Company of Heroes 2 was due to come out around about now, but then THQ folded and developers, Relic, were auctioned off to Sega. This has pushed back the World War 2 RTS by a few months. It'll now arrive on JUNE 25, long before Russian winter sets in.

“We hate to disappoint our fans with a later than expected date as we know they are eager to play but we feel that the additional time will help the team deliver the high quality sequel fans deserve” - thus spake producer Greg Williams into the press release robot's listening hole.

“However, the wait won’t be long as players will soon be able to help us test and balance multiplayer in the upcoming Closed Beta.

"Details will follow shortly," he adds.

Exciting news, no? I liked what I played of Company of Heroes 2 very much, because I like Company of Heroes 1 very much, and the sequel seems to be clinging very close to the ideas that made the original great.

This week, Chris and Toms Senior and Francis talk Teleglitch, SimCity, Crysis 3 multiplayer and more. Includes our thoughts on the troubles at Gas Powered Games, Jon Blow's next game, and your
questions from Twitter.

You can subscribe to the podcast on iTunes, or download the MP3 directly. The YouTube version will be going up early next week as I've, er, got a train to catch.

Follow PC Gamer UK on Twitter to be informed when we're putting the call out for questions. Here are our individual accounts:

Chris - @cthursten
Tom F - @pentadact
Tom S - @pcgludo

Show notes

Gas Powered Games' Wildman Kickstarter and Matt Barton's interview with Chris Taylor.
Our collected thoughts on Crysis 3 multiplayer, plus The Hidden: Source mod.
/r/GuildWarsDyeJob, the Guild Wars 2 dress-up subreddit that Chris is weirdly excited about.
The Dota 2 character art guide.
The nascent Twitter feed for the Absolute Bedlam Dota 2 tournament.
Try a round or two of Cheese or Font.

Farewell then, THQ. Yesterday saw the publisher’s final assets sold off to a variety of buyers, and while many good people (and franchises) managed to find a new home, our thoughts and well-wishes are with those that didn’t. As we’re in a reflective mood, we thought it only appropriate to commemorate the loss of this fine company with a look back at ten of the best games it’s delighted us with over the years.

Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War (September 2004)

Tempting though it is to bang on about Relic Entertainment’s wonderful sci-fi RTS Homeworld, it wasn’t until 2004 that THQ took the Vancouver-based studio under its wing. Dawn of War represented the first fruits of that union, and it remains one of the most successful digital adaptations of the tabletop favourite, capturing the appeal of the series in a smart, refined package.

Full Spectrum Warrior (October 2004)

The most satisfying triumphs come from conquering the greatest adversity. Pandemic’s squad-based military shooter was an incredibly demanding game in its day, its punishing authenticity a result of its origins as a US Army-affiliated training simulation. Persistently tense and claustrophobic, it may not have been the dictionary definition of ‘fun’, but it was a sweaty-palmed experience we’ll never forget.

Titan Quest (June 2006)

Time for a lesson in ancient history - well, 2006 does seem a fair while ago these days. THQ managed to temporarily sate appetites for a new Diablo by releasing this gloriously entertaining action-RPG that proves you don’t need an awful lot more than an enormous world and hordes of colossal monsters to biff for a good time. Titan Quest may not have been anything particularly new, but there’s an art to making hacking and slashing as fun as this.

Company of Heroes (September 2006)

Just as the world and his dog was heartily sick of WWII settings, Relic’s blistering RTS managed to make us all care again. ‘Visceral’ may be horribly overused in games criticism, but rarely has the word been applied more accurately than to CoH’s shudderingly intense combat. Tough, gritty and oddly beautiful, it elevated its creator among the giants of the strategy genre.

Supreme Commander (February 2007)

Chris Taylor and Gas Powered Games might be in the headlines for very different reasons at the moment, but back in 2007 this talented studio was making waves with a truly brilliant RTS. Supreme Commander was grand-scale warfare at its most exhaustive and exhausting – with some of the best AI in the business putting up a heck of a fight, every hard-earned victory was worthy of a triumphant air-punch.

