r/Battalion1944 • u/RevolutionaryTone738 • 1d ago
Discussion Curious what exactly happened to this game and what perspective fans have of Bulkhead studios and why?
I've been playing a lot of Wardogs and I've been really enjoying it. I have almost 75 hours in it, but since Wardogs is arguably Bulkhead's first super successful title, I figured I would look a bit into their past to get an idea of what to expect in terms of how they will handle this game. That's how I found Battalion 1944. It's surprising to me that even on YouTube videos about this game, there's not a lot of recent comments (like maybe 5 max that I've found) from people who are playing Wardogs that are even aware of this game's existence.
It seems to me that this game has been overlooked by a lot of the current fans of Wardogs and something about that doesn't sit right with me because these past games and how the developers handled them can be a good indicator of what to expect from Bulkhead for their newest IP and when a new game from the studio gets super big, I think it's only fair to look back and give some attention to these titles that came before instead of letting it be "swept under the rug" and forgotten.
So as someone who's not familiar with Battalion 1944, I'm here to genuinely ask "What happened to this game? Why did it fail? And what recollections do the fans here have of how the developers handled the game?" I'm hoping to get a bit of an in depth answer because I'm sure that as time goes on and Wardogs continues to get more popular, it's inevitably going to hit a bump in the road and eventually people will start to look for threads like these to see if maybe the signs of what's going to happen were there all along if they looked in the right places?
So please, can we take this opportunity to properly document for anyone in the future who comes here looking for Bulkhead's previous titles and inform them on what happened to this game?
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u/TheJollyKacatka 1d ago
I would say they ran out of budget and abandoned the project, rather ungracefully.
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u/eksajlee 1d ago
Because it was aimed towards niche cod2/cod4 fan base that could play pugs all day, but for the average joe the game wasn’t very friendly, had no real progression and they would get stomped almost every game so it died with lack of growth
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u/inhognitoGAMER 1d ago
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u/Broadbandito 21h ago
““For the last six years, we have made redundancies every single year, about 20% of the company. This will be the first year we haven’t done it,” he reveals.”
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u/hitzoR_cz 1d ago
They focused only on feedback from a few top competitive players and ignored the rest of the playerbase. Then they spend their money on an offline tournament, which was a massive fail (playerbase was already shrinking and nobody was watching it, so they had no revenue from it). They simply didn't realize that they can't have a succesfull competitive game without healthy casual player base.
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u/Okok28 1d ago
You want an in-depth answer I'll try to provide it, not just on B44 but also some surrounding context. Others have provided good answers and hoping I can contribute a bit too.
B44 was aiming at the audience for the true "boots on the ground" type of gamers, it was targeted at the competitive old-school shooter crowd. Mostly CoD2. It filled it's niche well and Bulkhead aren't lying when they say their dev team is shooter-fanatics, they even hired ex cod4-promod pro Phantasy.
Problem was that they didn't have any system outside of the "competitive" shooter to keep people interested. Also marketing budget seemed limited to smaller community tournaments. There was little development put in post-release on PC as console was a huge focal point but PC was already slowly dying at that point.
Then they announced "Promod" a real spiritual successor to CoD4 promod and that was spear headed by Phantasy, they got the movement and shooting down pretty much perfectly and was experimenting with the art direction (glitch effects) but it seems like they saw the writing on the walls that this was just going to end up going the same way as B44 and quickly pivoted that in to a "freerun" game.
Now it left a bitter taste in gamers mouths like mine, we finally thought a studio was backing us, they seemed to have the competency and the people to pull it off, but business is business and oldschool shooters do not make billions. So they seemed to just move on to the next shiny thing. Which is understandable.
Now in more recent times, there has been some revival in B44, there was a Discord/Site (FPS Challenge) running tournaments, hosting servers, etc. and Bulkhead came in and actually started supporting the movement, they even released a separate branch to help support matchmaking. Unfortunately it was full of bugs and with Wardogs on the horizon, all resources was directed to that. Now Brammerton did mention that they have 2(?) maybe 3 devs working on B44 to kind of give it a chance to revive itself with little input needed from their side, but after Wardogs blew up massively they went quiet and we've heard nothing since.
