On February 1st, 17:00pm GMT we launch Battalion 1944 into Steam Early Access.

This is a huge milestone for everyone who has supported us at events, through our Alpha tests and all the way into our recent Beta. Now is finally the time when the closed doors will open and everyone will be able to join us in creating the true successor to great shooters of the past.

We’re expecting a large influx of new players and your opinions matter. If you’ve enjoyed the game throughout Alpha/Beta, positive Steam reviews will help us reach as many people as possible to ensure the largest impact on day one. We have listened to your feedback to get us to this point, and now the real fun begins.

For those who want to jump on board with our ongoing development - here’s a few of the options we’ll have for you to get access to the game on day one.


For soldiers who want to really show their support of the development of the game, we are giving you guys the option to upgrade to the ‘First To Fight’ edition. This edition includes extra bonus content that will help you kickstart your weapon skin collection as well as the Battalion 1944 Original soundtrack in its entirety.



The First To Fight Edition includes:

• Battalion 1944 Core Game
  
• 5x 'The Originial War Chests'
  
• Exclusive ‘First To Fight’ Trench Gun Weapon Skin
  
• Battalion 1944 Original Soundtrack

The Battalion 1944 ‘First To Fight’ Edition will cost $24.99.





If you already own Battalion 1944 - you will have the option to upgrade later via the ‘Upgrade Pack’ which will cost $12.99. This includes the exact same bonus content as the First To Fight edition, minus the base Battalion 1944 base game.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qV2X_tGNwvk
All of the bonus content included in these editions are entirely optional and in no way affects the down the barrel gameplay of Battalion 1944!


We decided to price Battalion 1944 at an insanely low price point to give you guys as much value for your money as we could afford. Our $14.99 price point reflects our ethos heading into Early Access, where you guys get access to the game early in return for helping us shape the game. On top of this we’re adding a small 10% launch discount for all the day one adopters as an extra thanks for checking out our game.

We’re planning to be in early access for just one year - in which we shall be adding new features and content as well as regular spot fixes and patches. Once we’ve hit our year one milestone we shall release out of Early Access at a higher price along with even more new content.

You can read our full Steam Early Access road map right here:
http://www.battaliongame.com


If you’re a Kickstarter backer or you pre-ordered via Humble Bundle last year, you should have received your Battalion 1944 Steam key via email. This is NOT the same as the Battalion 1944 Test Zone key. If you’re missing your key when you’re 100% sure you have not received your key, please make sure to contact our community manager @BigTuna via Twitter.

All Kickstarter Backers and Humble Supporters will receive 3 free war chests as an extra thanks for your support!


Now this one’s huge.

Battalion 1944 Competitive Matchmaking will launch into Early Access February 8th, 2018.

This will give you one entire week to practice on unranked, arcade and community hosted servers ready for the competitive matchmaking launch day.

Ranked play will match players against each other of similar skill level with a hidden ELO system. Players will initially be put into placement matches with other players who are also completing their placements. Once all 10 placement matches are complete, you will then be put into a ranking division, either Bronze, Silver, Gold or Diamond. The goal of ranked play is for players to find others of a similar skill level and strive towards self improvement and teamplay.

To partake in ranked play, you must first reach at least level 10 (which shouldn’t take too long for players who grind the game on launch!).



Above is the full list of competitive ranks, all the way from Bronze Recruit to Diamond World Elite. Where do you think your road to becoming a professional player begin?

Other features/fixes coming out with the week 1 patch include:

• VOIP will be added to the game
  
• Equipped weapon skins will be enabled on unofficial community servers.
  
• Distributed servers will show if they are not up to date via the server browser.
  
• Networking improvements.
  
• Other small tweaks and fixes.

Bulkhead took the decision to not back any first week tournaments with prize money because we wanted to see which tournament providers would provide a good experience. However, we have worked with organizers to provide servers and some War Chest prize pools! Consider these first tournaments tests, have a good time and lets see who’s going to be THE FIRST winner of a Battalion tournament!

Want to take your team to the next level or jump straight into competitive play before the release of ranked matchmaking? On February 3rd Battalion 1944’s first weekly community hosted tournament will begin with the “BLITZKRIEG BATTLE” series.

BLITZKRIEG BATTLE (EU)



The Blitzkrieg Battle, community hosted and ran by ‘The Plays’ will take place online and will be broadcast via Twitch. 64 teams will compete to be crowned the first winner of a community hosted Battalion 1944 tournament. We fully endorse this kind of community initiative and have helped hook these guys up with the right people from Multiplay to run community hosted competitive servers for their event. This a great first step in seeing this community evolve.

WISEFRAG WEEKLY (NA)

The team at Wisefrag have put together a cup in North America.
Sign Up Here


Talks With ESL

On the subject of Battalion 1944 and competitive tournaments, we tweeted a photo this week that showed we’d been visiting ESL’s UK Office. We had a lot of questions that obviously we’d love to answer, but we can’t do that just yet! It’s safe to say the future of Battalion’s esport scene is in great hands and we’re really excited to see which players rise to the top.



We’ve had many meetings over the last 2 years with ESL who have been incredibly supportive of our efforts, but we just wanted to let you all know that the future looks bright but unfortunately, this is just a teaser of what’s to come!


War chests are the cosmetic only unlock system in Battalion 1944. Warchests can be obtained entirely for free by leveling your account via experience points or purchasing them for $1.75 each. Every level progression will reward a player with one free War Chest, which can be opened for free without the need of any sort of ‘key’ to unlock the chest. Inside each Warchest is a guaranteed weapon skin unlock, which can be equipped in the inventory or traded/sold via the Steam Marketplace.

