Commanders - thanks to the success, popularity and desire for more after our first blog in this series, we're back with another!
This series previews our upcoming update plans, giving you early insights to look forward to the future of the game. Think of it as a situation report - a SITREP. We can't share every detail now, and some bits are only teasers, but as each update nears, we'll dive deeper through devblogs, as always.
We love reading your experiences from the frontlines across social media. Your feedback helps Developers, Community Managers, Helpers, and Alpha testers shape both long-term goals and the smaller quality-of-life tweaks you've come to expect, so please keep your thoughts coming in the comments below.
Strap in - this is another long one!
Disclaimer:
We are happy to be able to share development updates before the devblogs, dev server, and update itself, but please note that anything mentioned in this news may be changed, delayed, or cancelled. Enlisted is constantly being developed, and as with any game, delays or other unforeseen circumstances may occur. Thank you for your continued interest in the game!
Mapping out the road
To start with, developers are still fully committed to the last roadmap very seriously. In fact, of the 25 promised features, only 3 remain.
First, "A new frontline" has not yet launched, but we can say that it awaits as part of the next major update - see the teaser below!
The "Ability to invite friends to ongoing battles" is the second of the three. Developers thought long and hard about it, and even implemented it with testing internally, however, the decision has been taken to cancel this would-be-convenient but extremely toxic feature. The reasons for this include that it would allow well-coordinated groups to easily abuse and overwhelm solo players in battles at the click of a switch. Though, while we've canceled the full invite-to-battle system, we've retained several useful UI micro-features from it - including the ability to jump directly into a custom battle lobby (rather than a standard matchmaking queue) when a friend is already playing one.
Thirdly, the one that a large proportion of our commanders will still be waiting for - "keyboard and mouse support" for console players. Work on this feature is still under way, but it won't be released in 2025.
Other than this, there were also the "considered features" that are mentioned. The fate of these is for now unknown, as these were always for the longer-term considerations. Instead, work is being focused on many other things mentioned in this article and beyond!
Many of you were also asking about whether we will do another roadmap for the years after 2026. We can see that publishing another long-term roadmap was in fact, contrary to expectations, not the most helpful due to the timeframes involved with each point. Instead, we plan on making blogs like this more frequently, to keep you updated before each major release, and may publish a new roadmap another time. We're happy to see such positive responses to these SITREPs as well as the desire for more, so we'd like to continue them!
The new frontline
As you may recall, we described this "new frontline" as "something more than a new battlefield". That extra scope means it's taken longer to finish - there's just more to design and test.
It'll be one of the standout features of our next major update - and it's something you've all been eagerly awaiting! We've already held several internal playtests to explore its various areas and gather feedback. Our artists are taking their time to make sure it feels truly fresh.
Of course, we don't want to leave you hanging after reading this far, so here's a sneak peek until the detailed devblogs arrive:
Hmm… I wonder what it could be?
May the Decals be with you
Working with our friends over at War Thunder, we have crafted a set of new historical decals for Enlisted. These designs focus on historical accuracy to boost immersion for each faction, as well as to ensure we add some much-desired decals that have yet to be in the game, and we're delighted to be able to talk about them now. Do note that these are longer term plans.
We'll avoid showing them all off now, but we now have many variants of core and simple roundels and icons that are currently missing in the game. For example, these will include various versions of the much-desired Balkenkreuz, including for both the Heer and the Luftwaffe. These aren't to mention the RAF roundels and RAC markings for British vehicles, US tank stars and USAAF insignia, USSR stars, Japanese air emblems and even an Italian airforce roundel.
To earn them, our initial plan (subject to change) is to create relevant longer-term "contracts" for specific nations that players can select to complete across a number of battles. When we know more, we'll let you know, but we aim to do it in such a way to avoid impacting faction balance and win rates.
We'd also like your opinion: should these decals remain faction-locked, or allow "captured" vehicles to appear wearing enemy markings? For example, would you want to let USSR players apply German roundels? Since there's no vehicle friendly fire, it's technically possible - but we want your feedback first. Please vote in the poll in the Forum under this post. It'll stay open for one week after this SITREP post.
The Need for Speed (& Statistics)
You've told us that some actions feel undervalued - either they don't reward enough points to help you progress, or they don't even show up in your profile stats. It's time to fix that! There are a lot of planned changes, but so we've grouped our planned changes into five main areas below.