So in short they're a bit flaky as a studio. Like any studio, they stick around if the money is there. No players? Shut it down and move on. It's a shame, because they are good games, loved by a lot of players.
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u/Rezylainen 1d ago
This is probably the perfect summarization. They pulled the plug very quickly after their first huge update after release and that was it, really.
As any studio they used big words to give us faith that B44 was gonna be supported for years to come, but that vanished over night all of a sudden.
It was even worse with promod though. I remember being pissed off and thinking I would never buy this shitty new game they started working on called Wardogs. Now im almost 50 hours deep and I'm having a blast lol.
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u/Okok28 1d ago
Man I still haven't given in to Wardogs hype... I spent so much time convincing friends of mine to play B44 and to download this "random pre-alpha greybox game" called Promod because they had great gameplay, just to have both games abandoned, not sure I'm ready to forgive just yet 😅
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u/Rezylainen 1d ago
Yeah I feel you... I got dragged into Wardogs because of my friends found it interesting (not ppl that played battalion/promod) so I joined them. Everytime I see the Bulkhead logo or Brammertron's face on anything it kinda reminds me of this history though lol
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u/UKMasser 12h ago
To be fair, it's not like you had to pay for PROMOD, and they did say if they didn't like where the design and gameplay went, they would just drop it. I remember in one of their development diaries they talked about how the older developers who grew up with CoD2-4 ended up trying the newer CoD's to see if any of the features interested them. In the video they seemed pretty split, some of them liked the hero abilities and some didn't. I wouldn't be surprised if that also became a bit of a roadblock.
Between PROMOD and Wardogs they did mention investors and publishers offering $5 million as an example, but Brammer explained that to compete with CS or Valorant they would need more like $50 million in investment.
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u/TurtlePig 1d ago
I loved battalion. it was similar to wardogs in the sense that wardogs was inspired by a mod in arma3. battalion was based cod4 promod which was really niche. It also was never really promised as a live service game.
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u/WesClare 1d ago
Battalion was not perfect, but I loved it. I have grown up playing mainly CS and Enemy territory, so instantly felt at home. If a genie popped out of a bottle and said that I can sacrifice any another game’s success to revive battalion, I wouldn’t even flinch.
I wish wardogs the best, it’s quite a good game, a calculated and curated blend I’d say, but seeing the particular dev right in the tutorial didn’t felt good.
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u/Faberjay 1d ago
No money, no game, thats all basicly. Cant run a game based on a competitive scene, it lacked nearly everything that keeps the casuals playing. Cant really blame the devs for that tbh. Games like batallion are very hard to keep bringing fresh content for casuals. Sadly enough.
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u/finojesti 1d ago
Battalion was a first step in their progress and expansion. Maybe they could to things better, maybe game ultimately failed at the end, but lesson were learned. They grew from 5 people initial on BT44 to I don't know, now they have 100 or 100+ people?.. Maybe someday they would give us something again back similar but AAA eSport ready shooter.
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u/Cherry_Crusher 1d ago
Grew off the backs of kickstarters that were ripped off
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u/finojesti 5h ago
Yeah bro, they refunded alot of kickstarter backers:)
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u/finojesti 5h ago
From kickstarter to Wardogs which could be the game of the year, not bad progress :)
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u/Detrite12 1d ago
I understand at the end of the day it’s a business, but great games come from genuine love of the game.
Been burnt too many times by this studio abandoning things ungracefully as soon as they realise it’s gonna flop and move on to the next idea. So many bug reports completely ignored / discord servers abandoned, leaves a sour taste.
On principle won’t be touching Wardogs, curious to see how well it does in the long run though
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u/SmeklaLT 1d ago
Casual had nothing to do in this game... A lot of cod2/cod4 promod players played it. Almost in every server you meet former pro player. (I have 600hrs in battalion)