We are now just one week away from full release on May 23rd. We're currently putting out two updates a day! We'd like to apologise for dropping this much information on you all at once, but there's just so much to discuss! Today, we have a 'non game' related update first before we get to the gameplay update later today.

For a long time we’ve been discussing internally and with Faceit whether we should look to support the South American community. After much back and forth with the South American community, we have decided to host servers in Sao Paulo for both Arcade and Faceit (Competitive). This decision has been made after the support from the community for the last 12 months, but notably the SA community have ‘Revolut’ to thank for his efforts.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jqh7Ve4uiBo&feature=youtu.be



We are excited to continue our partnership with The Plays. Tournaments will be exclusively held on the FACEIT platform and are to be featured in the Battalion 1944 game client.

Initially the two supported regions for these extra-special events are Europe and North America, with each region having its own tournament on alternating weekends to allow for the level of competition to grow with the game’s release. The champions of each weekly event will receive $500 cash and an exclusive invite to the final week of hard-fought battles where an additional cash prize will be waiting for the winners.

Blitzkrieg Battle: Europe - Season 1

• Week 1: Sunday 2nd June
  
• Week 2: Sunday 16th June
  
• Week 3: Sunday 30th June
  
• Week 4: Sunday 14th July
  
• Week 5: Sunday 28th July (Season Finals)

Blitzkrieg Battle: North America - Season 1

• Week 1: Saturday 8th June
  
• Week 2: Saturday 22nd June
  
• Week 3: Saturday 6th July
  
• Week 4: Saturday 20th July
  
• Week 5: Saturday 3rd August (Season Finals)

With $5000 up for grabs it's a no brainer for our competitive players out there, and don't worry we'll be talking about team only ladders soon too!

There’s more to announce today than just tournaments and server support! Later today we’ll be showing off some of the automatic weapons in Battalion and discussing some of the pros and cons of each weapon. For now, thanks to everybody for the support this last few weeks!

Remember, there is a whole host of quality of life changes, bug fixes, general improvements, and minor tweaks. There are simply too many to go into detail about every single one, Battalion 1944 is virtually a new game at full release.

Thank you everybody and obrigado!
Bulkhead

Originally upon Battalion's release, as designers we made the decision to build the game and gunplay with very little recoil, if any at all. Instead we opted for horizontal animation based recoil (similar to COD4's AK74u).

The community have been vocal about the fact that whilst the rifles feel great, the automatic weapons have always lacked skill, felt weightless, and simply were not fun to use.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mgNlrGCsW4w

The result of increasing recoil has been an extremely positive one! Whilst the recoil has only been tested in betas that we ran through the discord Battalion community. The feedback was unanimous in the opinion that the recoil made the automatic weapons feel great to use and fun to control. The recoil is certainly a new challenging aspect to the game, it has also increased the time to kill.
In the image below you can see the huge difference between the recoil in the old version of Battalion and the soon to be released version.

Every automatic weapon has had its recoil increased.



Adding recoil has only improved the game. Creating a more challenging, entertaining, and skilful experience.

If you have any thoughts on the recoil, please let us know here or on any of our other social pages! Recoil will be live with full release on May 23rd 2019!

Thanks
Bulkhead

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3wiHnnXblE
Battalion 1944’s full release is so close! On May 23rd you’ll be able to play mountains of new content! Today we’re revealing ‘Vanguard’, our new competitive Russian map that also plays as an intense Capture the Flag map.



Visuals
Make no mistake, the priority of Vanguard was gameplay first. We wanted to totally change the visual experience of this map, so the obvious choice was snow! This is our first snow map, snow gives us a great contrast between the indoors and outdoors. Diving into a building to get out the street feels great as a result of the warm interior lighting and the bitterly cold exterior lighting. Whilst the map does have fog, you may tweak your settings for improved visibility if you prefer playing on a lower quality graphical setting.



Design
The Russian architecture from that time period makes for iconic landmarks within the level, but at the same time we are able to use big blocky shapes to create a well balanced level without awkwardly shaped objects and buildings. Vanguard plays really well as a Wartide map but we had a lot of fun using it on Capture the Flag. The midstreet is a favourite amongst patient snipers in both Wartide and Capture the Flag. Holding the street in the late game is a popular strategy for catching rotating players in the later part of the game.







