Company of Heroes Steam Update Gets Ridiculous

Fans of the World War II based RTS are in for a bandwidth hurdle. Patches are nothing new for today’s gaming community as developers now frequently release updates to improve game performance, add new features, or fix a game-breaking bug that should have been caught before launch.

However, Relic’s most recent update for their hit RTS title, Company of Heroes, is quite frankly, absurd. The size of the patch for the stand alone expansions, Opposing Fronts and Tales of Valor are over 4.4GB. This completely trounces Relic’s previous enormous 2.101 update which was almost 1.8GB in size.

For the owners of all three pieces of Company of Heroes software on Steam, be sure to only let one game do the downloading as the patch should apply to all three. In other words, if you’re downloading the update for the Tales of Valor expansion, the update should be cancelled for both Company of Heroes and the Opposing Fronts expansion once it’s finished. If you do not have them connected to the same online account however, you may have to end up downloading over 13GB in patches.

To make matters worse, some users are reporting that Steam has ignored the “Do Not Update” notice and proceeded to download the enormous file without some users’ knowledge.

While this may not be an issue for people with excellent internet connections, keep in mind that many users have to deal with bandwidth caps in their respective regions, as exemplified by some frustrated users:

Posted by T@F
This is what annoys me the most.
Many ppl say set it to do not up date,thinking we are stupid.

yet we set it to do not update yet it still updates.
this has cost me money in the past with my isp.

how hard is it for valve to put a piece of code in so if we run the game it says new update out do you wish to download yes/no if no we can still play the game.
But we will always get the prompt when we run the game,until we update it.

Posted by Harle
where I live, it’s very difficult to find limitless traffic. Every ISP is shifting toward limits so they can charge people extra fees for going over. The only reason my current plan is limitless is because I’m technically using someone else’s internet plan, which they’ve had for years and years. The ISP doesn’t offer it anymore.

I understand limitless traffic is more common in the US. Maybe Valve has forgotten to look outside the country.

Unfortunately, Steam users will not be able to install the much smaller retail patch (156MB) due to how Steam manages the files for the game.

So what are we getting in this enormous patch? 6 new maps and balance changes. They better be some really good maps.

Source:
Steam Forums
Company of Heroes Release Notes