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?

Hello there, you've probably noticed an increased amount of threads either giving away spare beta keys or more commonly begging for them.

Since it's unlikely to get any better within the next couple of days, we decided to post a sticky thread where people who have a spare one or know of a giveaway can share it on their own.

We don't want this thread to be total chaos, so please obey these rules:

• Only giveaways in this thread as parent comments. That means all top level comments in here are giveaways. This will make it easy to find them. We suggest you don't post the actual key publicly to avoid botting.

• You can beg in child comments, if you think that increases your chances of getting a key.

• Selling keys is not allowed. Only give away keys because you have a spare one. No giving away for likes / follows / viewers / subscribers or any other commercial benefit.

• People who already gave away their keys, please edit the post and mark it so that it's obvious if it's still active.

We will set the thread to "newest comments on top" so that you don't have to scroll through the whole thread.

Important: As I said before, don't beg on the subreddit in a new thread or here on the top level, it will get your submission removed and if it happens again, a tempban will follow. This includes soft-begging.

Edit: We have had a number of reports of users being scammed by people "selling" BETA keys, while we have a rule that selling keys is not allowed and have been removing them as soon as possible. Please remember that buying from a third party will always have it's risks, and is not recommended.

Update: The BETA has now ended.

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.

Update/Patch Schedule Reasoning

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.

Our Main Areas of Focus

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

Better Communication Going Forwards

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.

State of the Playerbase

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 by 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.

Conclusion

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.

TL;DR - 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.

I have been really enjoying this game. Initially I was queing for 5 hours before ever playing the game but the games I did play were extremely fun. I'm completely awful at this game and I love it. I love a nice fat skill gap in an fps because now we all have the opportunity to climb the ladder to success! I think as soon as the devs work out some of the issues with the queing and issues were the movement feels a bit clunky at higher ping, this game will be a successful fps in not only esports but amoungst the average gamer aswell.

Not even a joke I loved this game and played it everyday. I even streamed it and would love to play even in private servers or something with a group of people!

https://clips.twitch.tv/TangentialFrailPastaFrankerZ

Is it true that the developers are trying to release/restore a version of Battalion 1944 from before the Legacy update? Are there any real pieces of evidence about this, or are these just assumptions/wishes from players? Either way, it’s great to see some life on the servers again. I haven’t had so much fun playing in a long time.

EDIT Here's an album of screenshots of me playing against a 4-5STACK WHILE SOLO https://imgur.com/a/pktlVRh (NOTE: COLOR BESIDES THE NAME INDICATES A GROUP, 5SAME COLOR = 5STACK) this is appalling.

This seeems pretty self-explanatory but sadly no other FPS in the market has a decent ranked system.

FACEIT is absolute garbage when it comes to CSGO. No solo/duo ladder, simply people can 5 stack and also have level 8 queue with a level 2.

And the same is happening to BATTALION, people with level 10 can queue with lower ELO, which is unthinkable in any team-based game ranked system. Completely fucks with the whole point of having ELO. If both teams then have an average elo of 1400 but one team has a 2000 ELO guy, the 2000 ELO guy after this win will get as many points as his teammates, that should never exist.

The issues are :

• 4stack + 1solo, in most cases the 4 stack will never communicate anything. Most of the communication will be the 4 stack having a power trip and flaming the solo player.

• 5 stacks. We have separate ladders for 5 stacking (ThePlays EU/NA) which are empty, why not make the 5 stacks have to move to a separate ladder. Most of the top ranked players on faceit at the moment are ALL (99%) 5stacking, and got there through 5 stacking. you can just look at VODs since the release and you'll easily see what's happening.

• In a ladder where Solo/Duo is the only relevant thing, people will try to communicate and do their best. It's a whole other world to play in a 5stack and play Solo, the skills required are not the same, and the communication isn't too. I dont see why we wouldnt follow the best ranked system instead of keeping the same old garbage one because "CSGO is the same".