S.T.A.L.K.E.R (March 2007)

Frightening, surprising, intense and ambitious? Or scrappy, buggy, overwhelming and confusing? S.T.A.L.K.E.R was all of the above and more, a sandbox-survival horror-RPG-FPS-adventure that cast you as a scavenger around the ruins of Chernobyl. Everyone’s experience was different: ours involved a lot of nervy creeping around in the dark, punctuated by terrified shrieks whenever a mutant spotted us. And we loved (almost) every minute of it.

Red Faction: Guerrilla (September 2009)

God bless Geo-Mod 2.0. It’s rare we’re minded to salute a physics engine, but the unparalleled destruction it enabled is what made Volition’s game such a giddy joy to play. After all, why just shoot an enemy when you can topple a multi-storey building onto him? Expertly paced, with a campaign that escalated into hysterical carnage, Guerrilla may have been unrefined at times but boy was it fun.

Metro 2033 (March 2010)

A rare thing: a great shooter with shooting that isn’t that great. Metro’s gunplay is lacking in feedback, but it’s hard to care too much in a world this rich and enveloping. Every inch of 4A Games’ subterranean nightmare is permeated with an atmosphere so thick you could slice it. This is the FPS as survival horror, and as appropriately brutal and hard-edged as that suggests.

Darksiders (September 2010)

A tilt of the hat to its sequel, too, but we’ve got rather a soft spot for Vigil’s original, even if ‘original’ is hardly a word you’d use to describe Darksiders’ unholy blend of Zelda and God of War. If you’re going to steal, though, then be sure to pinch from the best, and this post-apocalyptic tale did just that, marrying puzzly exploration with thrillingly weighty scraps, topped off nicely by some fine Joe Mad artwork.

Saints Row: The Third (November 2011)

What started out as a poor man’s GTA began to find its own identity in the follow-up, but it wasn’t until the third game that Saints Row realised its true potential. It was a monument to excess, a crude, coarse, tawdry descent into debauchery that was almost operatic in its tastelessness. Some remained immune to its charms (if that’s the right word) but there was genuine sophistication behind the silliness. Dumb, then, but artfully so.

 
 

THQ
1989-2013
RIP
This is no place for a horse.

 
 
 

THQ is no more: the bankrupt publisher and developer auctioned off its assets in U.S. Bankruptcy Court today. Though the court must still approve the sales, a letter from THQ's CEO (which was passed to Kotaku by an employee) reveals the bidders, which include Sega, Ubisoft, Deep Silver, Crytek, and Take-Two, and the THQ franchises and studios they'll acquire. Below is a breakdown of who's getting what, and what led to today's sale.

Who's getting what? Based on what we know right now...

Company of Heroes and Warhammer 40,000 developer Relic Entertainment is going to Sega.

Saints Row developer Volition, Inc. and the Metro series are going to Koch Media (Deep Silver).

The Homefront franchise is going to Crytek.

THQ Montreal and the South Park license are going to Ubisoft.

Evolve, a game in development by Turtle Rock Studios (which worked on Left 4 Dead), is going to Take-Two Interactive.
THQ will "make every effort to find appropriate buyers" for its remaining assets, such as Darksiders developer Vigil Games.


What happened?

On November 13, 2012, THQ announced that it had defaulted on a $50 million loan. Its subsequent Humble THQ Bundle raised about $5 million for THQ, charities, and the Humble Bundle organizers, but it wasn't enough: the company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy on December 19th.

Bankruptcy isn't necessarily the end—Chapter 11 allows the debtor to stay in control of the company under court oversight—but things didn't go as planned. THQ expected to sell itself in whole to a private equity firm called Clearlake Capital Group, but THQ's creditors and the bankruptcy court rejected that proposal earlier this month, which led to today's piece by piece auction.

