Day of Infamy [official site], the Insurgency mod unashamedly based on Valve’s WW2 FPS Day of Defeat, is becoming a standalone commercial game – with Valve’s blessing. Insurgency devs New World Interactive started Day of Infamy as a free mod made with the help of community members, releasing the first version earlier this year. Now they’re expanding it into a full and proper standalone game on the Source Engine, and with Valve’s support they’re even making a few levels based on ones from Day of Defeat. It’ll start on Steam Early Access next month. Here’s the announcement trailer:



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New World Interactive tell their tale in a blog post:

“After the mod version of Day of Infamy launched, we reached out to Valve to get their thoughts on the project. The original DoD creators checked it out and gave us their thumbs up. Valve offered to license Source Engine again to us so we could make the DoD-inspired game. They also encouraged us to make maps inspired by the classic DoD maps and provided permission to use art from their games. Although we had considered commercializing the game from the beginning, Valve’s positive response and licensing offer made the project a no-brainer to us. We had the opportunity to create an openly spiritual successor to the de facto WWII game many of us grew up on.”

So having now hired some community modder chums, they’re making their own take on the class-based, control point-capturing FPS. They’re not using all the assets Valve offered, but they are planning maps based on DoD classics like Ramelle, Caen, Avalanche, and Thunder. They’ve got their own their own original maps too, obvs.

Day of Defeat started out as a free mod itself, for Half-Life, before Valve bought it up and expanded it for a commercial release in 2003. Day of Defeat: Source followed in 2005 and gosh, it’s been a while. The PING! of its M1 Garand firing the final bullet of a clip is one of those video game noises forever lodged in my brain.

Day of Infamy is due to hit Steam Early Access for Windows and Mac in July.

Most of New World are still working on Insurgency: Sandstorm, a follow-up to their modern-day multiplayer military FPS – this time with a story mode which supports co-op. That blog post has progress updates on that, as well as competitive matchmaking for regular Insurgency.

Do check out the rest of our E3 2016 news, previews, odds, ends, and gubbins.