Company of Heroes 3: Operation Torch arrives November 25 - PC first, consoles wait, and it's a campaign, not a ladder patch

Fifteen missions. That's the number that matters, because Company of Heroes 3 has gone more than three years without a single new chunk of proper single-player content. Battlegroup DLC after battlegroup DLC, all of it aimed at the multiplayer crowd. Operation Torch is Relic finally turning around and looking at the people who bought the game to play a campaign.

The basics: it releases on November 25, it's on PC via Steam, and there's no console date yet. If you play on PS5 or Xbox Series X/S, you're waiting with no timeline - and given that the console versions haven't been getting the same updates as PC lately, I wouldn't hold my breath. Pricing hasn't been announced at the time of writing, so ignore anyone quoting a number before the Steam page does.

What you get is a story-driven American campaign covering the Allied landings in Vichy-held Algeria and Morocco in 1942, the beating at Kasserine and the push on Hill 609. It's told through three American soldiers, and you start with a green army that hardens over the course of the 15 missions. Upgrades you earn - from main objectives and optional ones - carry through the whole campaign, and Relic says you'll make choices between missions that shape how your force plays.

Now the bit for anyone who lives in automatch. Nothing Relic has shown points to new multiplayer units, maps or battlegroups here. This is a solo product. If you're grinding 1v1 and wondering whether you need it to stay competitive, the answer based on what's announced is no - your build orders are safe. Keep an eye on the patch notes around launch anyway, because Relic has a habit of bundling balance changes with content drops.

My honest take: persistent progression across a linear campaign is exactly what CoH3's Italian dynamic campaign was missing - stakes that carry forward without a map-painting layer that bogged everything down. North Africa was also the best part of the base game's single-player, the original Afrika Korps operation. Going back to the desert with a tighter, mission-by-mission structure is the right call. Whether it's worth the money depends on a price we don't have yet, and on whether those between-mission choices actually change how fights play, or just tweak a few percent here and there.

It also lands right in the series' 20th anniversary window, after the 3.0 Anniversary Update and alongside the upcoming Company of Heroes: Definitive Edition. Busy month for Relic. Let's see if the campaign has the depth to match the timing.

Image: dronepicr / CC BY 2.0, source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Company_of_Heroes_3_exhibition_stand_at_Gamescom_2022_in_Cologne,_Germany_(52759811991).jpg