We are incredibly excited to be this close to release! Soon we’ll officially announce our showmatch and livestream where you can see the map being played live on Monday the 20th of May.


If you have any questions about Vanguard, tweet @Battalion1944 or jump into the official discord and we’ll be happy to discuss them with you

And there’s a lot more to come!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y0VYj9bTlHw&feature=youtu.be
Battalion 1944’s full release is just around the corner. This week we’re revealing a whole host of information! On May 23rd a whole host of new maps will be available to players. This is ‘Goldrush’. A new addition to the arcade map pool.


Visuals
We wanted to head into a forest again, but we didn’t want to allow players to hide in long grass and foliage. So we made sure that the playable areas are clean with the nearby unreachable areas lively and busy. We were inspired by the myths of the Nazi Gold trains in Poland. The train is such a great visual asset we’re really pleased with this map!




Design
The best Capture the Flag maps always let the flag carriers get creative with how they steal flags. We’ve made multiple crossing routes where players will be forced to make key decisions that can win or lose the game. We love the intensity of Capture the Flag, we wanted to make sure the map was capable of maximising the intensity of those cat and mouse moments. That’s why we decided to take advantage of varying heights, including underground.

We’re excited for you to dive into Goldrush and let us know what you think! Get your PPSh drum mags ready!



If you have any questions about Goldrush, tweet @Battalion1944 or jump into the official discord and we’ll be happy to discuss them with you
Tomorrow we’ll be discussing Vanguard, our new snow map designed for both Wartide and Capture the Flag!

New map ‘Docks’ focuses on rewarding skilled players and decision making

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bV2X0TGGQdM&feature=youtu.be
When we started playing our blockout/greybox version of the level. We knew we wanted to make something bright and vibrant so we pushed forward with Italy. We wanted to hark back to the bright COD2 maps based in Tunisia. So we found a region that worked for us and fit with our setting.


We wanted to bring back the verticality of Toujane. The feeling that if you perfect your movement, you can effectively ‘parkour’ along the rooftops is definitely something we had in mind when we were designing this map. In Wartide the creativity in your movement comes to life when a player is forced to ‘rotate’ (change bomb site).
Docks is a small map compared to other Battalion maps, this makes for lots of quick rotations and double fakes. Information and communication is key on Docks.


The rooftops are powerful positions, but they are high risk positions. Attackers will often post up at a position where they can take aim at the rooftops and pick off any defenders trying to take a high ground position. Often when playing Docks, it will feel like a game of cat and mouse, gathering crumbs of information from quick head peaks and minor sounds. But in the last 20 seconds of the round the attackers have no choice but to crank up the aggression.


As an attacker on Docks, you’ll find more success if you make it a priority to pick off overextending defenders. Playing from far back and spreading across the map, only picking a bomb site once you have the numbers advantage in the late round. Do not give the defenders control of the rooftops, at any point. If you do, you’ll have real trouble trying to plant the bomb!




If you have any questions about Docks, tweet @Battalion1944 or jump into the official discord and we’ll be happy to discuss them with you

Tomorrow we’ll be discussing Goldrush, our new Arcade map designed for CTF play.

We are pleased to announce that today anyone can go and download the Battalion 1944 Toolkit from the Epic Launcher. The primary function of the tools is for mapping and level design.

Included in the Toolkit is our aim_map. This map contains many assets that you are totally free to reuse within Battalion 1944 to create maps.

For the sake of clarity, Battalion’s mod tools are free to use.


Video Tutorials
We have a series of video tutorials made by one of our programmers. The tutorials will walk you through the process of creating a mod, setting up a map, adding audio, polishing the level, then packaging and releasing the map to the Steam Workshop.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c4hYnfat62g&list=PLv_u6kEQpiVeNceRm9om2zCkWhQ7UxKOV&index=2&t=0s

Full Playlist:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLv_u6kEQpiVeNceRm9om2zCkWhQ7UxKOV

Discord Community
Feel free to join our official discord modding community by following this invite link https://discord.gg/GhpTK2S


Go Crazy!
You are free to create whatever you are capable of within our tools. The goal of us releasing mod tools it to get some of the great maps that people have in their minds actually playable in the game. But remember, you’ll need to optimise your work to run on everyone’s PC’s!

