Hello, soldiers!

The time has come to reveal a bit of information on our plans regarding the promised community game mode. We’ve been bombarded by requests and ideas for new game modes since even before the game launched into Early Access, which is understandable – everyone has their personal favourite and wants to see it realized in as many games as possible. Some game modes fit World War 3 better, some worse, but since we are only choosing one of them, we had to make sure it’s both heavily requested and actually works well with what World War 3 is and will be in the future.

We’d love to include every idea we can, but there are some problems with that. Obviously, we don’t have infinite time or resources to devote to making more game modes, but that’s not the main reason we’re trying to limit how many there are – we just don’t want to have 20 game modes that nobody plays, and we feel like limiting the number and playing to the strengths of the game is a much better approach.

When deciding on what game mode to add, we’ve had a few criteria to take into account, so let’s talk a bit about them.

Very early on we’ve noticed that the game is the most fun and works best when players create front lines between points, so it was instantly in our minds when thinking about next steps and how to handle adding more game modes to the game.

Right now, we’ve got two game modes: Team Deathmatch and Warzone. Both of them are vastly different and offer different experiences and we wanted to add something that’s somewhere in between – a bit more dynamic than Warzone, but a bit more tactical than TDM.

Those are the most important deciding factors of the game mode we wanted to add. Having that in mind, let’s take a look at what the community wanted – after all, this is the community game mode.

At the beginning of April, some community members came to us with a question: “Can you guys give us a password protected server to test a game mode we think would be cool?”. We talked about it a bit and decided that it could be fun to test something like this on the Public Test Environment with our community.

We set it up, and on the 19th, the first Breakthrough event was announced by and for the community. Check out the forums for the original post, but the idea was simple: create a popular Rush variant for World War 3 and see how it works with our mechanics and gunplay, inviting only people that know what the rules are and are willing to take the time to set it up and see how it plays.

It was great fun and it seemed to flow well and work with our game splendidly, but there were some problems, mainly with spawns and the rules that were decided at first. We changed them, went through the second and third iteration and each time it was more fun and was getting closer to the right idea.

At this point, there’s not much more that we can do without starting to change the game itself to facilitate the idea, so we had to decide if this was the game mode we wanted to go with. We don’t think there’s anything that can be called more of a community game mode than a game mode that came straight from our players. Moreover, in some polls that were held by the players on our forums, this type of game mode was also winning.

It fits our ideas of what the game needs and should be a good addition to the game mode roster, with TDM being a simple and dynamic one, Breakthrough going up in tactics, but still being fast paced and fun, Warzone – teamplay oriented and more complex and finally Recon – the one for tactical players.

We wanted to share with you what our players that started this initiative think and why they decided that a Rush-like was a good idea:

We’ve talked with the guys that World War 3 would be ideal for something like a Rush game mode and as avid players of this kind of mode, me and DareQQ decided to test how it would work. First iteration took over 2 weeks to prepare, thinking about how it would work and how to set it up. As it seems – it worked, and gave us a lot of fun and inspired us to organize more of the Breakthrough events. – Lugresky

So, what is it?

If you’re not familiar with how this type of game mode works, in Breakthrough, the players are divided into two teams: attacking and defending. Defending team has control of all of the areas on the map and all points and they can spawn on any of the points. The attacking team’s goal is to destroy the radio stations that are placed on each of the points, giving them control over the area and letting them push the front line further. They have to do it before the time runs out – if it does, defenders win.

Radio stations can be destroyed in two ways: by planting an explosive on them or by other explosives, like tank shells, C4 or grenades – it just takes a lot of them. Once the explosive has been planted, it can be defused by the defenders. If it’s not, it destroys the station and pushes the defenders further into their territory. All damage done to the station is permanent and it cannot be repaired.

Each region can have one or two stations and is converted to attackers after all stations are destroyed in it. Taking a region adds time to the game, making it a quick one in case of a steamroll and longer one if the game is evenly matched.

For now that’s all we are sharing about the game mode, but rest assured we don’t want to reinvent the wheel, just make it work with our game. It can still change, so we will share more details as they come up.

What is the current progress?

At this point we’ve got a working prototype and we’ve already tested our version a few times, with very positive feedback coming from the playtesting. Breakthrough will come the Public Test Environment at first and will be evolved there with community feedback and suggestions. We don’t have an ETA yet, because we’re still hard at work with the engine change, but the work is progressing as expected.

Let us know what you think on our social media, Discord server and on the forums.