You also have the entirely optional choice of purchasing extra War Chests. We see this as a way for people to further financially support the future of Battalion 1944 - where profits gained will be put straight back into development of post release content, and competitive tournament prize pools.



To see the skins available in ‘The Original War Chest’ - take a look at this fan made website posted on Reddit - https://www.reddit.com/r/Battalion1944/comments/7tj9xz/i_made_a_website_showing_off_battalion_1944/


If you’ve played Bulkhead Interactive’s previous game, The Turing Test, you will be in for a nice surprise on February 1st inside your Steam inventory!



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o4m6sTdelDA


You guys asked for map updated map overviews and call outs of every level which is being included in Early Access, so we’ve delivered. Click each thumbnail to expand!

Coastal





Derailed





Manorhouse v1





Manorhouse v2





Liberation





Battery





Outpost





AimMap_01




Good news Linux fans!
Linux distributed server files will be available February 1st for all your dedicated server hosting needs. If you’d like to pre-order a dedicated community server, head over to:
Multiplay!

If you’re looking for help on how to set up your dedicated server, check out our newly hosted wiki.battaliongame.com ! It should help you guys out with server commands and tips on day 1!

Alternatively you can also check out this guide in-game through Steam right here:
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1287190221


Want to set up a competitive Battalion 1944 tournament? Read the ruleset and get prepared right here: http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1287213024


Our lead programmer, James Tatum, has released some cool stats for programmers interested in Battalion 1944’s ongoing development. These facts include infomation such as how Battalion 1944’s code base has over 100,000 lines of code, and the busiest month saw nearly 24,000 lines of code written! You can follow him on twitter if this is your kind of thing.


Big things are coming. Let your friends know the release date and get your squad online and be the first to fight on February 1st. Leave a Steam review to let us know your thoughts and spread the word about the true successor to the classic shooters of the past.

This is Battalion 1944.

On February 1st, 17:00pm GMT we launch Battalion 1944 into Steam Early Access.

This is a huge milestone for everyone who has supported us at events, through our Alpha tests and all the way into our recent Beta. Now is finally the time when the closed doors will open and everyone will be able to join us in creating the true successor to great shooters of the past.

We’re expecting a large influx of new players and your opinions matter. If you’ve enjoyed the game throughout Alpha/Beta, positive Steam reviews will help us reach as many people as possible to ensure the largest impact on day one. We have listened to your feedback to get us to this point, and now the real fun begins.

For those who want to jump on board with our ongoing development - here’s a few of the options we’ll have for you to get access to the game on day one.


For soldiers who want to really show their support of the development of the game, we are giving you guys the option to upgrade to the ‘First To Fight’ edition. This edition includes extra bonus content that will help you kickstart your weapon skin collection as well as the Battalion 1944 Original soundtrack in its entirety.



The First To Fight Edition includes:

• Battalion 1944 Core Game
  
• 5x 'The Originial War Chests'
  
• Exclusive ‘First To Fight’ Trench Gun Weapon Skin
  
• Battalion 1944 Original Soundtrack

The Battalion 1944 ‘First To Fight’ Edition will cost $24.99.





If you already own Battalion 1944 - you will have the option to upgrade later via the ‘Upgrade Pack’ which will cost $12.99. This includes the exact same bonus content as the First To Fight edition, minus the base Battalion 1944 base game.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qV2X_tGNwvk
All of the bonus content included in these editions are entirely optional and in no way affects the down the barrel gameplay of Battalion 1944!


We decided to price Battalion 1944 at an insanely low price point to give you guys as much value for your money as we could afford. Our $14.99 price point reflects our ethos heading into Early Access, where you guys get access to the game early in return for helping us shape the game. On top of this we’re adding a small 10% launch discount for all the day one adopters as an extra thanks for checking out our game.

We’re planning to be in early access for just one year - in which we shall be adding new features and content as well as regular spot fixes and patches. Once we’ve hit our year one milestone we shall release out of Early Access at a higher price along with even more new content.

You can read our full Steam Early Access road map right here:
http://www.battaliongame.com


If you’re a Kickstarter backer or you pre-ordered via Humble Bundle last year, you should have received your Battalion 1944 Steam key via email. This is NOT the same as the Battalion 1944 Test Zone key. If you’re missing your key when you’re 100% sure you have not received your key, please make sure to contact our community manager @BigTuna via Twitter.

All Kickstarter Backers and Humble Supporters will receive 3 free war chests as an extra thanks for your support!


Now this one’s huge.

Battalion 1944 Competitive Matchmaking will launch into Early Access February 8th, 2018.

This will give you one entire week to practice on unranked, arcade and community hosted servers ready for the competitive matchmaking launch day.

Ranked play will match players against each other of similar skill level with a hidden ELO system. Players will initially be put into placement matches with other players who are also completing their placements. Once all 10 placement matches are complete, you will then be put into a ranking division, either Bronze, Silver, Gold or Diamond. The goal of ranked play is for players to find others of a similar skill level and strive towards self improvement and teamplay.

To partake in ranked play, you must first reach at least level 10 (which shouldn’t take too long for players who grind the game on launch!).



Above is the full list of competitive ranks, all the way from Bronze Recruit to Diamond World Elite. Where do you think your road to becoming a professional player begin?

Other features/fixes coming out with the week 1 patch include:

• VOIP will be added to the game
  
• Equipped weapon skins will be enabled on unofficial community servers.
  
• Distributed servers will show if they are not up to date via the server browser.
  
• Networking improvements.
  
• Other small tweaks and fixes.

Bulkhead took the decision to not back any first week tournaments with prize money because we wanted to see which tournament providers would provide a good experience. However, we have worked with organizers to provide servers and some War Chest prize pools! Consider these first tournaments tests, have a good time and lets see who’s going to be THE FIRST winner of a Battalion tournament!