We're heading towards the conclusion of THQ's ongoing bankruptcy saga. After the publisher's creditors raised objections over its hoped-for quick sale - objections which were upheld by a US judge - details are emerging about how that sale will eventually go down.

THQ had hoped to sell themselves as a whole, ensuring the company could exist as-is under a new owner. That's now not going to happen, after it was decided that a wholesale attempt would fetch less money than dividing the company up and selling each franchise separately. A tweet by the Distressed Debt Investing blog confirms this move, saying "The auction will allow for piecemeal ("title by title") sales of THQ assets"

DDI's latest blog update on the THQ case explains how the sale will work. THQ's properties will be auctioned off on January 22nd, with both titles and studios up for grabs. So far EA and Warner Brothers have been revealed as interested parties, although it's not known which titles they're eyeing up.

Also unclear is how this arrangement will affect THQ's upcoming games. Company of Heroes 2, Metro: Last Light and South Park: The Stick of Truth all seem close enough to completion that a prospective buyer would almost certainly want them released and making money. The status of their other projects - like Volition's Saints Row 4 - may be less secure. This is assuming the auction will keep each developer with their respective games, which itself is far from certain.

We should start to finally get some solid details come the sale hearing on January 23rd. In the meantime, wild speculation! Where would you like to see THQ's many great franchises end up?

Thanks, Polygon.

Last week we brought news that THQ's hopeful quick sale to the equity firm Clearlake was in trouble, following objections raised by a US Trustee and the publisher's own creditors. Today, a US judge has upheld those objections, saying the proposed sale process hasn't given potential buyers enough time to make a bid.

The Clearlake sale was scheduled to complete this week, but US bankruptcy judge Mary F. Walrath has found in favour of the creditors, noting that the aggressive timetable had pushed out other interested parties. "I have problems concluding that the pre-petition sale process was fulsome," she said, finding problem with the way THQ "did not even put out to the public that it was for sale" until after Clearlake had signed a non-disclosure agreement over the deal.

Walrath cited 10 possible buyers that had contacted THQ following its bankruptcy, saying this was evidence that the publisher wasn't doing everything it could to maximise the sale price. She also queried THQ's desire to be sold wholesale, saying "individual titles may have substantial value," and adding that the requirement to purchase the company in its entirety "may depress bids." Despite these concerns, as yet no ruling has been made on whether this requirement will also be blocked.

On THQ's part, the company is claiming it wanted the quick sale to fund the $37.5 million bankruptcy loan it's looking to take out, which would need to be paid by the 15th January. The judge dismissed this, saying "I am not convinced that we are under the gun to have a sale process by the 15th."

The revised date for the sale of THQ has yet to be decided, although the creditors are looking for a three week extension to the process.

Thanks, Gamasutra.

Last month THQ declared bankruptcy and announced plans to sell to the equity firm Clearlake Capital. It was a troubling development for the struggling publisher, but if the sale goes as planned, it will mean they could potentially continue to operate, without the need for staff cuts or game closures. Unfortunately, the sale may not go as planned.

Distressed Debt Investing report that two objections have been filled in the case. The first, raised by the US Trustee overseeing the bankruptcy, is... complicated. Essentially her complaint is that the short timing of the sale and high reimbursement rate unfairly benefit Clearlake. The proposed sale hearing of January 10 and $2.25 million due to Clearlake if another company won the bid essentially block other interested parties from participating.

The second objection was raised by THQ's own creditors, and its motivations are far more obvious. Their problem with the sale is the way THQ management have arranged the terms to favour keeping jobs and ensuring the company's future over debt payments. Standard bankruptcy practice is to chop the company into little bits and sell each one piecemeal. THQ's terms ensure the company would be bought as a whole. Which sounds like a good thing, but it doesn't let the money-men maximise their profits, so obviously it must be bad.

"Taken as a whole, the bidding procedures are designed specifically to ensure that Clearlake is the successful bidder and that the Debtors' business will continue as a 'going concern,' whether or not such outcome would be in the best interests of the Debtors' unsecured creditors and/or maximize the value of the Debtors' estates," the committee of note holders stated.

