While not everyone agrees with some of the design decisions taken by Relic on how the team designed Company of Heroes 2, it’s still a pretty decent RTS game that pulls in over 6,000 players a day. The stand-alone Ardennes Assault expansion also represents one of the best war game experiences you can have.
But it’s been seven years since Company of Heroes 2 launched, and given the fact that Relic have since tried to move on to Dawn of War III and even Age of Empires 4, you’d be forgiven for thinking the studio’s WW2 days were behind it. It turns out the developers are not done with the game yet, and this week the RTS received a 64-bit update and new maps.
It’s weird to still be talking about games upgrading to 64-bit in 2021, but it seems for whatever reason Company of Heroes 2 never made the jump back when it was all the rage. The update has been in beta since mid-September 2020, but it’s now ready for prime time and has been rolled out for all owners.
If you’re one of those strange people who are still rocking a 32-bit machine, or just generally take issues with the number 64, there is a ‘legacy branch’ you can access to keep things as they were.
Details on how to access this can be found on the official blog post. The 64-bit update will also enable cross-play between Steam users and anyone playing the game via Game Pass for PC and the Windows Store.
In addition to this technical upgrade, Company of Heroes 2 has also received a major update to its map pool. With the help of the community, ten new maps have been included across the 1v1, 2v2, and the 3v3/4v4 map pool, with a further five existing maps getting a rework.
Related: The best WW2 games on PC
You can read up on the full list of changes and additions here, although it’s worth noting that the focus is on the smaller game modes. A previous map overhaul dealt with the larger game modes.