Want to take your team to the next level or jump straight into competitive play before the release of ranked matchmaking? On February 3rd Battalion 1944’s first weekly community hosted tournament will begin with the “BLITZKRIEG BATTLE” series.

BLITZKRIEG BATTLE (EU)



The Blitzkrieg Battle, community hosted and ran by ‘The Plays’ will take place online and will be broadcast via Twitch. 64 teams will compete to be crowned the first winner of a community hosted Battalion 1944 tournament. We fully endorse this kind of community initiative and have helped hook these guys up with the right people from Multiplay to run community hosted competitive servers for their event. This a great first step in seeing this community evolve.

WISEFRAG WEEKLY (NA)

The team at Wisefrag have put together a cup in North America.
Sign Up Here


Talks With ESL

On the subject of Battalion 1944 and competitive tournaments, we tweeted a photo this week that showed we’d been visiting ESL’s UK Office. We had a lot of questions that obviously we’d love to answer, but we can’t do that just yet! It’s safe to say the future of Battalion’s esport scene is in great hands and we’re really excited to see which players rise to the top.



We’ve had many meetings over the last 2 years with ESL who have been incredibly supportive of our efforts, but we just wanted to let you all know that the future looks bright but unfortunately, this is just a teaser of what’s to come!


War chests are the cosmetic only unlock system in Battalion 1944. Warchests can be obtained entirely for free by leveling your account via experience points or purchasing them for $1.75 each. Every level progression will reward a player with one free War Chest, which can be opened for free without the need of any sort of ‘key’ to unlock the chest. Inside each Warchest is a guaranteed weapon skin unlock, which can be equipped in the inventory or traded/sold via the Steam Marketplace.

You also have the entirely optional choice of purchasing extra War Chests. We see this as a way for people to further financially support the future of Battalion 1944 - where profits gained will be put straight back into development of post release content, and competitive tournament prize pools.



To see the skins available in ‘The Original War Chest’ - take a look at this fan made website posted on Reddit - https://www.reddit.com/r/Battalion1944/comments/7tj9xz/i_made_a_website_showing_off_battalion_1944/


If you’ve played Bulkhead Interactive’s previous game, The Turing Test, you will be in for a nice surprise on February 1st inside your Steam inventory!



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o4m6sTdelDA


You guys asked for map updated map overviews and call outs of every level which is being included in Early Access, so we’ve delivered. Click each thumbnail to expand!

Coastal





Derailed





Manorhouse v1





Manorhouse v2





Liberation





Battery





Outpost





AimMap_01




Good news Linux fans!
Linux distributed server files will be available February 1st for all your dedicated server hosting needs. If you’d like to pre-order a dedicated community server, head over to:
Multiplay!

If you’re looking for help on how to set up your dedicated server, check out our newly hosted wiki.battaliongame.com ! It should help you guys out with server commands and tips on day 1!

Alternatively you can also check out this guide in-game through Steam right here:
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1287190221


Want to set up a competitive Battalion 1944 tournament? Read the ruleset and get prepared right here: http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1287213024


Our lead programmer, James Tatum, has released some cool stats for programmers interested in Battalion 1944’s ongoing development. These facts include infomation such as how Battalion 1944’s code base has over 100,000 lines of code, and the busiest month saw nearly 24,000 lines of code written! You can follow him on twitter if this is your kind of thing.


Big things are coming. Let your friends know the release date and get your squad online and be the first to fight on February 1st. Leave a Steam review to let us know your thoughts and spread the word about the true successor to the classic shooters of the past.

This is Battalion 1944.

Hopefully this will be yet more evidence of the bright future of Battalion’s competitive scene.

We don’t just listen to the community and react. We make our own assessments. We watch your feedback come in and evolve as more hours are put into the game. We then read and listen to your feedback on reddit/twitter/steam and we discuss potential fixes for your issues. Then we implement/test, and finally we push the game to the community for feedback!

First off we’d like to just give the community a small insight into the future of Battalion as a competitive title. Obviously the competitive side of the game is a huge focus for Battalion but we aren’t going to start with a huge prize pot without first growing the competitive scene. Our goal is to see each event grow bigger than the last. In the last 12 months we’ve seen multiple games grow too quickly in the esports scene without building the game on a solid foundation. Since the big success of our beta, we’ve been presented with so many amazing opportunities to push Battalion as not just a competitive game but to also have a professional scene as well.

We’re humbled to be presented with these opportunities but we wanted to let the community know that, regardless of how much money gets thrown at events and tournaments, the most important thing to us is to keep our focus on fostering growth in our fan base and our competitive scene, it is not possible to buy your way into esports.

To grow the game competitively we need you guys to continue your support and patience! We also would like to stress the importance of Clanwars going forward, being able to compete against other teams without ever having to leave the game is a huge step forward for a competitive game like ours. On top of this, we have some huge announcements on the horizon, surrounding Clanwars.

So whilst we’ve had many offers for events, we’re choosing to support a select group who share our ideas of steady growth. If you are an event or organisation looking to collaborate, please don’t hesitate to contact esports@bulkheadinteractive.com





Changes to Mid-Air Accuracy
We’ve acknowledged that beta players felt the time to kill was too low and that corner strafing/jump peeking was too common. Previously in Battalion, weapons were 100% accurate in the air. We have now added another layer of depth to the game, to reduce the amount of ‘flying around corners’complaints. Whilst strafing around a corner is still a valid strategy, it should no longer be the most optimal way to approach a gun fight, allowing for more options.

