You ddidnt play the CoH 3 Alpha (yet), one can assume. Because the game actually doesnt look better than Age4.
The realistic style may be your forte, but it doesnt make the game look better in any capacity. Currently it actually looks a lot worse, but we are in a Pre-Alpha, so thats fine.
I am ot sure if there actally are secondary (B) and primary (A) teams. I think the dev has 300 woekers all of which are part of any team they are assigned.
However I agree that I would have loved better comunication from the beginning as CoH3 does. BUT this leads to some issues, especially if the passionate playerbase doesnt understand what they play.
I can only imagine (also after being in the forum here for a while) that age fans have less knowlege / interest in how games are actually developed. So if we were shown an alpha version (see fan preview) there would be plenty of criticism, some of it necessary and good, other rather useless.
However they must think their playerbase will know what Pre Alpha means. I sure hope they do.
However I assume relic is not 100% responsible for the development of the game. It seems SEGA wants coH3 to be well received by fans, therefore having early feedback rounds. Maybe they also have a more stable build than age 4 had a year ago.
Maybe they think (maybe they are right) CoH is such a nice, it doesnt need an E3 or Presentation asides form a live stream, because they want to mainly catch their niche.
On the other hand, Marketing of Age4 seems to focus on Presentations and building up hype (spoiler: doesnt work for me), so the sensible data like civs etc are not testable by us folks until they are all revealed. It somehow makes sense, I think.
And Age 4 team (MS most likely) must have decided they are so confident in their chosen council that the dont need all the age players input a year before release. and then decided they would rather hype the game up and then start a beta than the other way. I personally wouldhave chosen a different way though.
However with the council, tehy gathererd feedback even earlier than CoH3 does now.
Its like, 3 sides of a coin, so to say.
There is an argument for building up hype, and with the council they didnt really need more player feedback (thats also a LOT to wrk through unless its like the coh feedback page, only 1 place to enter text).
I guess the question is: Does the company want to choose their “most dedicated players” by what they achieve (which is why many PvP streamers are in the council, they gathered a lot of viewers/attention for the game, so they are dedicated, just as great modders or AoEO.2 creators)
Or let they decide the community if they are the most dedicated by letting them log in (technically MS does this With age insider) connect to steam, download the preview and play it?
Basically CoH Pre Alpha is like Age insiders+, how it should work to get the most feedback imo, but also making each player less impoortant. Which is a good thing if you want broad feedback.
Anyways, they chose this way, we have to live with it and I hope that next week after PAX, we will know about the 2 last civs in detail, so we can finally get the invites to beta test, and then give valuable feedback, if only on bugs etc, because the gameplay in general will be set by now. (As seen with CoH 3 the general gameplay direction is ready about a year before release)
Maybe they also learned from DOW 3 and now want to get feedback as early as possible 