The first details have appeared online regarding the recently announced Company of Heroes 2.

Company of Heroes is regarded as one of the finest RTS games ever made, but can its sequel live up to expectations? The game will apparently contain lots of snow, Russians, Nazis, and highly destructible environments. The full details are below:

• Company of Heroes 2 will take place on the Russian front, with players controlling the Soviets as they battle the invading Nazi forces.

• Snow plays a major part on the battlefield, falling and melting dynamically and slowing your soldiers and tanks based on its depth.

• The game runs on the Essence 3 engine, the latest version of the graphics engine Relic has been updating and expanding upon for years.

• The cover system has been revamped to function more realistically and allow soldiers to vault over obstacles.

• Line of sight plays a large tactical role, with the game’s fog-of-war based on what your soldiers can actually see. Relic calls this system “True Sight,” and it causes areas of the map to be grayed out and enemies within turned invisible by buildings, items of cover, or dropped smoke grenades.

• The Normandy landing that opened Company of Heroes (and Saving Private Ryan, one of its key inspirations), was the 23rd-biggest battle of World War II. According to Company of Heroes lead designer Quinn Duffy, “13 of the 15 bloodiest battles” in WWII happened on the Eastern front. The game should represent those battles—and their vicious scale—as much as it does minute infantry tactics.

• Just like in the original, the scenery’s highly destructible, and you’ll be given control of plenty of tanks and other explosive equipment. That includes barn-burning flamethrowers.

• Multiplayer will be included, but Relic isn’t ready to talk about it yet.

• The game is due out 2013.

Source: PC Gamer