The court hearing on bidding procedures is scheduled for tomorrow.

Thanks, GI.biz.

Face Off pits two gladiators against each other as they tackle gaming's most perplexing conundrums. This New Year's Eve edition is a chronological throw-down: which decade gave PC gaming the most? Podcast Producer Erik Belsaas says it was the '90s—the origin of modern PC gaming. Executive Editor Evan Lahti insists it was the '00s, with its speedy internet, better PCs, and shinier graphics engines.

Evan: The 1990s had the CD-ROM and the McRib sandwich. The ‘00s had Windows XP and two terrible Star Wars movies. I think the latter birthed better games: the Battlefield series, Crysis, Company of Heroes, BioShock, Dragon Age: Origins, Guild Wars, The Sims, Rome: Total War, Star Wars: KOTOR, and the best Civilization games happened then. What've you got, Erik?

Erik: Lucasarts, id, Ion Storm, Interplay, Blizzard: the iconic names that created franchises that we still discuss today. “RTS,” “FPS,” and “MMO” had no meaning before the pioneers of the '90s came along with some-thing other than sequels and rehashes: Baldur's Gate, Wolfenstein 3D, Duke Nukem 3D, MechWarrior, Unreal Tournament and every LucasArts adventure game from Sam & Max to Grim Fandango.

Evan: This is going to devolve into who can name-drop more game titles, isn't it?

Erik: Pretty much.

Evan: Cool. In that case, let’s put the best we've got on the page. What are the top three games from your decade? Mine: WoW, Counter-Strike, and Half-Life 2.

Erik: Just three? How about X-COM, Fallout, and The Secret of Monkey Island. Timeless classics that we still play today.

Evan: Is that the best that the decade that gave us the Spice Girls has got, grandpa? The innovations of the '00s will last far longer. Half-Life 2 wasn't just the basis for the way modern action games tell stories, it’s the technological foundation for the most ambitious mods we have today and the preferred canvas for machinima creators. World of Warcraft’s meteoric rise brought PC gaming into popular culture, ruined innumerable marriages, and earned its own South Park episode. Top that.

Erik:Your great games are all parts of established franchises that began in the '90s. For that matter, the original Counter-Strike mod came out in 1999, before Valve turned it into a retail product! Take away the names that began in the '90s, the '00s would've created very little of their own.

Evan: Megabyte for megabyte, I’d rather replay Half-Life 2 than its predecessor. Likewise for Diablo II, Warcraft III, Fallout 3 and other major franchises that began in the '90s but matured in the '00s. I really think that the tech of the '00s (better operating systems, fast internet, faster PCs) produced better gaming experiences. EVE Online couldn't exist in the '90s. Team Fortress 2's dozens of free content updates couldn't have streamed down our wimpy modems—the same goes for 25-man WoW raids or a heavily modded playthrough of Oblivion or Morrowind.

Erik: You've got a short memory. EverQuest allowed 72-man raids. And before Oblivion and Morrowind came Daggerfall, which was amazing and heavily modded. Doom, the father of modding, came out in '93.

Evan: I’ll play your game, Belsaas. Here's my ace: Deus Ex, our most favorite game ever, happened in 2000.

Erik: Deus Ex is a good game...but how about StarCraft? Has any other game absolutely defined its genre or rallied an entire nation behind it like a sport?



Evan: I was worried you’d play the Korea card. What can I counter that with? The 100-million-selling main-stream success of The Sims? The booming popularity of independent gaming? ...Peggle?

Erik: Peggle? Well I’ve got...you know...uh...Carmen Sandiego. Fine. Peggle wins.

This article originally appeared in issue 247 of PC Gamer UK. Written by Craig Lager.

War on the Russian steppe is very different to the Normandy landings. You can’t learn about it simply by watching Saving Private Ryan over and over again, for one thing.

