When looking at the list of issues with the Early Access launch version of Battalion, at the top of the list was giving reasons for players to keep playing whilst rewarding those who do keep booting up and playing for their efforts. We had these kind of changes down to be worked on ready for Major Update 3 - but we’ve decided to run a small ‘betaseason’ of our new leveling system within Major Update 2 called ‘BattleRank’.



BattleRank Beta Season 2018 is the first step towards making Battalion the engaging and rewarding game it was always intended to become. With every BattleRank season (roughly every 3 months) will come new exclusive rewards and weapon skins that can only be acquired during that period.

BattleRank is a system designed to reward you for playing Battalion 1944 - due to this all players XP will need to be reset to make way for this new era of BattleRank.

Every player who boots the game during the very first beta season (seasons will last roughly 3 months) will receive a participant coin and a participant weapon skin as thanks for checking out the changes to the game for that season.

Players who stick around however, get the chance to ‘level up’ their BattleRank to higher tiers. This is done by gaining experience point (XP) by playing the game and completing matches. In the 2018 Beta Season of BattleRank, every 10 levels will reward you with a new & exclusive weapon skin that can be sold or traded on the community market. Also, every single level up will upgrade your publicly displayed BattleRank icon and also reward you with a free War Chest!



Reaching the Diamond Tier and max rank (Lvl 50+) will reward you with the ‘Beta 2018 Completionist Coin’ and a season exclusive animated weapon skin that you can only obtain during this BattleRank Beta season. We will reveal these awesome skins closer to the release of Major Update 2!

This season of BattleRank is named the Beta season as we want to recieve feedback on the system and see how we can improve upon it for future seasons.


Along with BattleRank - we’re adding a brand new War Chest! Say hello to the brand new 'Aces High' War Chest:



This War Chest comes with 20 brand new weapon skins based on WW2 warplanes from the era. We can’t wait to show off the full set when we get closer to Major Update 2! Players will be able to unlock an ‘Aces High’ War Chest every time they level up via BattleRank.


Introducing ‘The Chompson’ Exclusive to The ‘Aces High’ War Chest

Important: The ‘Aces High’ War Chest will replace the previous ‘The Original’ War Chest. If you’re missing any of ‘The Original’ War Chest skins such as the coveted ‘Grand Panther’ skin, these last few weeks before Major Update 2 will be your last opportunity to unlock these original Early Access era weapon skins. Maybe it's worth holding onto them to see if they increase in market value?


Our daily development playtests have been really helping us refine the game before the release of Major Update 2 and Wartide 2 is the area of the game that has seen the most iteration from these playtests. The specific focus of MU2 has always been to refine Wartide into a truly competitive gamemode that’s both fun to both play and watch for casual and competitive players alike.

However, since we added the concept of a personal wallet, we noticed the redundancy of having a shared economy pool. While cool in theory, - when playing we realised the only reason it had to exist was so that we could distribute money to players fairly, by allowing players to withdraw/deposit to the team pool as needed. The reality was it became just a race to withdraw 3 coins first - whilst actual sharing of money was done through the individual player wallet donation buttons.

This made the dual currency system not only redundant - but also confusing with so much information to share between players within the 18 second buy time.



Changes:

The single largest key change to Wartide 2.0 from our playtests is:
The removal of the shared token pool and replaced by personal wallets & direct teammate player donations only.

We have decided to remove the shared currency pool where all tokens earned through in game actions were merged into one central pool. This was a system where all players could donate their personal tokens into the team pool, however they could also extract tokens from this pool to their personal wallet.

We have decided to move away from this system and have introduced one where the only pool is personal and the only donations you are able to give are to other team members.

By only having your own personal wallet of tokens to worry about - the gamemode is now much simpler and allows you to quickly and efficiently share cash between your teammates whilst still allowing more selfish players to hold onto their own tokens. We’re very happy with this iteration of Wartide and are very confident in this being the extremely solid foundations for the gamemode going forwards. Strategy and teamplay have never felt stronger in any iteration of Battalion 1944 than the current development build.

Any changes to the mode from now on will most likely just be adjustments in weapon costs and/or reward amounts for winning/losing rounds.

Wartide 2.0 - Knife Rounds

The classic way to decide which team gets to choose which faction to play first has been officially added to the game. Server owners and tournament organisers will no longer have to restart servers with their own configs or trust players to not shoot one another

Here’s a question for the community - would you like knife rounds to be included on official Bulkhead unranked matchmaking servers? Or should this feature only be a server config variable for community server admins? Let us know in the comments!

Wartide 2.0 - Overtime

We’ve now added an official overtime server config variable so that competitive players get to play multiple mr3 overtimes until one team is victorious. This avoids scenarios in tournament play where team would draw 15-15 and have to completely restart the game server.


Adding an Ambient Sound Slider
You can now adjust the volume of the ambient map sounds separately from the other audio in the game through the ingame menus. You cannot turn the ambience entirely off - but this should reduce audio clutter for competitive players whilst keeping the playing field level and fair.

