoys horror, adventure, puzzle games and RPGs, and played the Japanese version of Final Fantasy VIII with a translated script he printed off from the internet. Tom has been writing about free games for PC Gamer since 2012. If he were packing for a desert island, he’d take his giant Columbo boxset and a laptop stuffed with PuzzleScript games.