These changes affect the scoped rifles & the Kar98 most of all. For an amount of time when a player is in the air, they will no longer be able to hit perfectly accurate shots. This change is ONLY applied to horizontal movement (X & Z axis), if you stand still and complete a regular vertical jumpshot, you will retain 100% accuracy.

This change has been applied to the following weapons at different levels of inaccuracy:

• Kar98 Sniper (Extreme)
  
• Springfield (Extreme)
  
• Kar98k (High)
  
• STG44 (Medium)
  
• BAR (Medium)
  
• Thompson (Minor)
  
• MP40 (Minor)

BAR & STG44 Movement Speed Changes
After much discussion between the developers and the community, we have decided to buff the BAR & STG movement speed across the board. Firstly, we have increased ADS movement speed on the BAR & STG by 20%. This change is intended to make peeking corners more viable and remove the necessity to strafe round every corner.

We have also given the BAR & STG a buff by making their regular movement speed 20% faster.

Kar98k ADS speed changes
We have made the Kar98k’s general move speed slower, however the ADS speed is the same. We have moved away from any class based movements and adopted more weapon specific movement speeds.

This change is not as drastic as it sound and works out as more of a buff to the other weapons than it does a nerf to the Kar98k itself. This again feels a lot more balanced when we have tested it internally. It’s worth noting that its counterpart, the M1 Garand, now has faster movement speed in ADS than the Kar98k. This is to keep each factions weapons asymmetrical by design, giving each faction and team their own advantages and disadvantages.

The Garand has the faster shoulder peek but takes 2 bullets to kill!

Sniper Rifles Movement Changes
Previously, the snipers were set at the ‘medium’ movement speed. The Springfield and the Kar98 Scoped will both now have a reduced ADS walk speed and their overall movement speed will be slower. Generally, all the classes aren’t too dissimilar in speeds at the slow/medium level. But we felt the snipers were so fun to use for players that we didn’t want to nerf them by hurting the weapon. So we decided to nerf it in other ways. So far the sniper, still feels great but feels A LOT more balanced than it was.

Kar98 Scope Sight Changes
There was a consensus that the Kar98 scope in ADS wasn’t as appealing as the Springfield's. While we like the asymmetrical nature of the rifles, we wanted to make the sight feel a bit better. It’s a minor change but we’ve made the sticks/bars in the sight thinner & skinnier. You can see the change below.



Sniper Forced Unscope
Previously, snipers were able to take a shot and remain in scope while bolting the weapon. Now, the player is forced to unscope.

This functions the exact same way as Call of Duty 4, so it is worth noting, when you take a shot, you will need to manually press unscope, to not feel ‘stuck’ otherwise you will feel slow. This is just an extra layer of mechanical mastery that adds another layer of skill to high level sniping Battalion.

Hopefully, with all changes considered, snipers will no longer be overpowered and they will still feel great to play.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S0_Fa6NOdmk&feature=youtu.be

Pistol speeds
As part of our movement changes, the pistol now also has its own unique speed. SMGs and default weapons are slightly faster than the pistol, however other weapons are slower. Keep this in mind when you’re rushing to get that pick!

Fixed Exploits on Derailed
Various unfair spots and strange angles have been fixed.

Upottery Training Map Fixes
Black lighting errors on Upottery have been fixed, it now also has a loading screen.

Going into beta, we were already aware of issues with spawns in CTF, DOM, and TDM. The community tested the beta and came to the same conclusion that the spawns were not good enough. Fortunately we had started work on arcade spawns already and we were able to get them in just in time, we’ve tested them internally and they are much more intelligent!

Dedicated Server Files
We will be releasing the dedicated server files via the Steam tools section on February 1st. You will be able to host your own servers easily.

Player Counts
Technically, you can run a 50v50 game if you so wish!
However, we have tested the game with 18 players max, so anything after that is uncharted territory. As part of our “Major Content Update” in summer 2018 (www.battaliongame.com) we plan to include ‘large map support’ so that players can begin to play games with larger server numbers.

Please remember, the more players in a game, the more your frame rate will be affected.

Pre-Order Gameservers
We’ve been working with Multiplay who host all of our matchmaking servers, but they will also be hosting servers for players who want to run their own game! Their servers will be limited for 60 tick for now this will change in the future.

Visit https://www.multiplaygameservers.com/game-servers/battalion/ to pre-order your dedicated servers ready for Day 1 of Early Access.

Tick Rate
After much deliberation, we have decided to run our matchmaking servers at 60 tick. There are multiple reasons for this and it is important that server providers read this. We fully intend to offer 128 tick servers in the near future, but currently with our time constraints there are bugs with 128 tick. Some animation related and some spectator related. Clanwars is in its early stages but we intend for it to use higher tick servers, so fixing these issues are a priority for us.

If you do run your own server, we advise you do not use 128 tick and stick to 90 at most until we iron out these issues. But remember, the game has been tested most at 60 tick.

We have made some changes to match making over this week to improve the overall experience ready for early access. This Beta will not be held for marketing purposes. We do however want to test the match making one more time before Early Access to really iron out those matchmaking problems.

The mini beta will be held this weekend between Friday the 26th and Sunday the 28th for approximately 1 hour. We will push out an update to the Battalion Test Zone (TZ) and we will live the servers.

To be clear; we have no interest in promoting this or even giving out the exact time - this is strictly for technical testing only. At some point via both the Studio Leads twitter (www.twitter.com/Brammertron) and the official Discord channel, we will say “The servers & update are live”. From then there will be a small window to play and test the game. However, our ONLY interest is in testing match making.

Hopefully this will be yet more evidence of the bright future of Battalion’s competitive scene.

We don’t just listen to the community and react. We make our own assessments. We watch your feedback come in and evolve as more hours are put into the game. We then read and listen to your feedback on reddit/twitter/steam and we discuss potential fixes for your issues. Then we implement/test, and finally we push the game to the community for feedback!