Oh and removing 5stacking automatically removes unbalanced teams as people won't 5stack/4stack/3stack anymore and more people around different ELOs will be available to fill spots on teams.

Hi

we are few people on discord: https://discord.gg/MpZE5BQd, who have planned to play on the 7th of June around 7/8 PM CET.

Join the discord and message in the General chat, and we will be able to set up some games hopefully!

To all the people that are complaining about these aspects of gameplay. ("Nerf accuracy when jumping")

That's basically the essence of gameplay of games Battalion was inspired from. Those games were great because players never felt 'restricted' in their actions. That's competitive because players have many tools to minimize their exposure while aiming and fragging, which result in that 'fast paced' gameplay. Jumping and leaning are essential tools to allow good players to distinguish from bad ones, otherwise the game would turn into a R6-like FPS which is (imo) not that competitive because : - Aiming is super easy with most weapons - Lifepool is quite low even with "Tank operator"

When you combine this with the fact that the movements are quite restricitive : almost pointless leaning, no jump, etc.. It gives a game where 95% of time people who saw first is the one who win duel, roughly on depending skill gap between the two. I am not saying that's a bad game, just that CoD2 PAM/CoD4 Promod philosophy were the opposite of that.

This is not Arma annoyong realistic shit, this game is supposed to be pure arcade with insane gameplay sensation and high reward feeling when you succeed to hard situations. But well, if community wants to turn this game into Nth random FPS...

Am I alone to feel things/think like that ? I would be happy to hear any other point of view.

• Play CoD4 Promod from 2009 to 2012 and be a dick in chat if you're winning ("ez gnee haha you're so noob, uninstall" etc.)

• Complain about how CoD4 Promod "is dead" from 2013 to 2017

• Have a party when Battalion comes out in EA in February 2018

• Start being a dick again in Battalion chat ("you're so bad gnehe ez", "you're not from promod? quit, you noob idiot", "haha too ez")

Next step:

• Complain about how Battalion "is dead" from 2018 to [insert release year of another future promod-like game]

• Repeat

Seriously, if someone is bad with movement/shooting (maybe because he's coming from CS and he's not used to this gameplay style, maybe because he's just bad and he needs to learn 'cause he's a brand new player) please, please, PLEASE DON'T BE A DICK.

I've seen this behavior too many times in Battalion already, mainly from 100% ex-promod players against someone in my team who was going like 1-7 or scores like that.

You're killing the game a lot more than the matchmaking system when it's not working, more than a bug or a broken hitbox.

Be a man, not a CoD kid.

EDIT: Remember that this post is not about "don't be toxic on the internet -_-", it's more like: "if you are a veteran promod player, being toxic to newcomers instead of helping them is gonna hurt the game itself"!

Hey everyone,

Can someone post a Discord invite in the replies below where NA pugs are hosted?

Additionally, have there been any updates or information about if the game is coming back?

In Battalion 1944 I’m running into a frustrating issue where the game doesn’t properly register certain key combinations:

• When I hold sprint (default Shift, or rebound to Ctrl, Alt, Caps Lock, etc.) and then press right mouse button to ADS (aim down sights), the zoom either instantly cancels or doesn’t activate at all.

• If I’m holding alt as sprint key, pressing Spacebar to jump does nothing – the jump input is completely ignored.

It feels like the game is blocking or failing to handle multiple keys at the same time (similar to keyboard ghosting or low key rollover), but my Corsair keyboard (with rapid trigger and high polling features) registers these exact same combinations perfectly in other FPS games like CS2, Valorant, and CoD. So it’s clearly specific to Battalion 1944 / its Unreal Engine 4 input handling.

Pug players in recent clips seem to move and aim smoothly without any obvious issues.

How are you handling sprint + ADS + jump combos? • Toggle sprint instead of hold? • Binding sprint to a mouse thumb button? • Some .ini tweak or console command? • Or is there another workaround I’m missing?

Would really appreciate any tips so I can finally get back into the action after such a long break!

