Devblog: Year End 2021

Note that the concepts and features that are shown in this post are in early development and are subject to change before release.

With the end of the year approaching I wanted to give everyone a final quick update before we start winding things down for the year. I also wanted to show off some concepts of things we're working on in the future.

An old concept that we are revisiting in 2022

To recap 2021, we shipped two of our biggest updates within the span of 7 months. We released Winter Army back in February which contained an entire artillery revamp, a weather system, a Regiment (clan) system, and a big infantry weapon update. In September, we released Entrenched, which added 14 new regions, revamped the Bunker system, Uniforms, and a new tactical camera. We also worked on several other minor updates throughout the year, including the upcoming Update 47 which will bring modular vehicles and field bridges to the game.

Needless to say, it's been a grueling year of development and the team is looking forward to some well deserved rest over the holidays. We will be a bit quiet over the next few weeks, but we hope to come back fully recharged and ready for what we believe to be an even bigger year for Foxhole in 2022.

Major & Minor Updates

Before getting into the roadmap, I wanted to shed some light on how updates are planned and rolled out. Over the last few years, we've worked within the framework of shipping major and minor updates (sometimes we refer to the minor updates as "interim" updates). The major updates are aimed at larger features and revamps, while the minor ones are focused on refinement and iteration.

Both Major and Minor updates are planned for post 1.0 release

A big reason why development is done this way is because the big features require a much longer pipeline to implement. Features go from planning, to concept, to prototype, to implementation, iteration, and then finally QA. This is a process that can take many months or even the better part of a year to complete from start to end for bigger features. We don't want to have so much time in between updates so while those bigger features get worked on in the background, we work on minor updates to addresses nearer term issues like bugs, game balance, and smaller content.

What to expect in 2022

With that context in mind, Entrenched was a major update and Update 47 (coming soon) and Update 48 (coming early 2022) will be minor Updates.

This brings us to the topic of 1.0. Earlier this year we announced that 1.0 would be split into two major updates because there was too much content to cram into a single release. Entrenched was the first part of this while the next major update coming in 2022 will be the second part.

Early concept of a feature that has been in the works for awhile

There are some key expectations to keep in mind for 1.0. First, it won't be a big inflection point for the game and won't radically be different from the current live game. It will just be another major update like Winter Army or Entrenched. At the same time, we will continue to work on both major and minor updates after 1.0 so we can all expect things to be business as usual in the coming years in terms of ongoing updates. I highly encourage everyone to read this FAQ for more information on the 1.0 release.

Logistics

We've seen a lot of conversation about logistics lately, which is great! This is a big priority going into 2022 so we're looking forward to seeing all the feedback. Keep in mind that there is still one more minor update in the pipeline (Update 48). While we hope to see some small logistics changes in this update, expect the more significant changes to come later into next year.

Logistics is a big priority for 2022, but features will take time to develop.

Final Remarks

In closing I did want to touch quickly on our approach to announcing features and updates. We've found over the years that we've worked best when we listen quietly to the community instead of butting our heads in to promise one feature or another. We've done the latter in the past and at times this has caused some unfair situations for players that may have expected a feature that never gets delivered. These days, we prefer put our heads down, get to work and then announce features when we feel they are already ready to go.

So if things get a bit quiet, it means that we're hard at work. We hope that the past 5 years and 47 updates has shown that while we have ups and downs in development, our commitment to Foxhole is unwavering.

Happy Holidays everyone!

Tank combat was refreshed mid 2021. Infantry combat will be reviewed early next year.