Official Infantry Update Dev Q&A thread

Most likely yes

It wouldn't be technically feasible to port Foxhole to the R² Engine at this point as the game's codebase is too mature. However, we are continuing to invest in optimizations to help the servers take on more load. While R² Engine tech can't be directly adopted, the R&D knowledge can be shared across teams at the studio.

Skins and customization options would be neat, but we'd want to do it in a way that benefits the game's goals. It was a foundational requirement at the start to not sell microtransactions in Foxhole to ensure that design decisions (whether everyone agrees with them or not) were always towards the betterment of the creative goals of the game as opposed to financial incentives. We believe strongly that in the long term better games are made this way.

Implementation started early 2024 and I'd say it took about half a year of on/off development to reach a stage where we were confident. The most exciting part of the process was the first time we were able to climb into a c*ckpit and take off and fly around the world on our internal servers. The flight model started off really realistic so it took quite a bit of skill to even take off at first.

We're still iterating on the experience to find the right balance but right now it is on the realistic side. It takes some skill and effort to consistently navigate to a target and engage it. This will obviously be refined over the coming months of development.

Live servers will be patched with the new build several days before the 18th (for the "Pre-Patch" war). This is done to ensure major stability issues are caught ahead of time.

So in short, downtime should be minimal on the 18th unless there are unforeseen technical issues.

There aren't any immediate plans to rework border bases, but we will of course continue to address issues as they come up in future wars. When discussing border base, I want to make sure their historical context is communicated so any feedback takes into account all prior issues, which will help us find better solutions to new problems. Here's a post I made awhile back.

In the first few years of Foxhole and World Conquest, a problem that became known as "border lockdown" emerged. It would cause region borders to be closed off by players and heavily defended. This became a desired strategy (understandably) from players but it had some negative effects.

First, it would cause major issues with player queues. During peak hours, "border lockdown" would essentially subtract regions from the frontline conflict (e.g. bringing the frontline from 7 to 5 or even 4 regions). This problem wasn't easily visible by players and would manifest itself in sudden complaints during peak hours when there would be several hundred players in queue.

Second, it would cause very unpleasant border fighting scenarios. Players that were in the world would have to spawn in a friendly region, border travel over the locked down border, die, and then travel back. That was how front line battles in these locked down areas would look. The fighting came down to who could camp the border and kill players travelling in the best. This among many other issues caused us to try various other solutions (for those who remember): Forts, Frontier Bases, etc. However, none of them were consistently reliable and came with their own set of problems.

The Border Bases now more or less guarantee a minimum supported frontline population where players can spawn in and fight. They also minimize (but not eliminate) the awful border fighting scenario I mentioned about by intentionally pushing the fighting away from the border and further into the region so the gameplay can behave more like a conventional frontline (instead the "magical" border wall being used as an exploitable strategy).

So any discourse/criticism on this subject is welcome, but please keep that context in mind. Border Bases are far from an ideal solution, but they have minimized the issues above for quite some time. We may be running into new edge cases now that need to be looked at but can't be understated much of a negative impact those historical issues had on the project and care needs to be taken to not reintroduce them into the game. An enormous amount of development energy has been spent fighting this problem over the years.

We are still iterating on the controls, but overall we are aiming for a balance between a flight sim and action game experience.

Oh I really hope so. There are many at the studio excited about more uniforms.