New HD Renderer
You may have noticed the visual upgrade Battalion has received?
If not here’s a quick reminder:



This is to do with us constantly working on improving the visual direction of the game from characters to environments to user interface - but also due to our new HD renderer which gives us way more post processing options to play with. The great thing about this is that we’ve also made it so that players themselves can tweak individual settings themselves - such as bloom/lens flare/brightness and even hue/saturation etc

We’ve actually added a quick option in the video settings so that players can quickly optimise their video settings between beauty and performance presets just in case you destroy your default config!


That’s it for today’s development update and preview - we have more awesome Battalion 1944 news and announcements to come and we can’t wait to share it. Keep a lookout for another huge announcement coming later this week!

Thanks,
The Bullkhead Interactive Team

We have added a new smoke grenade effect. Taking inspiration from CSGO, our smoke is designed to effectively be a wall. Whilst it’s not the prettiest smoke, that is very much for a reason. Smoke should block your vision, as soon as we start to add in pretty features and nice graphics, unwanted behaviors begin to occur. Our new smoke is bigger and covers all core chokes in Battalion 1944 maps.

The smoke grenade can be seen in action here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X_BJVUfR5Oo&feature=youtu.be
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9BkkfyzMrVA
After we pushed Invasion to the public we were waiting for feedback. Players had some pretty strong opinions of the map and it was by far the least favourite competitive map. So as we did with Manorhouse V2 we’ve entirely reworked Invasion using our new level design ethos. More verticality, more options, less tight chokes.

So without further adieu, here is the latest iteration of our competitive map: ‘Invasion’
Invasion is still a work in progress and is likely to change slightly prior to release of MU2

















As you can see, Invasion has had a pretty interesting rework. Using feedback from reddit, twitter, and discord we were able to get a good idea of what was wrong with it and how we can improve it. From our experience of playing the new Invasion, there is a place for every weapon which fits great into our new game mode. Check out a ‘run around’ of new Invasion.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u5ouRR8JuAo


Whilst Coastal was one of the more popular maps at launch - we’ve seen a decline in popular opinion on the map’s flow and how the map itself - whilst solid competitively - was kind of ‘boring’ and had a few core issues. We’ve made the following changes to give Allied and Axis players more options when rotating and holding certain parts of the map.

• Improved spawn area layouts for both axis and allies.
  
• Added a new sniper building by the allies spawn for the Allies to peek into mid from a higher elevation or defend against aggressive flankers from B.
  
• Added a new enterable house on A long by the A bombsite to allow axis players to peek A long and allied players to flank around the A bombsite building.
  
• Made the ‘Byfam Antiques’ building enterable to add a quicker rotation point between B stairs & middle’s broken walls.
  
• Added a ladder to the back of the A bombsite building to allow players to enter from the top of the wooden stairs (sorry stair campers!)

We have made minor changes to the popular map Manorhouse V2 based on community member ‘Dust Mouret’s’ suggestions after approving of his previous changes he suggested for Derailed. We feel Manorhouse V2 is now in a good state as a popular competitive map.

• Added a haystack as cover to the corner of A bombsite
  
• Flattened the terrain in that same corner of A bombsite
  
• Removed the ‘boost boxes’ by mid/A barn exit
  
• Blocked certain overpowered boost spots based on players feedback
  
• Fixed some map specific bugs with Manorhouse v2

Did you think this was the last development preview for Major Update 2?

Nope! We have more development updates coming next week with even more great features and changes that you’ve been requesting these past few months. We’re hyped to share all this information with you guys ahead of the update release as every day we’re starting to see the game shape into what it was intended to be.

We still have just over 6 months of development in Early Access before we head to full release on PC. A Lot has changed these past few months and whilst after Major Update 2 there will still be features and issues still to fix, this update should hopefully show our dedication and commitment to Battalion and that the future of this game is a bright one.

Thanks guys and see you in the next one soon!
The Bulkhead Team

Major Update 2 is on the horizon and with not “too” long left to wait we’d like to start sharing our fixes, improvements, and changes. MU2 will contain a tonne of new additions as well as loads of great tweaks, balances & fixes! We think this update will really improve the experience of Battalion 1944 and dramatically improve upon certain features that were prevalent when we went to Early Access in February.

This is just part 2 of the Changelog as there is so much to go through therefore we are trying to keep our updates as short and snappy as possible. Part 3 should be released tomorrow so keep an eye out for that!


Our upcoming Major Update 2 combats what some players are calling “bunny hopping” in Battalion 1944. The controversial ‘corner jumping meta’ which we’ve received a lot of feedback on from both casual and competitive players is being addressed with in this update. We’re also planning on some tweaking weapon balancing based on your feedback as well as lots of nice extras, such as settings and performance increases and new weapon sounds that you guys have been asking us for!


Our intentions with the following movement and weapon balance changes are to reduce the strength of jumping around corners to the point of it being a calculated risk to do so, whilst in turn increasing the strength of other styles of engagements such as jiggle peeking or leaning to allow different playstyles to become viable within the game.

