Company of Heroes: Tales of Valor

Since you're freed up from juggling the movements of a large number of units, Relic has had a bit of a fiddle with the mechanics, too. The result: direct control. "Controlling an army is a lot of fun, but what about controlling just one or two units?" asks Degnan. "The idea behind this is something that's been looked at in a bunch of other games where they look to take the army combat of an RTS and mix it with the direct control of first-person shooters. Point, click, boom. That's really what it's all about: taking the visceral control and putting it right in the player's hands where it belongs."

You don't have to use direct control, but you'd be daft not to. In the Tiger Ace mission it transforms the way you play: with full control over the direction and timing of fire, you can pick off targets almost as if you're playing a third-person action game. And this will be employed elsewhere in the game. Degnan continues: "Where does it make sense? On a bazooka? Sure, why not. On a flamethrower? Absolutely." If you're worrying about it making the game too easy, there's a yang to the yin. "Its strengths are balanced out by its weaknesses," he reckons. "You sacrifice the amount of units you can control for having really superb control over one squad." Lumbering around in the tank is fun, and even with direct control enabled, with narrow pathways to squeeze through and enemies attacking from all sides, it delivers a satisfyingly tense impression of your best guess as what it would be like to manoeuvre one of these powerful beasts around a town in the heat of battle.

Opposing Fronts added two new factions - the Brits and the German Panzer Elite. The US, the Commonwealth, the Wehrmacht and the Panzer Elite all feature in Tales of Valor, but there are no new additions. Instead, new units are added for each faction, such as the M18 Hellcat tank for the US, replacing the M10 Wolverine. And while the various strands of the game are being treated individually, items you unlock in single-player can be carried over into multiplayer. Each mini-campaign, meanwhile, focuses on a different force: the US, the Panzer Elite and, for the first time in single-player, the Werhmacht. There will be co-op in the Campaign, but Relic's saying nothing right now. Which applies to multiplayer in general.

"The number of multiplayer missions? I'm not at liberty to say, but there's definitely more than a couple," says Degnan, without really saying anything at all. We were told by another Relic staffer to expect "several new multiplayer modes, goals, maps, which we're not going to unveil today; New multiplayer modes that leverage our single-player strength at scripting and bring it over to the multiplayer audience". Make of that what you will, but the attention being lavished on multiplayer is with COH's long-standing fans in mind. "The economy comes in huge in the multiplayer experience," insists Degnan. "The economy is a pacing element; it works with the context of World War II. They were always worried about fuel, about munitions, about having enough men to satisfy the demands of the war."

And these are, after all, the very guys Relic wants you to connect with. "We're telling really intimate stories about World War II," he concludes. "Stories that we care a lot about, that are faithful within the context of the videogame environment to the actual inspirational stories of real people. It's something that we have a lot of respect for. That, more than anything, is what makes us one of the best RTSs out there, if not the best." That, and the economy, stupid.