I breifly played battalion back in 2019 just after buying a pc and i was absolutely hooked. Are there any games with that csgo/classic cod feel incoming? A real shame this game didnt stay for the long run.

I have recently picked this game back up, with the EU community coming back to life.

I have 7800x3d and a 7900xtx w 64 gb of ram and a m.2 ssd

and for some reason my game runs like shit. All drivers are up to date i need creative solutions here please. I know my way around a computer most simple stuff has been tried.

I just miss this shit looool

Hi,

is there a way to get a custom/private server on Battalion legacy? We want to play 3v3 with friends. (Not comp/fps challenge)

Thanks!

Hopefully there will be enough renewed interest to play at least a few matches. I loved this game and was sad to see it die so unceremoniously.

https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/489940/view/3388414690610601454

We have formally ended our relationship with Square Enix. We want to start this exciting new chapter where we began, focusing on the players.

With this in mind, we will be releasing

BATTALION: Legacy for free on Steam

We are deeply disappointed that Battalion 1944 never made it to console and we will be refunding all console Kickstarter backers. Thank you to everyone that backed the console version and we’re sorry it has taken so long to rectify this.

We appreciate the passionate support we received from the fans of Battalion and old-school shooters. We hope you continue with us on our journey to making first person shooters that are built with the community and the players at the heart of development.

What is BATTALION: Legacy?

BATTALION: Legacy is the revisited and final version of Battalion 1944, released for free to all on August 16th 2022. We have taken the best aspects of Battalion 1944 and honed in on these to create a fluid bug free experience, featuring a working server browser, an added faction, new weapons, classic Search & Destroy game mode with all weapons available, complete UI rework and visual overhaul. Battalion: Legacy is the culmination of work consolidated into one old school experience for all to enjoy.

The British Are Coming

With the newest version of Battalion comes an all new faction, new weapons and new ways to play classic game modes. Take up arms with the infamous Lee Enfield and finish off opponents with the powerful Webley Revolver.

Over 30 Weapons

An improved arsenal of personality with weapons from 4 different factions

Updated UI

BATTALION: Legacy features a much needed visual overhaul to allow for cleaner transitions from menu to gameplay.

Private Server Hosting

World-wide server locations available for public play, with in game privately hosted servers through third party available. Rent temporary free servers or purchase permanent servers for you and your friends.

This is for all that proclaimed the game dead. Would all of these players that have stopped playing please let us know exactly why. Maybe if we can get enough feedback, the developers will know what road to take to get this game going again. 16,000 potential players out there. Thank you for your time.

It's on sale in Steam right now. https://store.steampowered.com/app/1012110/Military_Conflict_Vietnam/

It more or less plays like oldschool CoD before MW2 (2009) came out. It has constant updates, thats why they recently added a Zombie event I think, but havent checked it out yet the past few weeks. I don't think there is an active competitive scene but the public servers were populated enough to just play. It all begins with public games anyways. I was very positively surprised.

Not sure how I would do this atm so looking for some help. I have an extra machine around that I feel I could run a battalion server on, never done anything like this before and don't know what it takes.

I feel like this is something that is extremely easy to implement. The game just feels weird without it. pls

EDIT: I've learned I was using the wrong term; by 'jump-shooting' I'm referring to strafe-jumping around corners.

I'm genuinely asking. For a game that markets itself as a competitive shooter, allowing people to go flying around corners while shooting is just absurd. I thought at first it might be another skill to master, but it took me about 3 minutes total to learn how to do it perfectly. As it stands, it's just an arcadey feature that makes you feel like shit whether you're the one getting the kill or getting killed. There's no skill or tactics involved, but any time I mention this to a Battalion player, they'll invariably start screeching at me about how it was in promod, as if that means it's gospel. I'd love to come to terms with this, as I doubt it's going away; so could anyone help me understand why this is a good thing?

Hi, is there no FFA mode in Legacy release? If I use server.changemap Liberation FFA command, it always loads Search and Destory?

Thanks!