• Reduced the amount your third person player model moves out of cover whilst leaning by 75% which will encourage angle holding and jiggle peeking.
  
• Increased momentum very slightly to create smoother general movement.
  
• No longer receive movement penalty when falling from small heights whilst not ADS to increase general movement fluidity.
  
• Added a server side ‘takeoff’ sound when a player jumps to give players who are holding an angle extra information on the enemies movement behavior.
  
• Added a ‘movement punish’ when landing whilst holding ADS.

These combined changes will mean a strafing jump shot is much more of a commitment/risk when choosing to make that play. You will still be able to jump around a corner to get the surprise factor on an unsuspecting enemy but it should no longer be the best play in all situations if you need to guarantee a swift kill. We will be watching how these changes affect the meta of the game very closely.


A small percentage of players were complaining about ‘dropshotting’ where players would go to prone as they came around a corner to decrease their chances of being hit. We’ve addressed this by re-looking at how other games implement ‘anti drop shot’ mechanics, hence the following changes:

• If a player goes to prone when moving whilst ADS, they will be pulled out of ADS.
  
• If a player goes to prone when stationary whilst ADS, they will stay in ADS.
  
• If a player tries to move whilst already in prone and ADS, they will be pulled out of ADS - unless you’re a using a scoped sniper rifle.

Sniper Rifles

• The Springfield, the Kar98 Scoped and the Kar98 now take slightly longer to become fully scoped when transitioning to ADS. This has in turn increased the length of the inaccuracy period when transitioning between hip fire to aiming down the scope.
  
• The Springfield and the Kar98 Scoped hip fire accuracy has been decreased whilst moving.

These changes are intended to evolve the playstyle of these weapons to focus more on holding angles and sight lines, instead of jumping around a corner at close range. Instead players should start using quick lean peeks to get opening picks to allow your team to take early map control. Using these extremely powerful weapons aggressively in close ranges is still a viable choice for skilled players - but these tweaks ensure other weapons may be a better choice depending on the map played & gameplan of your team. Playing a sniper aggressively carries a much higher risk than it did before.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SalcWzos1mc
These changes can initially sound drastic and we fully expect players to be worried about their favourite weapon receiving slight nerfs within the upcoming major update, but after lots of internal testing we actually believe this is the right move for the weapons themselves and game as a whole. These changes bring the scope in/out times more in line with similar classic FPS titles. During our first play tests, we really felt the immediate effect of the changes, however when we adapted our playstyles to the ‘new’ Battalion 1944 we found that the overall game was considerably better as a result.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wTL4C3Cu1jo
Heavy Weapons

• The BAR is now a 3 shot weapon across all ranges instead of 3-5 shots at range.
  
• The BAR ADS animation was tweaked to feel more snappy and responsive.
  
• The STG44 is now a 3-4 shot weapon instead of 3-5 shots.
  
• Both STG44 & BAR stationary hip fire accuracy slightly increased.

The BAR is finally receiving a well deserved buff to increase its pick rate and give the allies a much more reliable weapon choice when attacking. These changes should increase the weapon’s feeling of consistency and ‘snappiness’. We have also minorly buffed the STG44, but only to reduce the feeling of randomness of getting 5 hitmarkers at its longest engagement range. The STG44 is intentionally not as powerful as the allied BAR due to the nature of the Germans being on the defensive side. And remember, both automatic weapons can still deliver an almighty 1 shot headshot! A much more effective way of fighting with our new ‘fat head’ characters.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iht2JrYa5Ic
SMGs

• MP40 Horizontal Recoil Slightly Reduced.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T8n971qIifA
The feedback we’ve received on Battalion’s SMGs has generally been positive. The one common complaint was with the MP40’s recoil pattern. We’ve decided to reduce the horizontal recoil of this weapon to be more in line with its allied counterpart, the Thompson, to allow more control over the weapon’s erratic firing nature.

Shotguns

• Max range damage slightly reduced.
  
• Min range damage increased slightly.
  
• Crosshair spread decreased to more accurately portray pellet spread.
  
• Reduced shotgun fire rate.
  
• Can now hold 6 shots instead of 5.

Shotguns in any FPS game have always been controversial. In an effort to make every weapon viable, we originally buffed the shotgun to allow it to compete with some of the other extremely powerful weapons within the game. With the changes to Wartide 2.0 meaning different weapons have different values, this no longer needs to be the case.

We’ve also seen the feedback from players that in certain situations the shotgun’s communication wasn’t correctly shown to the player - creating situations where players would ‘tag’ when they felt they deserved a kill - or the exact opposite to this scenario could also happen. We’re hoping the above tweaks will help alleviate the feeling of the regularity of these situations!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZZJYFI-VFuA

Our thinking with bullet penetration has always been trying to make it consistent in terms of communication over what you can and can’t shoot through. This meant thin metal sheets, small objects and thin wooden doors/shutters etc are supposed to be penetrable. The problem we’ve seen is that some assets slipped through and were accidently made penetrable, such as the kubelwagen. This was never meant to be the case.

