Just playing through the entirety of Company of Heroes, a 2006 game, and it's still mindblowingly awesome. Much of which Company of Heroes brought to the RTS table (destructible environments and deformable terrain, focus on smaller scale and tighter designed and balanced combat scenarios, less yet more powerful units), DICE began to implent into the Battlefield games, starting with the console exclusive Battlefield : Bad Company (2008). They stayed on that path up until Bad Company 2, and have kinda veered back to their roots with BF3 (which I passionately hate, yet play regardless).

Do you see Company of Heroes influence too? And boy don't you wish Relic would make a direct Battlefield competitor? A Company of Heroes competitive online multiplayer shooter? After playing most of their body of work this last couple of months, I'm sure they'd do a stellar job on such a thing. And after selling 14+ million copies of BF3, it's really time some other developers try their hand at the sandbox shooter genre. Gold Rush time!

The guys at Relic are making a Company of Heroes 2 which will be an rts and futher more i think we can all agree that the market is overflooded with shooters. 

No, to the last question. I still wish Relic would make a modern successor to Homeworld.

But I never really thought about how CoH might have influenced DICE. It's an interesting thought, and it wouldn't be too surprising if it had happened on a subconscious level at least.

@Seppli said:

Do you see Company of Heroes influence too?

I don't think CoH had anything to do with the direction Battlefield went in.

And boy don't you wish Relic would make a direct Battlefield competitor?

I really don't.

A Company of Heroes competitive online multiplayer shooter?

No thank you.

@Witzig said:

The guys at Relic are making a Company of Heroes 2 which will be an rts and futher more i think we can all agree that the market is overflooded with shooters.

Sure, I'm looking forward to Company of Heroes 2. Likely going to be yet again the crowing jewel of the RTS genre. Yet I'm kinda in love with the idea of Relic making a direct Battlefield competitor. Just because I'm afraid I'm not going to like where EA and DICE are taking the Battlefield franchise, and competition is a great thing.

I fondly remember the days, when Novalogic's Joint Operations & add-ons were my first choice in 'Battlefield' games. Good times.

@Witzig said:

@Seppli: Well you could trade destructibility of BF3 for the huge amount of custom mods and features found in ARMA 2 if you don't like EA's and Dice's approach to the Battlefield franchise anymore.

I like Battlefield of the Bad Company variety, so ARMA is entirely in the wrong direction of what I'm after in a sandbox military shooter with vehicles... mil sims are not it.

Battlefield 3 puts gritty 'authenticity' over playabilty. I like design that involves 100% tracer rounds and such, stuff that makes it more of a game, and less of a representation of reality.