The First World War shooter Verdun celebrates the famed Christmas Truce of 1914 with a special in-game event in which players from opposing sides can get together for snowball fights, soccer games, and card exchanges. Starting today and running until April 22, something similar, yet very different is happening in the trenches of its standalone expansion Tannenberg: The Wolf Truce. 

This event, according to developer M2H, is also based on historical happenings, but from later in the war, when the carnage had driven large numbers of wolves from their normal ranges in search of food. They pushed into Germany, killing livestock and even children, and also began attacking soldiers, especially the wounded. It became such a problem that German and Russian soldiers were eventually forced to band together to fight them off. 

The Wolf Truce event in Tannenberg recreates that lupine invasion by injecting aggressive wolves into the game, but what makes it really interesting is that players aren't actually forced to team up to fight them. The Christmas Truce event takes place in a special no-shooting area, separate from the usual maps, but the Wolf Truce will not, so while players can (and probably should) team up to survive, they can also opt to keep shooting each other and hope for the best—or, maybe, put on a friendly face and then wait for an opportune moment to hit 'em from behind. 

Wolves can appear on any Tannenberg map over this weekend but will only appear on winter maps after that, and players who survive a wolf attack without injuring or killing anyone on the opposite team will earn the new Wolf Truce medal. Personally, I think it sounds like a recipe for disaster, but that's also the appeal, right? Details of the event are available on Steam, and a historical record of the Wolf Truce from a 1917 edition of the New York Times is yours to enjoy below. 

With the dramatic new trailer above, Tannenberg has left Steam Early Access. At the time of writing, the 64-player WWI shooter has attracted 241 concurrent players, and I was able to join a half-full match on a US server quickly after completing the 5.4 GB download. The European servers are more populated at the moment, but it's also the middle of a Wednesday in the US, so that's understandable. 

Tannenberg comes from Verdun creators Blackmill Games and M2H, and has been in Early Access since late 2017. Where Verdun takes place on WWI's Western Front, Tannenberg shifts to the east, with Russian, Romanian, Austro-Hungarian, German, and Bulgarian armies. 

The primary mode, Maneuver, sees teams attack and defend sectors. It's more Red Orchestra than Battlefield, with a focus on authenticity as the armies push and pull along a front line—the tutorial here explains the basics.

Tannenberg is $20 or £15.49 on Steam. We'll take to the trenches this weekend—after this week's avalanche of other game launches—and let you know how we fare with it next week.

Tannenberg, the "realistic" First World War FPS that debuted on Steam Early Access a year ago, will go into full release on February 13, 2018, M2H and Blackmill Games announced today. The developers also teased a special winter offensive event and revealed plans to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the Armistice that ended the war on November 11, 1918, with a two-minute in-game silence. 

Tannenberg is a multiplayer WWI FPS that can support up to 64 players, and while that might inspire thoughts of Battlefield 1, it's a very different kind of game. EA claims "authenticity" in its shooters, while Tannenberg (and its predecessor, Verdun) are more about realism, which is to say that your gun sucks and you're going to die a lot at the hands of people you can't see. (But in a good way.)

As if to emphasize the point, the studio put out a brief "release date announcement" video teasing the arrival of the Bulgarians, who will be added to the game when it launches. In the world of Tannenberg, that's big stuff: M2H and Blackmill said when the game was announced that their goal was to turn a spotlight on the war's lesser-known Eastern Front, which was a far more mobile conflict that didn't get bogged down in the grind of trench warfare.

A major update to Tannenberg was also released today that overhauls the interface, with the goal of making it more immersive and intuitive for newcomers. M2H said that the update is a "good first pass," but promised to continue evolving the game "to capture the true Eastern Front warfare experience." Players are invited to offer input on future changes on Steam or via the Tannenberg Discord.    

Tannenberg is currently on sale for half-price on Steam—$10/£8/€8—until November 11. A gameplay trailer featuring the updated interface is below.

Tannenberg, the First World War online FPS from the makers of Verdun that was announced in May, is now available for purchase on Steam Early Access. The new game takes place on the Eastern Front of the war, and features Frontovik and Cossack units from the Russian army, Austro-Hungarian KuK troops, and German Infanterie doing battle in a more mobile, but no less horrific, theater of war. 

Unlike certain other WWI shooters you may have played (I'm talking about Battlefield 1), Tannenberg, like Verdun, is a more true-to-life recreation of the Great War: Weapons are clunky, movement is slow, and death comes quickly. That probably won't help make it a mainstream hit, but the priority for developers M2H and Blackmill Games is "to create an all-encompassing World War 1 experience that captures the essence in the gameplay and also provide a myriad of historical content (by using squad leveling and map sectors etc.)" 