We’ve now adjusted these specific meshes that weren't meant to be penetrable and adjusted the damage values of penetration to feel more consistent.



Also, a big change the community requested was to make the bomb box no longer penetrable which we are happy to say will be implemented into Major Update 2! You will now be ‘safe’ when planting/defusing - meaning your post plant positioning will now be very important.


We’re adding new weapon sounds to make all weapons feel much more powerful across the board. This update will also include new hitmarker & headshot sounds to make the game feel even more responsive than before.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FBbQFJvh1Jk

• Added a server side ‘takeoff’ sound when a player jumps.
  
• New Gewehr Sound.
  
• New STG44 Sound.
  
• New Thompson Sound.
  
• New Luger Sound.
  
• New M1911 Sound.
  
• New Headshot Sound.
  
• New Hitmarker Sound.
  
• New Footsteps Sounds.
  
• New Token Pickup Sound.
  
• New Attenuation/Falloff.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IeUxJK6UNM4

We’ve heard the complaints since Major Update 1 about performance dropping - We’ve been looking into multiple aspects of the game from both CPU and GPU perspective to help better optimise for high end and lower end hardware. These tweaks include us focusing onto:

• Blueprint Nativization (drastically decreasing load times and increasing performance).
  
• Level Specific Optimisations (reducing draw calls).
  
• General Optimisations (reducing unnecessary clutter within the project).
  
• Animation Optimisation (only visible information is sent to clients).

Hopefully in Major Update 2 players should see FPS and performance gains across the board. These optimisations are ongoing and will continue all the way until release!


Major Update 2 will be the very last time an update resets your config! Part of our new build system has allowed us to keep your configs intact for future updates - this means future smaller patches will no longer become a major annoyance every time we would like to update the game.

We’re also introducing more in-game config settings as we look to enable those with lower end PCs the same ingame options as someone who would tweak their ini files externally. This change also means ini files will be locked - as all of the relevant options will be be available ingame (you’ll still be able to keep your settings config!).

We’ll also be putting some restrictions on certain config settings which we felt were being abused to give an entirely unfair advantage to certain players.


Players have been asking us to bring them in to help test the game before it’s pushed live to the world! There are 2 stages in MU2.

MU2 Stage 1 - Beta:

In June when we feel the build is stable ‘enough’ for testing, we will push a version of the game to our ‘Public Beta’ branch on Steam. We will not be using the Test Zone for a few good reasons, but this won’t change anything for you! To access the beta, we will distribute a code to players that can be used in Steam by doing the following:
Open Steam > Right Click ‘BATTALION 1944’ > Properties > Betas > ‘enter code’

MU2 Stage 2 - Release: Throughout the Beta phase we will be watching the feedback. What we will not do is be “over-reactive” to initial feedback. The beta phase will last a few weeks. During this time we will make changes, fixes, and improvements. We absolutely expect there to be bugs. But this is your opportunity as a passionate gaming community to make an impact on a commercial video game and this is our opportunity to make our passion project commercial! By listening to your feedback we believe we can maximise the potential of Battalion 1944. We are not setting unrealistic expectations during this update, our goal is to show people what Battalion 1944 should have been at launch, but could only be possible with the extensive feedback given to us over the last 4 months. After we believe the game is balanced and just prior to the ‘Gallantry LAN event in Budapest’ we will push the release version of MU2 to the live Battalion 1944 branch.

We hope you’re ready to see all these new additions in game becasue we can't wait for you all to test these changes and let us know what you think. We really hope they will really improve Battalion’s gameplay for the long term.

Thanks guys and see you in the next one coming tomorrow!
The Bulkhead Team

Note: Colors/Camouflage are currently in development and may change/improve for better visibility prior to the release of MU2

It’s time for a change and we’re happy to announce we are replacing the current player models that are used in Battalion 1944. The current issue with the existing player models is that they were visually small and frail. Whilst they looked great in renders during early prototype development - the reality is their visuals didn’t transition over well once we were able to get the characters running around in-game within fully developed environments.

The newly revised German and American character models are much ‘beefier’ with nice fat heads and generally a wider silhouette which will make them better suited for visibility and competitive play, as well of the added benefit of generally looking much better than the older player models.



The first person arms and hands have also had a rework. The previous characters didn’t do the game justice, seeing as you constantly see the arms and hands of the character, we decided to completely rework the hands as well. Both characters now wear gloves to avoid plastic looking skin!

These new Characters are also more effectively optimised. Therefore they should have a lot less of a negative effect on your FPS. This is especially relevant in Arcade as when we moved from 5v5 to 8v8 in all modes the increased character count meant less frames. You voiced these issues and we have addressed them as the effect it was having was obvious so we hope you also enjoy that aspect of these updated models too.





These new characters are a little ‘thicker’. They’re bulky and overweight they’ve also got pretty chunky heads! This means hit detection should feel much better. Whilst the characters backpack will not give you a hit/tag, it will give you a blood splatter. We have focused on reducing the situations where players are ‘hitting’ the player model’s clothes and not his hitbox (for example the player model’s helmet) and client side blood appears whilst not actually hitting the character.