Some of our devs have been having fun creating old maps from older Call of Duty games. Obviously we will never release these in the main game, but if you do fancy recreating your favourite maps you are more than welcome to add them to the Steam Workshop. Here is one of our devs Mark ‘Phan’ Pinney playing around with a remake of his!


Dev Support
We intend to work with the mod community. If we see a map we think is really special or could benefit from our intervention and support, we will reach out to the creator. The best way to show us that your map should be in the game? Is by getting it on the Steam Workshop and hosting it on your own server! Show us all, let the community give you feedback!

Download Battalion Toolkit Here!

Good luck! We can't wait to see the amazing creations you come up with!
Bulkhead

We’re excited to announce that multiplayer shooter Battalion 1944 is about to leave Steam Early Access!

Battalion 1944 will launch in full this month - May 23, 2019, to be precise.

And precision is extremely important. This has been just over a year in Early Access development - sticking to our plan of taking on board your feedback and polishing the game to a state that we are confident that hardcore FPS players, new & returning, will enjoy. Instead of us hyping up the full release - we’ll let this list of features & improvements do the talking for us and you can enjoy just a little tease at what’s to come.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=paBYTKZZS5s

Over the next coming weeks before the launch date we will break down and detail these specific features in further steam posts. There’s so much to talk about we can’t do it all in one post!

Full Release Feature List

Russians Join The Fight
Say hello to the Russian faction.

Russian Weapons

• PPSh-41 Drum Magazine
  
• SVT-40
  
• Baikal 21 Double Barrel Shotgun
  
• PPS-43 Stick Magazine
  
• Fedorov Avtomat
  
• Mosin Nagant
  
• Mosin Nagant Scoped
  
• TT-33
  
• RGD-33

New Map: Vanguard
Play on the new russian snow map - Vanguard. This map has long open lanes & lots of buildings to duel across with your mosin nagant & kar98 rifles.

New Map: Docks
Take the fight to Italy in this homage to the rooftop rifle duels of toujane. A mix of tight & open angles and a smaller map layout make fast rotations & clutches nail biting.

New Map: Goldrush
This new map focuses on its free flowing arcadey layout within a french forest on the border of the german defensive line. Follow the train track into the heart of axis bunker system for close range combat - or snipe from the barn tower overlooking a key domination point. This map is open for many player choices.

We’ll be covering all of the new maps in more detail over the next few weeks.


Introducing Faceit 5v5 Competitive Matchmaking
Faceit’s competitive matchmaking toolset is integrated directly into the game for free. Stats, rankings, matchmaking, tournaments and hubs are all built into the game menus.
More info coming soon...

New gamemode 1v1 Showdown
Run through Faceit matchmaking - prove you’re the best in 1v1 small deathmatch arena. More info coming soon…

New Gamemode - Free For All
This mode is accessible via the community server browser.

Improved Capture The Flag
Extra time & overtime make this overhauled mode extremely fun!

Improved Domination


New Challenge System
Get cosmetic rewards for completing quick fire, daily, weekly and community challenges.
More info coming soon…

Improved Character Visibility
Our new character shaders allow you to actually see who’s sniping at you!

Stat Tracking
In depth stat tracking lets you see your progress from season to season.

Leaderboards
Track who’s the best on your friends list at Battalion 1944.

Ingame Medals & Rewards
Be proud of your achievements and show off your collection of accolades.
Get a sick 1 tap or 5 man clutch? There’s a medal for that.

Match History & Replay System.
Competitive Wartide, Arcade all supported with full playback.

User Interface Overhaul
Much clearer and slicker ingame and main menu UI.

Audio Overhaul
Hear the snaps of bullets hitting beside you and hear your teammates warnings of incoming grenades - alongside new music triggers and voice lines, Battalion 1944 has never sounded better.