With Verdun marking the "completion" of its Western Front effort, the developers opted to go to the Eastern Front, because of its "enormous" historical impact. It also opens up opportunities to create different kinds of gameplay, without sacrificing historical fidelity. 

"The almost complete lock-down on the Western front required unique rules to be imposed on a multiplayer game-mode to recreate the somewhat symmetrical nature of warfare, where each line lost would face a direct counter-attack, for instance. The overwhelming nature of the combat and the deep lines of defense on either side allowed for a unique approach," Blackmill's Jos Hoebe explained. 

"In the East we see characteristic elements that also lend themselves to certain gameplay rules. To begin with, the environments themselves are different, with less continuous lines of trenches, the vast distances to be covered, and fewer artillery shells per square meter, combined with the doctrines and equipment of the armies that fought there. The battle of Tannenberg itself, for instance, is a good example of an encirclement battle, a pattern repeated several times over as the war progressed. This element will be central to the new 'Maneuver' game mode." 

Maneuver is a 64-player mode set on large, open maps, with multiple zones of control and a variety of terrain, weather conditions and objectives. Players can attack and defend from any zone they control, and as zones are won or lost, the flow of battle will shift. "All of these elements add up not only to a different meta-game in terms of having to move around in a nonlinear way across the battlefield when the tactical situation changes for your squad, but also with respects to shifting gunplay engagement distances and different approaches to cover," Hoebe said. 

I've spent a little time playing with the Maneuver mode and even though it has that "not quite ready" feel of a game in beta, I was impressed by both its scope and its brutality. The map features forests, bombed-out buildings, dangerously wide-open fields, points of high and low ground, and small networks of trenches—and it feels big. It's plodding at times compared to games like BF1, but the slow, primitive weaponry can make for some intense moments, too: In one up-close confrontation, an enemy and I each emptied our rifles toward, but not actually into, each other, and then it was a frantic race to reload (which takes forever) and try again. I won, by the way.

And when you shoot a guy and don't make a clean kill—which seems to be most of the time—he goes down and makes some of the most awful screaming, choking, and gurgling noises you can imagine. It's horrible, but it occasionally works against the game too: The aftermath of a big skirmish in a small area is inevitably filled with competing cries of agony, and it ends up sounding like the cast of a small-town theater troupe trying to outdo each other in simultaneous over-dramatic death scenes. It might sound like an odd thing to complain about, but it's really weird. Hopefully the developers will tone it down. 

The new game features a number of under-the-hood changes from Verdun, including improved AI and graphics, and an updated interface that will properly support 4K resolutions. But the developers plan to approach the Early Access in basically the same way it did with the previous game, gradually increasing the player cap as it becomes more stable. Even so, if all goes well it should be a relatively short Early Access period: Tannnenberg is content-complete, so the Early Access beta will be focused primarily on "balance [and] sound and performance issues," and getting the new interface in place. It's expected to be ready for full release in the first quarter of 2018.

Before there was Battlefield 1 there was Verdun, a "realistic" First World War multiplayer FPS released in 2015 by M2H and Blackmill Games. It obviously wasn't as much of a hit as EA's big-budget shooter but its unique, unforgiving approach to online combat found an audience—enough to justify a "standalone expansion" called Tannenberg, announced today and scheduled to come to Steam later this year. 

Tannenberg brings the Russian Empire into the fight on the Eastern Front, in a very different style of fighting than that seen in Verdun. "The Russians and Austro-Hungarians played a huge part in the First World War and we're looking forward to portraying their contribution," Jos Hoebe of Blackmill Games said. "The Eastern Front didn't see the same trench warfare as in the West. In Tannenberg we offer players the experience of a more mobile side of the war which many people may be unfamiliar with." 

The game will feature a new 64-player mode that "captures this more mobile nature of battle." Squads will have access to new, highly-detailed weapons,  and there will be new landscapes to fight over as well, including snow-covered fields, forests, burned villages, and mountainside pastures. And of course, as noted in the Steam listing, there will be plenty of "horrendous gore."

Verdun's "realism" means that it's not the most accessible gaming experience you're liable to have. Most of my time with it has been spent crawling through mud toward where I think the fight is, and then getting killed by someone I didn't see. But I like that there's a place for games like this to thrive, and I hope that Tannenberg does just as well, even if I won't miss those deathtrap trenches. It's slated to come out later this year.