Both these new and improved character models were made completely in house by our artists. They are an updated look from the original ones whilst retaining a classic WW2 style. We think they look great and we believe they will help alleviate some of the issues that were caused by the previous player models and really contribute to improving Battalions gameplay. We hope you guys like them and enjoy both the look as well as the gameplay changes they bring.

We recently teased a video of ladders being added to Battalion 1944. You’ll be seeing more on this later this week!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lp2FYMuW86w
Remember: We have lots of updates coming this week as there are so many changes being introduced in Major Update 2 and we have so much information to get out to you guys so make sure you stay in the loop and keep an eye out for further updates as they will be coming pretty regularly!



Thanks for reading guys and look out for the next one!
The Bulkhead Team

We are excited to announce that Battalion is now expanding its theatres to the mediterranean with the introduction of the new Italian competitive map ‘Savoia’.

Savoia has an interesting development story that has grown from the passion of the competitive COD community.

Mark ‘Phantasy’ Pinney started work for us as a QA Tester in our studio in May 2017. It didn’t take us very long to realize he had a little experience in Unreal Engine and a real talent for level design. Step by step we started giving Phan bigger and bigger tasks as he evolved from a professional gamer into a professional game developer.



We first asked Phan to make a “Shipment style TDM level”. He gave us Coastal….
If you look at the center of Coastal you can actually see how it was supposed to play like a small 1v1 level.

One day Phan showed us a ‘blocked out’ (basic design) level he made for his University Project, he originally showed us as a joke… But when we imported it into Battalion and ran around in it, Phan’s experience in COD had let him to accurately design the feel and scope of a Call of Duty style map.

We decided to investigate further as our level design team started working with Phan to flesh out the map further. Then, in February 2018 we started adding art to a thoroughly designed level. You can see that transition from the passionately designed map into full blown video game environment in the gif below.





Savoia has wide streets and architectured crossing points for some great sniper battles. In an effort to reduce the ‘corner jumper’ meta, we’ve added more windows, more open points and less tight chokes.

We’ve also opted to push for more verticality this time. Previously some of our maps are guilty of being too one dimensional. We’re pulling away from many CSGO design principles that work for CS and making our own design rules based off of feedback from the community across all of our maps.

Very soon we’ll be releasing a detailed update on the changes coming in Major Update #2 (MU2) based on the feedback we’ve been receiving over the last 3 months. This will also be our last new competitive map for some time as our art team turns their focus onto Major Update #3 (MU3) and Arcade 2.0 as well as content for full release such as the Russians!




Throughout the development of Battalion our goal has been to bring back the feeling of old school style games through the movement and feel of weapons in Battalion 1944. To progress these older titles we needed a new game mode fit for a 2019 gaming audience that was accessible whilst inclusive of spectators as well as casters.

We wanted to try and encourage team work by forcing teams to ‘share currency’ in Wartide 1 and 2. Unfortunately, I think we all agree that there are too many players that are simply not interested in playing as a team. Furthermore it is totally acceptable for people to want to play a game on their own with their own strategies. However, we still want an aspect of sharing and teamwork in Battalion, therefore we are introducing our ‘Dual Currency’ system.

You will now be able to have your own personal in game wallet along with a separate team pool. Individual token pickups are rewarded straight to your personal wallet whilst team efforts such as planting or defusing the bomb and loss bonuses are awarded to the team pool.

You can donate an unlimited amount of your tokens to other individual players or to the teams pool, however the maximum you can withdraw from the team pool is ‘3 tokens’ per round.

We hope you agree that this is a step in the right direction for Wartide 2, we will be testing this revamped competitive mode with Early Access players prior to MU2’s update.


In the live version of Wartide, players currently are able to pick up and use enemy weapons within the round they acquired them but their weapons get wiped as the round resets. This means allied players don’t get the benefit/reward of keeping the weapons that they have picked up into further rounds, for example, allied players have no permanent way of taking a 1 shot Kar98 rifle from the other team and keeping it until the next round should they survive.

With Wartide 2.0 - this is all about to change!

Players will now be able to ‘save weapons’ between rounds. This means a surviving player can pickup and take secondary weapons into the next round, therefore lost rounds still have value as you can scavenge an enemy weapon and keep it for the next round to get a crucial opening pick.

This will drastically change the dynamic of buying and saving weapons in the new version of Wartide and has been something players have been asking to have in competitive play for a long time now. We can’t wait to see how this singular change effects all levels of play.


For players less interested in the competitive side of the game there is good news on the horizon. We’ve started to focus our efforts more and more on what we’re calling “Arcade 2.0” a total rework and rebuild of the Arcade experience that will be going live with Major Update 3 (MU3).

From incentivising play time and objectives, to building maps that are designed solely for the Arcade experience. Arcade 2.0 will be another great turning point for Battalion 1944 and really provide it’s players with a well rounded choice of ways to play.