First off we’d like to just give the community a small insight into the future of Battalion as a competitive title. Obviously the competitive side of the game is a huge focus for Battalion but we aren’t going to start with a huge prize pot without first growing the competitive scene. Our goal is to see each event grow bigger than the last. In the last 12 months we’ve seen multiple games grow too quickly in the esports scene without building the game on a solid foundation. Since the big success of our beta, we’ve been presented with so many amazing opportunities to push Battalion as not just a competitive game but to also have a professional scene as well.

We’re humbled to be presented with these opportunities but we wanted to let the community know that, regardless of how much money gets thrown at events and tournaments, the most important thing to us is to keep our focus on fostering growth in our fan base and our competitive scene, it is not possible to buy your way into esports.

To grow the game competitively we need you guys to continue your support and patience! We also would like to stress the importance of Clanwars going forward, being able to compete against other teams without ever having to leave the game is a huge step forward for a competitive game like ours. On top of this, we have some huge announcements on the horizon, surrounding Clanwars.

So whilst we’ve had many offers for events, we’re choosing to support a select group who share our ideas of steady growth. If you are an event or organisation looking to collaborate, please don’t hesitate to contact esports@bulkheadinteractive.com





Changes to Mid-Air Accuracy
We’ve acknowledged that beta players felt the time to kill was too low and that corner strafing/jump peeking was too common. Previously in Battalion, weapons were 100% accurate in the air. We have now added another layer of depth to the game, to reduce the amount of ‘flying around corners’complaints. Whilst strafing around a corner is still a valid strategy, it should no longer be the most optimal way to approach a gun fight, allowing for more options.

These changes affect the scoped rifles & the Kar98 most of all. For an amount of time when a player is in the air, they will no longer be able to hit perfectly accurate shots. This change is ONLY applied to horizontal movement (X & Z axis), if you stand still and complete a regular vertical jumpshot, you will retain 100% accuracy.

This change has been applied to the following weapons at different levels of inaccuracy:

• Kar98 Sniper (Extreme)
  
• Springfield (Extreme)
  
• Kar98k (High)
  
• STG44 (Medium)
  
• BAR (Medium)
  
• Thompson (Minor)
  
• MP40 (Minor)

BAR & STG44 Movement Speed Changes
After much discussion between the developers and the community, we have decided to buff the BAR & STG movement speed across the board. Firstly, we have increased ADS movement speed on the BAR & STG by 20%. This change is intended to make peeking corners more viable and remove the necessity to strafe round every corner.

We have also given the BAR & STG a buff by making their regular movement speed 20% faster.

Kar98k ADS speed changes
We have made the Kar98k’s general move speed slower, however the ADS speed is the same. We have moved away from any class based movements and adopted more weapon specific movement speeds.

This change is not as drastic as it sound and works out as more of a buff to the other weapons than it does a nerf to the Kar98k itself. This again feels a lot more balanced when we have tested it internally. It’s worth noting that its counterpart, the M1 Garand, now has faster movement speed in ADS than the Kar98k. This is to keep each factions weapons asymmetrical by design, giving each faction and team their own advantages and disadvantages.

The Garand has the faster shoulder peek but takes 2 bullets to kill!

Sniper Rifles Movement Changes
Previously, the snipers were set at the ‘medium’ movement speed. The Springfield and the Kar98 Scoped will both now have a reduced ADS walk speed and their overall movement speed will be slower. Generally, all the classes aren’t too dissimilar in speeds at the slow/medium level. But we felt the snipers were so fun to use for players that we didn’t want to nerf them by hurting the weapon. So we decided to nerf it in other ways. So far the sniper, still feels great but feels A LOT more balanced than it was.

Kar98 Scope Sight Changes
There was a consensus that the Kar98 scope in ADS wasn’t as appealing as the Springfield's. While we like the asymmetrical nature of the rifles, we wanted to make the sight feel a bit better. It’s a minor change but we’ve made the sticks/bars in the sight thinner & skinnier. You can see the change below.



Sniper Forced Unscope
Previously, snipers were able to take a shot and remain in scope while bolting the weapon. Now, the player is forced to unscope.

This functions the exact same way as Call of Duty 4, so it is worth noting, when you take a shot, you will need to manually press unscope, to not feel ‘stuck’ otherwise you will feel slow. This is just an extra layer of mechanical mastery that adds another layer of skill to high level sniping Battalion.

Hopefully, with all changes considered, snipers will no longer be overpowered and they will still feel great to play.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S0_Fa6NOdmk&feature=youtu.be

Pistol speeds
As part of our movement changes, the pistol now also has its own unique speed. SMGs and default weapons are slightly faster than the pistol, however other weapons are slower. Keep this in mind when you’re rushing to get that pick!

Fixed Exploits on Derailed
Various unfair spots and strange angles have been fixed.

Upottery Training Map Fixes
Black lighting errors on Upottery have been fixed, it now also has a loading screen.

Going into beta, we were already aware of issues with spawns in CTF, DOM, and TDM. The community tested the beta and came to the same conclusion that the spawns were not good enough. Fortunately we had started work on arcade spawns already and we were able to get them in just in time, we’ve tested them internally and they are much more intelligent!

Dedicated Server Files
We will be releasing the dedicated server files via the Steam tools section on February 1st. You will be able to host your own servers easily.

Player Counts
Technically, you can run a 50v50 game if you so wish!
However, we have tested the game with 18 players max, so anything after that is uncharted territory. As part of our “Major Content Update” in summer 2018 (www.battaliongame.com) we plan to include ‘large map support’ so that players can begin to play games with larger server numbers.

