FrontWake
Three factions fight for one continent, up to 900 players on a single server. We love military simulation games, and this is the war we want to play in.
- Genre
- Large-scale war shooter
- Players
- Up to 900, online
- Platform
- PC, on Steam
- Release
- In development
Concept art
Why we're making it
We love military simulation games, mostly for the talking. Someone calling out a position, a squad leader trying to keep everyone together, a stranger next to you asking where that shot came from. A good fight is a lot of people working out a plan out loud.
FrontWake is built around that, only bigger: up to 900 players on one server, three hundred to a faction, a chain of command to hold it together, and proximity chat for whoever happens to be standing near you.
Don't expect a strict simulation, though. It's set in a science fiction world on a continent we made up, with shields and rules you can learn quickly, because we'd rather you spent your first night talking to your squad than reading a manual.
About the game
Each server runs one war on one map. It's split into sixteen zones, each with an outpost at its centre: take the outpost and the zone is yours. Every zone your faction holds adds to its score, the central ones most of all, and the first faction to the victory score wins. Leave an outpost empty and it won't stay yours for long.
Nobody fights alone. You join a squad of up to thirty, and its leader splits it into fireteams, enough people to plan a push without waiting on anyone else. The faction votes in a commander, who fights alongside everyone and draws the orders on the map. Any enemy a teammate can see shows up for the whole faction.
Voice is what holds all of this together. Your fireteam has its own channel, squad leaders talk with their fireteam leaders, and the commander can reach every leader at once, all of it over the radio. Then there's proximity chat, where you hear whoever is close to you, friend or enemy. If you can hear them talking around the corner, they can hear you too.
Your shield takes the first hits and recharges. Your health doesn't, and when it runs out you go down and wait for a medic, or give up and respawn. Riflemen, medics, machine gunners, marksmen and squad leaders each carry one main weapon, a pistol and one tool.
Logistics trucks carry nine people to the front and haul the supply your outposts run on, and gun buggies bring a mounted machine gun along. Everything is played in first person, vehicle seats included.
There is no timer. A war ends when a faction wins it, which we expect to take about 60 to 90 minutes, and then the server starts over on a fresh map.
FrontWake is a working title, and the game is early in development. Nine hundred players on one server is the hard part, so the server and the networking come first. The first players will get in through a closed beta, and plenty can still change before then, the voice channels included.