There are some frighteningly realistic games out there. Battlefield 1 sticks in my mind, primarily for its sound effects and destruction physics. Hell Let Loose is similar, and then there’s Escape From Tarkov and the controversial SWAT simulator Ready Or Not. But when it comes to the brutal attrition of war, where both sides suffer horrible casualties and neither can truly be called a winner, WW2 MMO Foxhole has just become the perfect metaphor. So drawn-out and deadly is the latest in-game battle that developer Siege Camp has been forced to intervene.
A little context. Foxhole is a persistent, ongoing MMO and WW2 game where every single soldier and factory worker is a human player. Using vehicles, guns, and artillery, frontline players fight over hexagonal zones to earn Victory Points. Logistics players stay behind the line and oversee enormous production lines – every bullet and bomb in Foxhole has to be manually produced and delivered to the front by players.
The game is divided into wars, and a single war might last for weeks – when you log back in, you can check the map to see how much territory has changed hands since you were last online. The winner is the side that has accumulated a sufficient number of Victory Points. One they hit the target, the war ends, the map resets, and the game starts over.
Until recently, the longest war in Foxhole history was War 100, which lasted just under 55 days. The deadliest war was War 117, where collectively, both sides suffered 7.6 million casualties. However, both of these have just been dwarfed by the latest war, one that will live in Foxhole infamy. From this day forward, Foxhole players will shudder at the words: Charlie 9.
71 days. More than nine million dead. Charlie 9 was the longest and most lethal war in Foxhole history. Despite enormous efforts and sacrifices, neither side was able to definitively gain an advantage over the other – the territories in the center of the map were variously captured, defended, and then re-captured, but nobody could make a significant in-road into the other team’s home turf.
And so Siege Camp, Foxhole’s developer, has been forced to intercede. The problem with such a long war is that it means Foxhole is permanently stuck in the ‘endgame,’ whereby all the technologies have been unlocked for both sides, and mass production has already been established and refined.
For players who are brand-new to Foxhole, they’re unable to experience the early and middle stages of a war – it’s much harder to learn the game’s mechanics if you come into a war that’s already at its peak. In the past, Siege Camp has intervened to stop a war only when a substantial new update is about to roll out. With Charlie 9, however, it’s been forced to negotiate a strange kind of peace.
On Monday January 27, Siege Camp announced that it was lowering the Victory Points requirement for Charlie 9, effectively making it easier for one side to hit the quota. “The war on Charlie will be concluded through the reduction of VPs later this week and a new war will begin on Friday Jan 31,” the developer announced. “The main reason is to ensure that new players that have joined Charlie in the last month get the chance to experience a war as it’s meant to be played, progressing through early, mid, and late phases of the tech tree. Starting Wednesday Jan 29…the total number of VPs required to win will be reduced gradually over the next 48hrs until the win condition is met.”
And sure enough, Charlie 9 has finally come to an end, with a narrow victory for the green ‘Colonial’ side. However, it seems that the Colonials or ‘Collies’ may have ended the war notwithstanding Siege Camp’s intervention. In the early hours of the morning of January 29, it seems the Colonial side organized a gigantic push on a number of blue team or ‘Warden’ locations, consolidating a winning position before the VP reduction came into effect. It’s another layer of drama to what could become one of the most significant events in Foxhole history.
Check out some of the other best war games, or perhaps the best multiplayer games on PC.
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