Please remember, the more players in a game, the more your frame rate will be affected.

Pre-Order Gameservers
We’ve been working with Multiplay who host all of our matchmaking servers, but they will also be hosting servers for players who want to run their own game! Their servers will be limited for 60 tick for now this will change in the future.

Visit https://www.multiplaygameservers.com/game-servers/battalion/ to pre-order your dedicated servers ready for Day 1 of Early Access.

Tick Rate
After much deliberation, we have decided to run our matchmaking servers at 60 tick. There are multiple reasons for this and it is important that server providers read this. We fully intend to offer 128 tick servers in the near future, but currently with our time constraints there are bugs with 128 tick. Some animation related and some spectator related. Clanwars is in its early stages but we intend for it to use higher tick servers, so fixing these issues are a priority for us.

If you do run your own server, we advise you do not use 128 tick and stick to 90 at most until we iron out these issues. But remember, the game has been tested most at 60 tick.

We have made some changes to match making over this week to improve the overall experience ready for early access. This Beta will not be held for marketing purposes. We do however want to test the match making one more time before Early Access to really iron out those matchmaking problems.

The mini beta will be held this weekend between Friday the 26th and Sunday the 28th for approximately 1 hour. We will push out an update to the Battalion Test Zone (TZ) and we will live the servers.

To be clear; we have no interest in promoting this or even giving out the exact time - this is strictly for technical testing only. At some point via both the Studio Leads twitter (www.twitter.com/Brammertron) and the official Discord channel, we will say “The servers & update are live”. From then there will be a small window to play and test the game. However, our ONLY interest is in testing match making.

Battalion 1944 is coming to Early Access on February 1st 2018 at 17:00 GMT we hope to see you all there day one!

If you enjoyed beta and buy the game on day 1, please leave us a review and help get Battalion to the front of Steam!


Overall the beta was a huge success! We were able to test match making with large numbers and expose the issues. Our opinion is bugs are a good thing, because it means we can fix them. We cant fix things we can’t see. There were definitely issues, but we’d like to remind everyone that this is an early access game and to remember ANY game at release, not just early access games. As far as Battalion’s stability goes, it was very good for an early access game. We’re now committed to preparing for our first major update: The Stability Update. You can read more about our roadmap here: www.battaliongame.com

We saw some incredible fragmovies over the weekend, and we’ll be regularly sharing some of our favourites in our Steam Updates. Along with weekly highlights from HattonGames!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0sdOY0OUNEo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U8GPdBZ4uO4
And finally, congratulations to “DRUNKKZ3” for being the highest competitively ranked player on Sunday, when we tested our elo rankings. He played an impressive 25 games in just a few hours!
Now it’s time for some updates and changes we’ve made based on the feedback from beta players.

M1 Carbine – Ironsight Update
As usual, we debated this change internally before we even reached beta. We wanted to see how the players felt about the M1 Carbine before we went ahead and made changes. Players often said they found the default classes powerful with a high skill ceiling however, the ironsight on the M1 Carbine was regularly commented on as being invasive and ‘in the way’. It wasn’t a lot of work to make that change so this will be in for Early Access


Coastal – Lamppost Jump Balance
We all love a good jump spot, so we didn’t want to remove this one that players found. However, we did want to make it more fair. We’ve removed the first tree, so that players are not shooting through a tree. We’ve also removed the railings from the top of the arch, making the player in the jump spot much more visible than before. The route you take to get on top of the lamppost is the same, but now you’ll be more exposed and visible than you were before. Do you think this is a good compromise?

Wartide – Future plans and Intentions
We’re very aware that Wartide is needs tweaking. Our biggest issue with Wartide is that it is a negatively progressing system meaning; you are always losing cards instead of a positively progressing system like Counter Strike where you are constantly being rewarded. You are not the first to identify these issues; luckily, we anticipated balancing issues back in November and began work on designing improvements to the mode. Yesterday on the Monday following the beta we made the decision to pursue our improvements. Whilst we aren’t prepared to disclose what they are yet, we are happy to say that it is a big rework of Wartide, but the core value of team shared economy and physical pickups will remain in the mode. However, there are many juicy details we will be holding back until our first major update…
It’s important to mention that we NEED people playing the mode in its current state so that we can gather the data and balance what we currently have. The additions will come in due time, however we need to make sure we see the positives and negatives of the existing system playout, before we make any large changes, the same way any major studio would. Rest assured, the devs are on it.


We saw a huge amount of people play the game over the weekend. First and foremost, we’d like to apologize for underestimating how many people would want to play the game. Battalion is a lot bigger than we’d expected, which is an AWESOME problem to have! But we’d like to explain some of the matchmaking issues below and how we intend to fix them, just to keep the community in the loop!


Players not accepting matches
25% of the time, when a player alt-tabs back into Battalion during an accept period, the accept button will not show. Resulting in players not being able to hit accept. We are working to fix this

Not enough servers
We have two types of servers, that Bulkhead and Square Enix Collective pay for. Bare Metal & Cloud based servers. The bare metal servers are literally sitting there, ready to go. However cloud based servers have to be requested from our server provider ‘Multiplay’. These cloud based servers can take sometimes up to 10 minutes to allocate! (Usually 3-6 minutes) However, during beta we saw issues meaning they weren’t correctly being allocated. Not only have we fixed this, we have also improved the way we allocate servers and we have also ordered more bare metal servers, so that players won’t have to wait to be assigned servers, EXCEPT during peak times. Once the game settles, we'll be able to predict exactly how many servers we'll need during peak times.