Thanks for tuning in and make sure you stay tuned we have lots of big announcements coming soon as there is loads going on over here at Bulkhead HQ. Look out for our series of Major Update 2 announcements coming including the full change log for you guys. Lots of good changes scheduled for June!

Thanks again guys,
The Bulkhead Team

If you follow our updates you might have seen that last week we announced that the M3 Grease Gun will be added to the Allied weapon line up. Well, now we are announcing the Axis equivalent that’s coming in our next Major Update #2 scheduled for June 2018!



The MP 28 is a 9mm submachine gun that will fit nicely into the new “eco” class we are adding to Wartide 2.0

The Axis eco weapon will be the MP 28, this means it will be useful in situations where your team wants to ‘force buy’. It’s a cheap, low damage submachine gun that doesn’t cost many tokens to purchase but will hopefully give you a spray of 9mm bullets that you could need to get out of a sticky situation or ambush an opponent!

When we looked for a weapon to fit the Axis “Eco” role this jumped out at us. It’s an older weapon that isn’t really seen as a classic “WW2 gun” but it is definitely something we can fit into the meta as an inexpensive eco weapon. We think it looks cool, our artists had a good time designing it and we hope you have fun using it for some face to face engagements in Battalion.


The MP 28 will be a low damage Submachine gun and it’s class will come equipped with 1 smoke grenade to help you & your team advance on objectives.

The additions of these two new weapons will add another layer to our Wartide 2.0 competitive game mode and build upon our first iteration of the game mode. You can read more about the Wartide 2.0 update here: https://steamcommunity.com/games/489940/announcements/detail/2632793340751347452


Disclaimer: We are currently in the process of testing and balancing these Eco weapons so their role and price could change at some point so make sure you stay up to date with this by following our future patch notes and updates our social media accounts.

Thanks a lot guys, we are eager to see your reactions to these weapons, how they play and how they fit into the meta so let us know what you think and stay tuned for our next update coming soon!

Some of you may have already seen from Twitter or Reddit that we will be adding the M3 “Grease Gun” to Battalion’s Armory in our Major Update 2 scheduled for June. We are aiming for this weapon to act as an “Eco Weapon” and is one of two new “Eco” weapons we’ll be adding as we will also introduce one for the Axis faction that we be announced soon.



Being designated as an “Eco Weapon” indicates that the Grease Gun will be a cheap automatic submachine gun and cost minimal tokens within our new competitive Wartide 2.0 game mode . This means it may not be the most powerful weapon in your arsenal but if used correctly in certain situations it can be useful to your game plan or if your back is against the wall!

When we decided to add the eco class, the M3 Grease Gun seemed a good fit for the US. In WW2 it was designed to be a ‘low production cost weapon’. It’s a small submachine gun that looks like it could belong in a tank instead of a Infantryman’s hands. We hope it's fun to run and gun with in close quarters and a kill with it can be hard earned but well deserved.



The Grease Gun is a low damage Submachine Gun and it’s class will come equipped with 1 smoke grenade to help provide cover for yourself and your teammates.

The additions of these two new weapons will add another layer to our Wartide 2.0 competitive game mode and build upon our first iteration of it (Wartide 1). You can read more about the Wartide 2.0 update here: https://steamcommunity.com/games/489940/announcements/detail/2632793340751347452



Disclaimer; We are currently in the process of testing and balancing these weapons so their role and price could change at some point so make sure you stay up to date with this by following our future patch notes and updates on our social media accounts.

Thanks a lot guys and stay tuned for our next update where we will be announcing the Axis eco weapon, can anyone guess what it will be?

What do you think the German light submachine gun will be?

Wartide 2.0 is coming! You as a community have spoken and we’ve listened to all your feedback about the original Wartide gamemode. We’ve taken that feedback onboard and have acted on it by creating an entirely revamped version of the gamemode we’re calling internally ‘Wartide 2.0’.

This re-engineered competitive mode will replace the current competitive gamemode - “Wartide” and will be released within our Major Update #2 coming in June, so get ready!

The largest concerns with the original Wartide were:

• No win / loss bonuses meant steamrolling became very likely.
  
• Having the losing team being forced repeatedly to play default class round after round when losing, wasn’t a fun experience and players would often leave rather than persist.
  
• The original Wartide system lacked depth to its weapons economy therefore all weapons were forced to be balanced and as viable as each other in terms of perceived value.

Wartide 2.0 intends to address these issues by adding an actual economy system which is shared entirely between your team.



The brand new Wartide 2.0 Tokens, which drop when a player gets fragged. (Only one token is ever dropped, even if the weapon’s value is higher than one token!)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lg6nW15cJys

Teams will start with a set amount of tokens that will deplete as the players on a team pick weapons from the shared buy menu, these weapons all have varying costs based on their effectiveness.

For example - the extremely powerful one shot snipers cost more than cheaper weapons such as the shotgun and the two brand new eco weapons we’re adding to the game! In this new system the much loved default carbine classes will be free so have fun with those.