BattleRank Season 3
We’re launching a brand new season of Battlerank, our free ‘battlepass-like’ system, which lets players gain cosmetic rewards simply for playing the game. Every level rewards a free war chest This season brings brand new weapon skins for players to work to unlock through our reworked XP system that rewards how well you play - with a beautiful STG44 at the highest diamond rank.
More info coming soon…

New War Chest - The ‘Red Star’ Russian War Chest
Packed full of shiny new russian weapon skins & can be earned for free through our new ingame challenge system.

General Fluidity & Gameplay Improvements
This one is so big! We’ve made so many improvements to counter ‘bunny hopping’ and diversify away from the old ‘corner jumping’ meta alongside feedback from the community. We’ll be breaking this down more over the coming weeks - in the meantime ask our closed beta players their thoughts.

Much, much more!
These points only cover a small amount of the full changelist for full release.
Many minor quality of life changes have been worked on & we can’t wait for you to try the full version of the game.




Early Access hasn’t been an easy ride - we knew it never would be. However - full release will be a turning point for Battalion 1944. With the game being more stable and fun than ever - we cannot wait to see you on the servers again at full release.

Thanks,
Bulkhead Interactive

First of all, the price is going to go up. This was something we promised from the start – that Early Access players would get the game at a lower price than we planned to sell the release version for. And we’re keeping that promise. Over the past 14 months or so, the community for this game has helped to make Battalion what we always hoped it could be when it fully released; and we’ve always wanted to show our appreciation for that.

The retail price on Steam will increase to $19.99 and local currency equivalents, on Monday the 22nd of April. This brings it in line with where we feel the right value lies in terms of what we’ve added in the past year or so (see the list below!).

However, we know the importance of getting new players in at launch, so we will be offering a solid launch discount – although, even this won’t bring it below the price our Early Access players paid for the game.

Here are some highlights from Battalion’s time on Steam so far:

• New Map – Derailed
  
• New Map – Coastal
  
• New Map – Invasion
  
• New Map – Savoia
  
• New Weapon – Grease Gun
  
• New Weapon – MP28
  
• New Characters– US Forces
  
• New Charactersl – German Forces
  
• All Maps Revamped– Multiple Improvements
  
• Added Battlerank Progression & Rewards
  
• Added High Quality VOIP Voice Communication
  
• Audio Overhaul
  
• Animation Overhaul
  
• Wartide Overhaul
  
• Spectator Mode Overhaul
  
• Multiple Matchmaking Improvements
  
• Added XP & Progression
  
• Added Competitive Ranking
  
• Added Weapon Skins
  
• Massive Networking & Hitreg Improvements
  
• Massive System Performance Improvements
  
• New HD Renderer – Significant Visual Improvement
  
• New 3D Audio Implementation
  
• Added AI & Bots
  
• Added Match Replay System
  
• Added Strat Mode
  
• Reworked Character/Level Scale and sizing
  
• Released Dedicated Server Files
  
• Continuous Movement Improvements
  
• Continuous Weapon Balance & Penetration Improvements
  
• Massive Number of Bugs Crushed
  
• Massively reduced the viability of the ‘corner jumping’ meta

For those of you who have seen the rumblings and teases on the Official Discord and participated in the closed betas, you’ll have heard rumors of the huge quality of life improvements and mountains of content coming along with this coming release.

Battalion 1944’s move out of early access brings with it the game’s biggest update to date. It won’t be too long before we can start delving into the details so stay tuned. Thank you for your continued support to get us to this point.

It’s been a long journey but for us we’ve only just reached the beginning of Battalion’s life – and on that note, it just remains to say that the actual release date will be announced very soon!

Hello everyone!

As a team, we have been working hard on Battalion updates for the last 9 months. With every update, we’ve listened to the community’s wishes and opinions - and factored them into the adjustments we’ve made to the game. For us at Bulkhead Interactive, a key aspect of our development philosophy is to empower the community as evidenced in every changelog.

We’d like to take this opportunity to say ‘thank you’ for being a part of our Early Access phase. We agreed pre-launch that we would be treating Early Access exactly as it was intended - a time for testing the game, and getting meaningful feedback from the players, and we’re humbled with the response we’ve received over the past six months. We really didn’t anticipate having such a big launch, and it’s now well documented that the high player numbers caused us some problems. But thanks for sticking with us, because now we’re able to announce...