Server locations
Currently, our match making does not detect the best location for all players in the match. It picks a server and that is it. This is something we are working on, but it takes time and we wanted to get the game in players hands before we continue work on improving server detection. Currently our EU Servers will be based in Luxembourg, a central location for Europe. While the US will have one location in in West, Central, and East. We’re also adding servers in new regions, this will be announced soon. Server locations will be improved and is only a temporary measure as we roll out Battalion improvements over the next few months.


So thank you for continuing to support us, we're actively working on improving all aspects of the game, yes. Including animations!

See you on February 1st!

Battalion 1944 is coming to Early Access on February 1st 2018 at 17:00 GMT we hope to see you all there day one!

If you enjoyed beta and buy the game on day 1, please leave us a review and help get Battalion to the front of Steam!


Overall the beta was a huge success! We were able to test match making with large numbers and expose the issues. Our opinion is bugs are a good thing, because it means we can fix them. We cant fix things we can’t see. There were definitely issues, but we’d like to remind everyone that this is an early access game and to remember ANY game at release, not just early access games. As far as Battalion’s stability goes, it was very good for an early access game. We’re now committed to preparing for our first major update: The Stability Update. You can read more about our roadmap here: www.battaliongame.com

We saw some incredible fragmovies over the weekend, and we’ll be regularly sharing some of our favourites in our Steam Updates. Along with weekly highlights from HattonGames!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0sdOY0OUNEo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U8GPdBZ4uO4
And finally, congratulations to “DRUNKKZ3” for being the highest competitively ranked player on Sunday, when we tested our elo rankings. He played an impressive 25 games in just a few hours!
Now it’s time for some updates and changes we’ve made based on the feedback from beta players.

M1 Carbine – Ironsight Update
As usual, we debated this change internally before we even reached beta. We wanted to see how the players felt about the M1 Carbine before we went ahead and made changes. Players often said they found the default classes powerful with a high skill ceiling however, the ironsight on the M1 Carbine was regularly commented on as being invasive and ‘in the way’. It wasn’t a lot of work to make that change so this will be in for Early Access


Coastal – Lamppost Jump Balance
We all love a good jump spot, so we didn’t want to remove this one that players found. However, we did want to make it more fair. We’ve removed the first tree, so that players are not shooting through a tree. We’ve also removed the railings from the top of the arch, making the player in the jump spot much more visible than before. The route you take to get on top of the lamppost is the same, but now you’ll be more exposed and visible than you were before. Do you think this is a good compromise?

Wartide – Future plans and Intentions
We’re very aware that Wartide is needs tweaking. Our biggest issue with Wartide is that it is a negatively progressing system meaning; you are always losing cards instead of a positively progressing system like Counter Strike where you are constantly being rewarded. You are not the first to identify these issues; luckily, we anticipated balancing issues back in November and began work on designing improvements to the mode. Yesterday on the Monday following the beta we made the decision to pursue our improvements. Whilst we aren’t prepared to disclose what they are yet, we are happy to say that it is a big rework of Wartide, but the core value of team shared economy and physical pickups will remain in the mode. However, there are many juicy details we will be holding back until our first major update…
It’s important to mention that we NEED people playing the mode in its current state so that we can gather the data and balance what we currently have. The additions will come in due time, however we need to make sure we see the positives and negatives of the existing system playout, before we make any large changes, the same way any major studio would. Rest assured, the devs are on it.


We saw a huge amount of people play the game over the weekend. First and foremost, we’d like to apologize for underestimating how many people would want to play the game. Battalion is a lot bigger than we’d expected, which is an AWESOME problem to have! But we’d like to explain some of the matchmaking issues below and how we intend to fix them, just to keep the community in the loop!


Players not accepting matches
25% of the time, when a player alt-tabs back into Battalion during an accept period, the accept button will not show. Resulting in players not being able to hit accept. We are working to fix this

Not enough servers
We have two types of servers, that Bulkhead and Square Enix Collective pay for. Bare Metal & Cloud based servers. The bare metal servers are literally sitting there, ready to go. However cloud based servers have to be requested from our server provider ‘Multiplay’. These cloud based servers can take sometimes up to 10 minutes to allocate! (Usually 3-6 minutes) However, during beta we saw issues meaning they weren’t correctly being allocated. Not only have we fixed this, we have also improved the way we allocate servers and we have also ordered more bare metal servers, so that players won’t have to wait to be assigned servers, EXCEPT during peak times. Once the game settles, we'll be able to predict exactly how many servers we'll need during peak times.

Server locations
Currently, our match making does not detect the best location for all players in the match. It picks a server and that is it. This is something we are working on, but it takes time and we wanted to get the game in players hands before we continue work on improving server detection. Currently our EU Servers will be based in Luxembourg, a central location for Europe. While the US will have one location in in West, Central, and East. We’re also adding servers in new regions, this will be announced soon. Server locations will be improved and is only a temporary measure as we roll out Battalion improvements over the next few months.


So thank you for continuing to support us, we're actively working on improving all aspects of the game, yes. Including animations!

See you on February 1st!

Briefly, we’d like to thank all of our early backers who helped fund Battalion, Square Enix who believed in us almost no questions asked, ESL for constantly being there to support Battalion’s growth in the competitive scene, and all of our developers for working some seriously long hours to get us to this point. We’ll be slowing down our updates from here on out and making sure our developers get a healthy amount of time at home with their families from this point!
Welcome to beta. You can stream, share, and create content based on the footage in this build!
This build contains the following gamemodes:

• Wartide (Competitive)
  
• Capture The Flag (Arcade)
  
• Domination (Arcade)
  
• Team Deathmatch (Arcade)

If you’re interested in learning how to play ‘Wartide’ check out this explanation video.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uz4cTblG9S0
Phantasy has also taken the time to record and upload a scrim in Battalion. If you’re looking to hit Battalion hard this weekend, then these are the videos you want to watch!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hhdESIBFxxs

And we’ll be running these maps!