Players gain more tokens throughout the match. Important actions within a Wartide 2.0 game will result in rewarding players and, in turn, their team with additional tokens.

This includes actions such as:

• Planting / defusing the bomb
  
• Consecutive round wins / losses
  
• Picking up tokens from dead players

We’ve had a couple of early external tests with top level teams from within the competitive scene to test the new format (without user interface). We’re currently working with a different UI designer to revamp the Wartide 2.0 user interface to communicate this new gameplay as simply as possible for new players and spectators.



This is a work in progress and is subject to change. Some UI weapon models are placeholders and will be updated before release

We intend to carry out more external tests with top tier players as we move toward polishing Wartide 2.0 before public release in June.

We feel these changes counter some of the issues that were raised about our original Wartide gamemode and we are really interested to see what you all think and as always we are keen for constructive feedback.

Playlists – Estimated Major Update #2 (June)

We fully understand that with lower concurrent player numbers, new and less informed players are finding it difficult to find other players to play with unless its during peak times. One of the ways we are going to help alleviate this issue is by removing both ‘unranked’ and ‘ranked’ playlist and merging them into one and the same under the menu option ‘Wartide’. This means players will all be searching under one playlist - instead of being split between 2, helping players who want to find matches in the new Wartide 2.0 gamemode.



The new Wartide will function the same as the previous unranked playlist.

This is a temporary measure until we’re ready to relaunch a brand new ranked playlist through our huge competitive matchmaking upgrade later in the year (which we will release more info on at a later date. This decision was also made as we feel the ranked experience of Battalion 1944 wasn’t to the standard we ourselves would’ve liked it to be in, let alone our players.

More on this below.


The current ranked matchmaking user experience is not good enough - to the point where we’re hearing players would rather play unranked than ranked.

Instead of bashing away at improving a system that isn’t working - we have been talking to a very popular third party service provider who loves Battalion 1944 to implement their widely loved and accepted matchmaking system directly into the game… whilst we’re hoping players aren't too upset by the closure of our own competitive mode - we’re hoping you’ll be able to face it for now as we have a great 3rd party replacement in the works that will be integrated into the game itself.

This will come with a reliable ELO system that tracks your progress, general stat tracking, match history and all the other good stuff that player expect from a top tier competitive experience.

This is only the beginning for this feature, as we’ve always wanted a way for 5 man teams to stack up against each other within the game. More info on this will be announced closer to the release time whilst we work out the finer details of the system in the meantime.


In keeping with our renewed plan from last week’s ‘moving forwards’ news update (which you can read by clicking here , we’ll be releasing another development update next week with more behind the scenes looks at the development progress of Battalion 1944’s new upcoming features.

Thanks for the continued support,
See you next week!

Tuna and The Bulkhead Team

Hey guys,

We felt it was time to get you guys more involved and release a news update to really let you guys know what’s happening internally at Bulkhead Interactive, and lay bare our plans for the future with the game. After reading this update, you will hopefully see the light of the tunnel in the same way we do - as we aren't going anywhere and neither is Battalion 1944.

Please understand: Anyone who has ‘quit’ playing Battalion 1944, we fully understand the reasons why you feel that way. The most complained about issues include:

1] Bugs/Crashes & Performance
2] Core Gameplay Issues and Not Enough Reasons To Play.
3] Lack of Concurrent Players (A side effect of the above issues)

This good news is that everything in the above list is entirely fixable over this next few months. This update is written as if you guys are partners, not just our players.


We want to address the reason behind the commital to major updates and less smaller updates/patches.

First of all it's important to understand our infrastructure as an indie company. We’re a small studio with lots of talent that’s being stretched over multiple disciplines. Producing a ‘live operations’ game that’s constantly being updated in a multiplayer space where players are now expecting the level of support of a game such as Fortnite (Epic Games themselves) is a difficult task with a small team size. This means the time of every individual working on the game is at max capacity - unless we chose to go further and sacrifice more of our personal lives to try and cover all bases.

Our core team members did that voluntarily, including weekends and overtime all the way up to and after our Early Access launch because we believe in Battalion 1944. We were also (and still are) doing all of this on sub-optimal build/deployment systems which has brought our update/patch schedule to a complete halt whilst we work on huge new content/features ready for major update 2.

It's no secret we needed to launch the game when we did. We put everything we could, financially and mentally into that launch. Thankfully, we were right to believe in the game and our community. The launch was extremely financially successful when taking into account our studio size, regardless of the mixed reception Battalion 1944 received. We’re now able to start reinvesting those profits back into the game directly, which includes addressing the problems with our infrastructure that has become exposed these past few weeks.

This includes; Hiring new talent, giving our dev team more time to work on polish and testing as well as investing in Bulkhead’s build system tech to test and deploy safe builds much faster. This all sounds great (and it is!) but the downside is that players won’t see the benefit of this reinvestment immediately, as all of this takes time to implement into the studios workflow.

This means Bulkhead Interactive will be able to update & support our games much better in the long term and that the current downtime between updates (which we understand is highly frustrating but cannot be solved overnight) won’t be an issue for us in the future. After Major Update 2, things can start to improve.