...That in early 2019 we are officially ending our Early Access phase and preparing for full release!

To that end, there will be no more public game updates until full release, but this is by no means just a case of tying up loose ends. The Battalion 1944 release in early 2019 will deliver the game’s biggest update to date, with an overhauled user experience, more content than has ever been added before, brand new goals to aim for and so much more. Thanks to all the testing and feedback, we’re confident that the game has really now found its identity. We can’t wait to share it with all of you, but for now, it’s a secret!

This overhaul requires work - but more importantly, a healthy playerbase to enjoy the new game. It's important for Battalion 1944 to make a big splash at full release, and recapture the hearts and minds of players who fell in love with the concept earlier this year - as well as finding new players who were reluctant to join the fight back then because of the tech issues around the Early Access launch.

For this reason we’re committing to putting all future updates that were scheduled to go live pre-launch into one big release, rather than drip feeding that content as it's being worked on, as each release requires a substantial amount of development resources to be redirected to testing and pushing a build live. We would rather direct that dev time toward new features & systems. We’ll be talking more at the start of 2019 as we ramp up our marketing, and prepare for our own D-Day!

This does not mean that we’ll be completely cut off from you guys, as perhaps we have been when we’ve previously ‘gone dark’ in the past. We will be running small tests closer to release with our dedicated Discord community to gauge reactions and feedback. We will also release more information on our official Discord closer to the time.

But the combination of polish and highly-requested features will be a game-changer for fans. The game that we release at full launch in 2019 was ONLY made possible by using Early Access to get that vital feedback from players. We’re giving Battalion 1944 what we all want from the game: the best chance it can have to succeed. We hope you’ll support us in this journey going forwards through to full release, as we’ll be preparing our Mosin-Nagants ready for action on the servers next year...



Investment from Square Enix

On another topic, you may have read on games industry news sites that the publisher we’ve worked with (on The Turing Test and Battalion 1944) - Square Enix - has recently purchased a share of the Bulkhead Interactive business. This investment is something that we have been looking forward to announcing and we’re really glad that we can reveal it now!

Just to talk a little bit about what that means - for Battalion it’s a really a positive step. It means a better opportunity at launch, more marketing and more focus from the team at Square Enix too.

Alongside the investment news, it was also announced that we will be working on a new IP for Square Enix. To be clear, this has no impact on the work going into Battalion 1944, and the studio will continue to be focused on working towards the game’s release (and continued post-launch support too).

A separate, small 3 man team within Bulkhead is currently in the pre-production and planning phases for this other title that we will eventually work on; this is standard industry practice, but we wanted our community to know what’s happening at our studio, and ensure that no wires were crossed.

So that’s it - it’s been super busy in the past few months, and will be for the foreseeable future - so wish us luck, and thanks again for all your support and feedback.

We’ll see you in the New Year!

The Bulkhead Interactive Team

We’re releasing a smallpatch to the game which will help improve some of the high priority issues seen in the previous Update 2.5.2 patch.

Amazon Game Servers

With Update 2.5.3 we’re migrating our official server hosting to Amazon for initial testing. These server migration tests will help Battalion 1944 in the long term and will ultimately help the stability of the game when we reach full release next year.

Overall matchmaking and server stability should improve with this patch. However, if issues do arise, please post in the official Discord channel if you have any issue with connecting to or being disconnected from servers, or use the ingame bug report function.
We’ll be monitoring these reports with a close eye.


Movement

• Vaulting net correction has been smoothed to make for a smooth vault on online servers that closer mimics the smoothness of vaulting on LAN.
  
• Net corrections when landing have been tweaked, reducing the feeling/frequency of being teleported by the game server when ping is varying.

Gamemodes - Capture The Flag

• Fixed an issue where players would take the enemy flag but could not return it to their own home base.

Thanks for the feedback on the latest 2.5.3 patch. Please keep us up to date with bug reports and general feedback - the team is making every effort to. The studio is fully focused and working on making sure Battalion 1944 has the largest impact it can at full release. We’ll have more information to release soon in this regard.

Thanks for your patience!

The Bulkhead Interactive Dev Team