Hello everyone!
Year of 25th Anniversary for RTCW is kicking in! And we have some exciting news for the RTCW community!
Cursed Sands DLC
Long-requested console-exclusive Egypt episode is finally coming to PC - fully restored by William Faure (Enemy-Territory Single-Player and The Dark Army Uprising).
Cursed Sands DLC will feature:
All seven levels of console episode fully restored on PC
Exclusive Mercenary enemies
FMW cutscenes
Unique variations of Soldiers and Elite Guards
Restored dialogues
Survival mode maps
Xbox like UI
Cursed Sands episode will be released on May 6 2026 on Steam as a DLC for RealRTCW. We still need to do some testing before pushing it out on public. So you just need to wait a little bit more.
Steam page of Cursed Sands is live now! Go and wishlist it!
Whats new in RealRTCW 5.4?
While you wait for Cursed Sands, we’ve prepared something for you to dive into in RealRTCW 5.4. Let’s go over it in detail!
Xbox Exclusive Maps now on PC
Xbox-exclusive multiplayer maps Barn, Safe and Norway are now available in RealRTCW as Survival mode maps. Their visual style has been carefully preserved and refined. Each map features its own unique gameplay gimmicks, offering a distinct experience.
New Survival map - Crypt
Along with Xbox maps we have another map to introduce to Survival mode.
Crypt - a reimagination of single-player level for Survival mode. By my experience this is the most intense zombie map we have currently - everything can go wrong very quickly if you are not mindful about your surroundings.
PRO Perks
Inspired by Modern Warfare 2 (2009) multiplayer, PRO perks are now available in Survival mode.
After purchasing a basic perk, you can upgrade it to a PRO version for double the cost. The random perk machine can also grant upgrades for any perk you already own.
PRO perks add an additional effect to the base perk, improving your effectiveness against the hordes.
New player class - Covert Ops
In addition to four classes from RTCW multiplayer - a Covert Ops from Enemy Territory was added to Survival. Covert ops has:
Increased melee efficiency
Smoke grenade (new weapon!)
Additional throwing knives
New enemies
Two new enemies were added to Survival mode - Trench Soldier and Flesh Zombie.
Trench Soldier is an enemy equipped with shotgun. I also meddled with their behaviour a bit they will always try to get to your first and then attack, it might get dangerous in close quarters!
Flesh Zombie is a unique X-Creature variant of the zombie enemy. They cant attack you with skulls on distance, they have unique skin and soundboard. Also they blow in human gibs, instead of zombie bones.
Misc Survival adjustments
• +2 Venom Soldiers added to each non-undead map
• +1 Proto Soldier added to each non-undead map
• AI Health Cap toggle added to menu (disabled by default)
• Holy Cross now drops from certain entities on undead maps
• Soldiers on boss1 Survival now defend their area instead of following player
• Fixed issue allowing any team to use aiteam 0 spawn points
• Smoother post wave 10 AI health increase
• Fast Hands perk will make player load 2 shells at once
• Survival classes loadouts overhaul
Campaign levels improvements
AidenDemon continues his work on perfecting visuals of remastered campaign levels. This time he works on further detailing and fixing up Factory and Wulfburg village levels.
Inventory Xbox items now on PC
Three exclusive inventory items from Xbox version of RTCW were also ported to PC. Among those:
• Holy Cross
Burns and eliminates all undead entities within defined radius.
• EMP Device
Disables X-Creatures within the defined radius.
• X-Shield
Protects player from all incoming damage for limited time.
I also added three new achievements for their usage. You can find those items on some level of campaign or gain them as a rewards for finding all secrets on certain levels.
Campaign rebalances
Important balance improvements were introduced to campaign.
Loadouts overhaul. All malta/chapter starting levels loadouts were overhauled. With the introduction of new .loadout files system i was able to properly look at it and change it to find a suitable place for every weapon. Also dealt with a lot of vanilla arsenal overlaps where player coud receive a weapon without vanilla model while playing with vanilla arsenal.
New weapon roster type - Vanilla + Shotgun. To trully replicate RTCW:Tides of War experience I added this type of arsenal. Just for the folks who dont really want all new weapons but still want something so essential as shotgun.
Decreased health for undead enemies. All warrior zombie and zombies received a health debuff across all levels. To make them less bulletspongy.
All NPCs can take headshots now.
Gamepad support
RealRTCW 5.4 finally introduces some massive improvements to the gamepad support.
It includes:
• Proper movement scaling based on analog sensitivity
• Aim assist with adjustable strength scaling
• Basic menu navigation
• Gamepad layout overhaul
• Proper sensitivity sliders
• Jump while toggle-crouched now forces stand-up
• Simple zoom added for all weapons without alt mode (also usable with KMB)
• Knife can now be thrown using zoom button (no separate bind required)
• Prevented DPAD auto-repeat
I was able to beat the whole game using this native support on Steam Deck, I must say it was hella fun! Try it out!
Hitmarkers
In addition to hitsounds RealRTCW now have Hitmarkers. Those were done from ground up by C-ColinTH. Thanks again for your work on this!
Massive world textures overhaul
To further improve RealRTCW visual integrity all world HD textures were redone. No more ugly upscales with artifacts - no more out of place HD variants of the textures - it all looks as vanilla but slightly more sharper. This approach allowed me to fix all of the problematic metallic shaders - no more weird brightened metal surfaces in the fog!
Alternative symbolics pack
Alternative symbolics pack was introduced in "Content Packs" menu. It will allow you to replace swastikas with alternative symbolics from the German version of the game. It is not an attempt to censorship anything but rather an attempt to preserve those alternate textures from German version of RTCW. It only affects world textures, not the characters and is turned off by default.
Ability to reset your Steam Achievements
Got all RealRTCW achievements? Wanna go for another round of platinum trophy? You can do so with the new achievement reset feature. To reset all of your RealRTCW Steam achievements you need:
Launch the game.
Open the console with ~ or SHIFT+ESC
Type /spdevmap with any map e.g /spdevmap tram
Open the console while in game level
Type /reset_stats
Type /reset_stats again withing 15 seconds to confirm
All of your achievements are reset now!
Config and saves reset. Again.
I know you guys hate it, but here we go again.
RealRTCW 5.4 will reset your configs and saves.
But I made a few improvements to the saves/configs system so possible migration and reset wouldnt be so impactful in the future. Other than that sorry for that again. Use the chapter selection menu to get closes to your previous saves as possible!
New ways to support
I know Patreon might be not to everyone taste, so I added the ability to donate to RealRTCW development by one time donations through PayPal. You can do so here:
RealRTCW on Paypal!
As always full changelog for RealRTCW 5.4 can be found on Steam Forums!
Cya in May!
WolfETPlayer