Enlisted Interview: Balancing Realism And Gameplay In A Constantly Evolving War

Starting with Huertgen Forest, we began to update our approaches to creating maps and planning gameplay actively, and began to get rid of the prevalence of only open or only closed spaces. We decided to experiment with a combination of what we call “complex battles” and “simple close-range combat.” In general, the approach has proven itself, and now we are trying to make sure that missions offer a varied experience each time you play.

We also plan to expand the battle space to give missions an additional maneuvering component, so that the player has a little more variability in movement, both to the capture point and near it. We are also thinking about other components: for example, we are thinking through zones that are comfortable for infantry and, conversely, comfortable for tanks or aircraft, so that all this creates interesting combinations without an unambiguous predominance of any of the military branches, so that there is room for maneuver, cooperation of players and the combined use of infantry, ground vehicles and aircraft.

Some players call Enlisted “a museum of small arms” already. We plan to continue adding even more little-known, experimental, and limited-edition models. Such models are not always, for obvious reasons, appropriate for the main tech tree, but are great for various events. Often, weapons come into the game together with a unique squad: for example, a German squad with a Horn machine gun or a squad of British paratroopers with a Welgun submachine gun. Of course, we try to tie the prize weapons to the historical context whenever possible.

Unfortunately, armored personnel carriers were not used often during World War 2. Trucks were mainly used to transport soldiers and everything necessary for combat operations to the rear units that were near the front line, and then the troops moved forward on foot. But we do not exclude the possibility of adding new cars, motorcycles, “APCs,” or game mechanics that allow soldiers to be delivered directly to combat operation locations.

At the start of early access on Steam, we encountered problems with linking existing Gaijin.Net Enlisted player accounts to the Steam version of Enlisted. This was a difficult task because some players had multiple Gaijin.Net accounts and/or multiple Steam accounts, and some of them had previously linked one Gaijin.Net and one Steam account for War Thunder, and then tried to link a different pair of accounts for Enlisted.

For example, we had to address situations like “this player already has a Gaijin.Net account linked to Steam for War Thunder, and they tried to link a different (!) Gaijin.Net account to the same Steam account for Enlisted”. We had to refine the system to make sure it correctly functioned for all possible user cases. But in the end, the relaunch fortunately showed that we managed to solve all these problems.

We’re constantly polishing the performance of the game on all platforms, but the Enlisted version for PS4 and Xbox One is already as stable as possible (or at least close to) considering the hardware limitations. We’re proud that we managed to achieve a steady 30FPS on those platforms while still delivering great visuals, and we’ll continue our support of PS4 and Xbox One in the foreseeable future.

Enlisted is a PvP game first and foremost, so we focus on that component and will continue to do so. We’re also aware that many Enlisted players like PvE as well, so we’ll continue adding new time-limited PvE events offering new gameplay experiences.

The system of likes and dislikes affects matchmaking, the game tries to select missions that will suit most players waiting to fight. And of course, we plan to use them to collect statistics to understand the player needs better and take them into account when creating new missions and balancing existing ones.

This was never in our plans, and we’re not planning anything like this now. There are many legal and technical reasons not to do it, and it’s not a priority issue for our players as well. Our main focus is to make sure that Enlisted is fun and comfortable to play.

Firstly, our sandbox feature allows players to create their own PvE events (the same as those we launched or modified by the users). So, in fact, these time-limited events do not just vanish, as their content and mechanics are simply given out to the players and they can already use them for their own user-created missions. But of course, there is a good chance that at some point we’ll launch again some of the events that the players liked the most.

The Enlisted team, of course, constantly monitors the current problems of the game and proposals discussed in the game community. User feedback is always one of the key drivers behind the planning of the further development of the game. For example, the recently released QoL patch “Making Enlisted a Better Place #70” contains interface changes inspired by player feedback. We introduced a new search field for the squad selection and an additional option on the filter for choosing a weapon. That filter was directly suggested by the players.

This campaign is not actually relevant to session-based multiplayer shooters like Enlisted, as it’s mostly about single-player games that require a constant internet connection for some reason and become unplayable when the servers are shut down. Enlisted is a PvP online game by design, so there is no way to “preserve” it by making the game offline. Ultimately, it’s the players who keep true online games like this alive simply by playing them and purchasing new content from time to time.

We did not have any layoffs in Gaijin or at Darkflow Software, and we do not plan anything like this. Moreover, we’re actively hiring new specialists, and you can always check the list of open vacancies at gaijinent.com/job. Our key games continue to grow, and we are exploring new possibilities with titles like Active Matter and Aces of Thunder.

Gaijin is a company that has always been led by developers who create games they actually like to play. All Gaijin employees are expected to do something themselves (code, write, etc.), there are no purely managerial roles. Even the company founders, Anton Yudintsev and Kirill Yudintsev, still indulge in coding certain key parts of the games. This approach allows us to make decisions faster, understand our audience better, and not waste money. We are eager to try risky new ideas and to swiftly make changes in our games as soon as we see that something is just not working right.

For example, we started working on War Thunder when session-based vehicular combat online games simply did not exist (in 2008). Active Matter, one of the future Gaijin titles, has been in development since the end of 2018, with several prototypes being tested internally. Many things have changed since that time, but we have an original idea to combine PvP and PvE gameplay experience into a really unique alloy. We’ll see how it works out in the end, and we are ready to adapt and change. The point is that interesting new ideas do not necessarily work out, so being able to come up with new ones and surprise the players is the key here.

Enlisted is the first shooter where each player controls a whole squad of soldiers or a vehicle crew. Thanks to that feature, battles feel like really massive, authentic WW2-scale battles, while the input of each individual player in the results of each session is still significant. This idea still makes Enlisted stand out. At the same time, the original idea of dividing the game into several campaigns was initially met quite warmly by our players, but then it became clear to the players and to us that this greatly limits future development of the game. So we decided to change the game structure and progression, which was very difficult, but ultimately most players accepted it warmly (we thank them all for support and feedback!).

Anyway, as you can guess, we have a big list of new titles coming (both announced and unannounced), so we have enough new tasks for all our talented employees.

Our partners are doing fine, and we do not rely on a single contractor in any field, as we usually diversify our list of content providers. So do not worry, any problems in the gaming industry won’t delay new updates for Enlisted or other Gaijin titles.