“We do an obsessive amount of research about the setting, about our feeling of what the intensity should be, and how to deliver that in a game,” says Relic’s Quinn Duffy. “We could never get close to the real feeling, but we try. Our approach to authenticity is not about getting every bolt in the right place, it’s about making sure that a T-34 feels like a T-34.”

The mission I played was split into two parts: first, raid a small German encampment, then repair and reclaim a broken light tank. Starting out, Company of Heroes 2 feels very familiar – the same view, control scheme and general mechanics as Relic’s last few games welcome you in. But, as you progress, what initially seem like small changes start to make a big difference.

Play CoH2 for long enough and you will get a grounding in unpronounceable tank names.

Weather and the cold play an important role, for example. Just outside that first encampment I split my force up so that half could push straight on, as the other half vaulted a fence and went through a field to flank. I found out too late that the field was covered in deep snow, reducing my units to a crawl. When the Germans spotted them, exposed and trudging through snow drifts, they invented the word ‘schadenfreude’.

Without fire support, my central force was in serious trouble. But this is not Company of Retreaters. They held on, they pushed, and eventually they managed to get close enough to the objective for me to be granted a special ability: air support. Machine guns from a circling plane ripped through the base, slaughtering everyone.

The next job was to traverse the countryside to reclaim a tank on the other side of a frozen lake. The environment in CoH2 can be as deadly as German bullets – without shelter or a fire to keep warm, soldiers will die off, silently falling into the snow one by one as the harsh weather sets in. It’s grim, sombre, and pushes the game more into the moral and ethical reflections of war rather than only blowing stuff up.

Quinn offers another example: “If the enemy leaves a casualty on the battlefield and they’re crawling away, those casualties are still providing line of sight. My decision as a player is ‘do I shoot that guy?’ because he’s giving an advantage to the enemy. It’s just a little thing, but it adds some of that choice and consequence to the battlefield.”

The cold and extreme weather conditions play a big part in CoH2.

‘Run across this frozen lake towards the Germans’ is not the most strategically sound order to have ever been given in a pretend war. However, Russian troops know better than to question orders from The Motherland, so bravely they ran across, and bravely they got pinned down by machinegun fire, and bravely mostly bled to death in the cushioning snow.

Those few survivors didn’t last much longer. The barrage of gunfire had weakened the ice, so when a grenade landed amongst the troops, the outcome was unavoidable. The ice collapsed, plunging them into the frozen depths. A restart and a new strategy of ‘go around the lake’ let me attack the tank’s position. I pushed the Germans back enough for my engineers to reach the tank, get it fixed, and then jump some guys in. The enemy force brought in a tank as well, and we exchanged a couple of shells before that exploded too. I smile and admire the carnage, but then Quinn speaks and I don’t want to smile any more.

“You see one of these tanks blow up? You can draw a lot of inspiration from the experience and horror, because you know it’s not just a tank exploding. There are four or five guys in there burning to death. There’s a pressure to make it feel right.”

Company of Heroes 2 does feel right. What I’ve played perfectly captures the grim tone of war while still being an exciting and tactical RTS. Hopefully you won’t be too depressed to play it.

In a statement released today, THQ announced it filed bankruptcy as part of a sale to equity firm Clearlake Capital. Though financial issues troubled the publisher in the past, the announcement stressed everything will continue as normal while THQ seeks a new owner.

"THQ will continue operating its business without interruption during the sale period," read the statement. "All of the company’s studios remain open, and all development teams continue. Consumers and retailers should see no changes while the company completes a sale. The new financing will support business operations throughout the period. THQ does not intend to reduce its workforce as a result of the filing."

THQ's filing specifically fell under Chapter 11 of the government's Bankruptcy Code, which allows a company to reorganize and essentially get its bearings without disappearing entirely. Which is a good thing, with upcoming games such as Metro: Last Light, Company of Heroes 2, South Park: The Stick of Truth, and Saints Row 4 hanging in the balance.

On a positive note, THQ's substantial success generating over $5 million through its recent Humble Bundle deal boosted its stock nearly 40 percent!