Coastal

Derailed

Battery (Arcade Only)

BETA DATES:

JANUARY 19th 18:00(GMT) to JANUARY 20th 06:00(GMT)
(INFLUENCERS ONLY & LUCKY PLAYERS!)

JANUARY 20th 18:00(GMT) to JANUARY 22nd 06:00AM(GMT)
(ALL PLAYERS)

Keys are currently being distributed via email and we will finish sending keys by 18:00 GMT Saturday! Continue checking your email because you may get in on the Friday!
Thank you for your support, have a great beta and please buy the game on February 1st at 17:00 GMT on Steam!

Briefly, we’d like to thank all of our early backers who helped fund Battalion, Square Enix who believed in us almost no questions asked, ESL for constantly being there to support Battalion’s growth in the competitive scene, and all of our developers for working some seriously long hours to get us to this point. We’ll be slowing down our updates from here on out and making sure our developers get a healthy amount of time at home with their families from this point!
Welcome to beta. You can stream, share, and create content based on the footage in this build!
This build contains the following gamemodes:

• Wartide (Competitive)
  
• Capture The Flag (Arcade)
  
• Domination (Arcade)
  
• Team Deathmatch (Arcade)

If you’re interested in learning how to play ‘Wartide’ check out this explanation video.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uz4cTblG9S0
Phantasy has also taken the time to record and upload a scrim in Battalion. If you’re looking to hit Battalion hard this weekend, then these are the videos you want to watch!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hhdESIBFxxs

And we’ll be running these maps!

Coastal

Derailed

Battery (Arcade Only)

BETA DATES:

JANUARY 19th 18:00(GMT) to JANUARY 20th 06:00(GMT)
(INFLUENCERS ONLY & LUCKY PLAYERS!)

JANUARY 20th 18:00(GMT) to JANUARY 22nd 06:00AM(GMT)
(ALL PLAYERS)

Keys are currently being distributed via email and we will finish sending keys by 18:00 GMT Saturday! Continue checking your email because you may get in on the Friday!
Thank you for your support, have a great beta and please buy the game on February 1st at 17:00 GMT on Steam!

Alpha 0.8 was the big update in alpha that saw us immensely improve Battalion. This update is more about testing and stabilisation for beta, where we’ll be testing the game on a larger scale and attempting to max out our servers with thousands of people playing.

Alpha 0.9 will be running tonight, Wednesday January 17th starting at 18:00 GMT

We’ve been at the studio working very late into the night from early in the morning for a long time now, but it’s meant we can do things like this and test the alpha one more time.


Fixes & Technical Improvements
+ Improvement: Minor Improvements to Hitboxes, improved accuracy of hitboxes to character model
+ Improvement: Interpolation improvements to netcode
~ Fix: Fire button while holding shift now functions correctly
~ Fix: Two players choosing the same card from team stack will no longer result in one player spawning without a weapon
~ Fix: Players won’t disappear beneath floor when prone glitching
~ Improvement: You can now bind jump to scroll wheel
~ Fix: Hold prone/crouch now functions correctly. Not interfered by other key ‘holds’
~ Fix/Improvement: ‘Battery’ map performance issues rectified. Players should receive great performance on Battery
~ Fix/Improvement: Matchmaking changes, players should have considerably less issues finding a game this alpha
~ Fix: Some of Coastal’s lighting errors have been fixed, but not all

Gameplay Tweaks
+ New Kar98k Sound
+ New Kar98s Sound
+ New Trenchgun Sound
+ New Springfield Sound
+ New background ambience with focus on not distracting from gameplay
~ Derailed lighting improvements focusing on brightness and vision
~ Derailed cinema overhaul and redesign
~ Coastal glitch spot fixes and collision improvements
~ Coastal visual improvements/color changes
~ Coastal design improvements

Being one of the most exciting and skilful weapons in the game. We needed to give it the makeover it deserves, the kar98k hereby referred to as the ‘boomstick’ will echo throughout the map. We can’t wait to see the epic fragmovies that are born from this weapon.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PSCIMCtoqnE&feature=youtu.be
A sniper, needs to sound like a sniper. Despite technically being the same weapon as the kar98k, we needed to give the sniper more of a boom so that players anywhere in the map can identify the weapon that’s being used. This has been a goal for us for many months, make weapons easier to distinguish through audio.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VUdAJDngqs4

Everybody loves a punchy shotgun feeling. We decided that the shotgun needed to sound more powerful. It’s arguably one of the best guns in the game as players still struggle to understand how they should be using it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ISSK3_hyFbg

Derailed has had a lot of attention over the last few weeks. It’s one of the more strat based, team focused maps we have. Which makes it a little difficult to play in alpha until a meta has developed. We’ve given it even more improvements including a visibility pass with nice bright lighting. As well as giving the Germans more options to defend the cinema from AND we’ve made the whole cinema much more readable than before. Let us know what you think!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SBomGJWs6Hs&feature=youtu.be






Coastal is currently playing very well, it’s the most open map we have, but we felt that it needed a bit more visual identity and we wanted to make it feel like more of a seaside town. So we’ve thrown out some of the grey and gone with some nice colourful seafront buildings! We’ve also added a new route to rotate between bombsites and we’ve added a new entrance to B Bombsite.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QRY-UAqp__Q&feature=youtu.be




There’s a lot of updates here and we’ll have another update for ‘What to expect in beta’ tomorrow.

Tomorrow our Studio Lead will be running a 1 hour livestream from 20:30 until 21:30 GMT at www.twitch.tv/Brammertron
He’ll be giving away some codes for beta and answering as many questions as possible about the future of Battalion 1944.