Thanks for being understanding and patient with this.


Here’s a quick overview of our main focuses going forwards, which we’ll be showing much more of over the coming weeks. This is our ‘top priorities’ list, so don’t worry if a smaller issue isn’t listed here.

Bug Fixes & Existing Issues

• Wartide 2.0
  
• Arcade 2.0
  
• ‘Faceit Arena’
  
• New competitive maps
  
• New arcade maps
  
• Updating existing maps
  
• Free for all deathmatch (FFA)
  
• New player models
  
• Core gameplay adjustments
  
• Huge new content additions for full release
  
• Improve the new player experience
  
• Make the user experience more rewarding & fun for all players
  
• Add incentives for casual players to return everyday
  
• Add more incentives for competitive players to compete at the highest level
  
• New competitive matchmaking system, light years better than before.
  
• Mapping tools
  
• Match replay system
  
• Improving our studio infrastructure for faster testing & releasing of new builds
  
• Performance optimisations

We’re changing the way we do communication going forwards. We’ve always wanted to be more hands on with the community and the opposite of a AAA studio that ignores its community. Instead of random Reddit comments and private DMs to smaller groups of people - we’re going to communicate in a much more official manor with regularly scheduled news posts yet still retain the accessibility to our Dev team we’ve been aiming to build through our Twitter accounts.

We’re a small team which, unfortunately, means we can’t keep up with the patch/update speed and frequency that players expect, as explained in the ‘Update/Patch Schedule Reasoning’ section of this update.

Over the following weeks we’re going to start by releasing almost weekly development updates to show you guys exactly what we’re working on. These will include preview screenshots and written explanations of why we’re doing everything we’re doing so hopefully you will all feel more involved in our Early Access process.


Despite the chants of 'Dead Game' - Battalion isn't going anywhere. Our team are working full throttle and we will see Battalion 1944 through to release. This isn't blinded stubbornness on our part. We truly believe not only is it right for us to finish what we started but that we can get through this early period in Battalion’s life and use our next Major Update to place the game on an upward trajectory.

Players who joined us in development on Day 1 of Early Access don't realise that our expectations have always been on the lower end of the scale in terms of concurrent players - this game was a love letter to a very small community that has mostly moved on from gaming. The fast paced 'arena shooter' genre isn’t the giant gaming behemoth it used to be and we knew that going into development from the beginning.

This game blew up beyond our expectations at Early Access launch because the people who loved the old school style of FPS games that they grew up with (and actually took skill to play) had a new home to come to. The fact that this genre isn’t as big as it used to be does not mean that Battalion 1944 wasn’t and can't be a viable game for us to run our studio on full time. We believe we’ve been shown you guys that enough demand is there for this style of game and that when we are ready to boost player numbers on a future polished version of the current core game we will be able to have a second coming for Battalion.

This is the reason we're going to continue confidently working on the game, polishing every aspect of the experience taking it all the way to release. It might seem quiet from us for now until then but rest assured that we are working furiously to achieve this goal. This includes new huge new content and features. We have plans to boost the player base at multiple points throughout the game’s future and intend to provide the hardcore experience we set out to make over 2 years ago.

Battalion 1944 will not go down in history as a failure. In a way, it has already been a success from an internal financial standpoint (which unfortunately you must consider even when creating cool things such as video games). Our goal was to sell enough units to be able to continue development for 12 more months. We exceeded that target. Yes, the game has fundamental bugs and issues - but everything about that is fixable over this next year. We intend to leave a legacy that Battalion 1944, our love letter to the games that have been left behind by popular culture in favor of modern design, can provide a home for the players left behind - however big or small that community may be.

In a years time, once that is achieved, I don’t believe Battalion 1944 will be looked upon as a failure (by anyone who actually thinks deeply about these things at least) - as hitting the critical mass of concurrent players that Fortnite and PUBG are hitting was never the realistic goal we had set out to reach. If anything, we’re on the road to succeeding in continuing development for the game we wanted to play whilst laying the studio’s foundations for continued support and future projects in years to come.

Our goal has always been to maintain a player base with enough casual players dropping in and out whilst sustaining a competitive environment outside of the game itself through community hosted tournaments. This was and still is our goal. It’s fully achievable too.


The fact that you're here right now reading this lengthy update during this rocky Early Access period, still playing the game and adding positive and constructive discussion on our Reddit/Discord community is a testament to the better half of Battalion 1944’s community as a whole. We have a lot of new features and content in the works and we can’t wait to share development with you over the next few months as we lead up to our next major update.

We want to thank all of you for your time spent playing and testing Battalion 1944. Please know that we are doing everything we can over this next year to make the game closer to what we would all love it to become.

- We are 100% committed to Battalion 1944. We are going nowhere and neither is this game. We’re reinvesting everything we’ve made back into the project. Bulkhead will grow and improve as a studio as we work on some awesome new content and address Battalion’s core problems. Thank you for being a part of our journey.