On my first night in Foxhole, I didn’t fire a gun for hours. Instead, I was wandering around a city until I came across a fellow Colonial (my faction) and asked how I could be helpful. He put me to work in the scrap yards, harvesting scraps of scrap metal that we would load into a large container, load into the back of a truck and deliver to the local refinery. Our scrap became feedstock (or ‘bmats’) used to make guns, ammunition, vehicles, tools, clothing, explosives, sandbags – anything and everything our actual (virtual) comrades needed tens of miles away on the front line.
While I was working on the demolition, the guards were destroying one of our bases. Dozens of miles to the south, we had secured a Warden base of our own and pushed the front further west in a war that had been raging for over a real-time month.
Foxhole’s scale continues to baffle me for weeks to play it – it’s a massive war game with thousands of simultaneous players from two factions fighting for supremacy of a map so huge I gave up measuring. The game hits 1.0 this week after five years of early access, and it’s the biggest update yet (opens in new tab). Soon, both sides will compete to build elaborate train networks across the map and build massive factories capable of producing fire-breathing tanks.
As a lone soldier, I am a small cog in the making, yet my contributions feel real and useful no matter what I do. Amazingly, the distribution of players between frontline fighters and factory workers is evenly balanced. I’ve played a few military sims, including FPSs like Squad, where logistic (or “logi”) roles are mostly ignored by players who would all rather shoot guns than drive trucks back and forth. That’s not the case in the intractable world of Foxhole, probably because the logi part of the game is just as deep as the front line. Construction experts spend days and weeks building free-form bases and fortifying them with walls, gates, bunkers, bunkers and trenches. The first few weeks of a war are not a race to conquer territory, but a race to the end of a tech boom that begins with sandbags and ends with devastating nuclear weapons.
A real RPG
Foxhole is an honest MMO. It’s also an RPG, but in the literal sense of the role-playing, not in the sense of stat grinding. Like the best social games, great stories happen as a matter of course. Just like last night, some friends and I helped secure a frontline base by guarding a bridge that Wardens are sneaking through. The four of us stood at the ready for over an hour, occasionally chasing enemies who tried to slip past our watchtowers and steal a vehicle. Things were going pretty well until a couple of guards came rolling down the bridge in an armored car with a mounted machine gun. We were slaughtered, but were determined not to let it stand.
After re-sawning into the base we’d protected and missed our own APC, my friend came up with a plan that was just silly enough to work: jump into the bed of an armored transport, drive straight to the APC, and throw anti-tank grenades from the back.
Three guys in a truck: 1; Armored car: 0.
I immediately befriended soldiers crammed into tight foxholes only to lose them moments later in a hail of bullets. I sneaked deep behind enemy lines with a small partisan squad, stole a Warden tank and took it on a joyride through their base. I delivered crates of much-needed respawn tokens to a frontline just minutes before it ran out (got a lot of grateful messages for that).
I can’t stress enough how important proximity voice chat is to making all of this work. Hearing remote conversations or urgent requests for help creates points of interest that I naturally want to investigate. Sometimes I find a squadron preparing a coordinated tank attack on a distant Warden base. Sometimes it’s a bleeding gunman that needs to be carried to a medical tent. Other times, it’s a scout team arguing over anime as they head off on a spy mission.
You would have thought he was a convincingly programmed tutorial NPC had he not told me later that he is a Utah machine operator who plays Foxhole during the quiet hours of his graveyard service.
It’s nearly impossible to run for five minutes in one direction without meaningful interaction with other players, and the vast majority of the time the interactions were positive. That guy who showed me the tricks of the trade on my first night? He really didn’t have to. I delayed him with my constant questions, but his patience was deep and his instruction remarkably thorough – you would have thought he was a convincing programmed tutorial NPC if he hadn’t told me later that he is a Utah machine operator who plays Foxhole during the quiet hours of his service in the cemetery. I kept expecting to encounter shocks while learning the game, but without fail I found players eager to help. The obnoxious loud mouths and outright trolling common in Squad and Hell Let Loose seem to be less so in Foxhole. Perhaps his top-down perspective and simplistic shots don’t lead to selfish behavior either.
excavated
Good thing Foxhole’s community is cool as there are some non-intuitive design decisions that make getting into the game more difficult than it needs to be. You must really like the idea of Foxhole for its frustrating inventory menus, obtuse interaction controls, and general lack of explanation of how things work outside of a standard bootcamp area that keeps you to the bare minimum of movement, combat, and factory work. YouTube, wikis and good old human conversations will have to be your real teachers.
Hearing remote conversations or urgent requests for help creates points of interest that I naturally want to investigate.
I find it hard to stay frustrated with what Foxhole doesn’t do well because of the many things it does spectacularly well. They’re things other games don’t even strive for. Foxhole fully trusts players to use the tools provided to wage a war without any direction. There isn’t even an official chain of command or class system that determines who gets to do what. You do rise by receiving compliments, but it’s mostly a cosmetic title. I, a humble sergeant, can do anything a captain can. I’m endlessly impressed that Siege Camp, a small Toronto studio that started with mobile games, has been successfully operating an MMO for years that allows thousands of simultaneous players to build, shoot, control and explode tens of thousands of objects. on a single server with minimal interruptions.
I suspect part of the magic can be explained by Foxhole’s clever way of placing the map in hexagons several miles wide. Only your current hex will load at any given time and traveling to an adjacent hex requires a few seconds of loading. On the edge of the busiest fronts, with hundreds of players on either side, I sometimes had to wait in line for a few minutes before I could get in.
With Foxhole approaching its 1.0 release, I’ve been wondering if the main reason the game works is that it’s relatively small. Unlike most other MMOs, Siege Camp can focus its full attention on a single server that covers the entire population. The studio has been able to increase the map size over the years to support a growing player base, but on a few occasions Siege Camp was forced to fire up a second shard – an overflow war cut off from the original. The war that had just ended seemed to fit comfortably with a daily average of 1,500 players on a single server. If Foxhole’s player base doubles overnight after the 1.0 release, the server list will almost certainly have to expand to accommodate. That’s fine, but I find it charming that everyone playing Foxhole is on the same map right now.
Selfishly, I want Foxhole to stay small, but I also think more people should give it a shot once the big 1.0 Inferno update comes out on September 28.
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