Firstly, we'll be making sweeping changes to ensure the objective point is every player's focus. After all, you need to take it, or hold it, to win any and all battles of Enlisted. To be specific, we'll be increasing the bonus for capturing points by 3 times! But that's not all - we'll also be doubling the bonus for kills when attacking and defending the same objectives. Linked to this, and secondly, the bonuses for assists will be increased; primarily for infantry. The goal is simple: if you work toward your team's victory, you'll see it reflected in your score with more substantial rewards.
Thirdly, you'll remember that in the "Destruction" game mode, you currently don't receive any battle score reward for mining or defusing any charges on the objective. We're working on finally adding this bonus! Developers are hard at work on a great many changes, so this one may not make it into the closest major update, but it's planned and will be done soon!
Fourthly, statistics. What statistics, you ask? We'll be updating the main statistics pages on your account profile pages with a wealth of new data! Check below for just some of what we're planning to add - this data was already recorded, so it's finally time to let you all see them on your profile!
- Total kills
- Total assists
- Zone captures
- Kills with a semi-automatic rifle
- Kills with an assault rifle
- Kills with a shotgun
- Vehicles destroyed by mines (all types or TNT)
- Kills with mines (anti-personnel)
- Kills with mines (anti-tank)
- Kills with TNT
- Kills with the Ni05 impact mine
- Headshots
- Long-range kills
- Kills with an ampoule launcher
- Ammo crate usage by allies
- Infantry kills with bombs
- Kills with rocket weapons
- Rally point usage by allied squads
- Respawns in your APC
- Kills of tankers peeking out of their hatches
- Vehicles destroyed that you've marked (vehicle assists)
And lastly, we are going to experiment with an entirely new statistics section, "Rating Indicators". It won't affect anything - it'll be for you to track your progress and strive to improve. Do note that these will not appear in the next major update, but we'd like to hear your thoughts on this plan in advance.
Possible indicators include those listed below. Importantly, all indicators in this area will be calculated from scratch, starting from the launch date of the new feature, without taking into account previous results - even if the same statistics can be currently found in-game on the player's profile page.
1. Number of battles
2. Time in battle
3. Win rate (including wins/losses in matches from which a player deserted)
4. Desertion rate
5. Frequency of receiving a "Battle Hero" award
6. Frequency of achieving first place on the team
7. Frequency of being in the Top 20% of the team
8. Frequency of being in the Top 30% of the team
9. Frequency of being in the Top 50% of the team
10. Kill/Death ratio
11. Kills per minute of battle
12. Kills in the last 10 battles
13. Number of wins in the last 10 battles
14. Percentage of your last 10 battles where you received a "Battle Hero" award
15. A synthetic skill rating
The proposed "synthetic skill rating" averages several of these metrics and will be represented as a number from 0 to 1000, which gives an implied probability of that player's victory in their next battle. To give you an idea of what it might look like, as of the time of writing, the minimum rating value would be 190, and the maximum currently is 900. New accounts with fewer than 10 battles would show "unknown".
What do you think?
Make premium squads great again!
Something else we plan to do for the next major update is tackle something many of you have wondered about - the logistics regarding perk points for premium and event squads.
In order to fix some long-standing issues, we will be removing a number of "negative" base perk modifiers in any category from more recent premium and event squads. Essentially, what this means is that we'll be converting many negative base perk stats to 0.
This change will bring two main benefits. For starters, it prevents as much confusion where a soldier has maxed out perks in a certain perk branch yet has "leftover" stats that go into the negative numbers, meaning resetting them to customize them to your liking is not as desired. It also will allow specialized squads (like the Tempest Mk.V) to finally access perks they couldn't use before - for example, pilot perks for pilots.
To give an example of what will be happening, engineers in the 256th Reconnaissance Battalion (Sniper Gewehr 41 premium squad) currently have base stats of Vitality -2, Weapon Handling +14, and Speed -6. After the update, those will be 0, +14, and 0 respectively. That is, these specific premium engineers within this one premium squad will receive a whopping 8 additional points - that's the largest increase; most squads will see around +4 total points. This change will apply to all premium and event squads.
New forum, who dis?
You may have already noticed a fresh, modern look on our forums - reorganized categories, updated formatting, and brand-new sections.
There are a few key reasons why we wanted to do this. One is that it, quite simply, could have done with a revamp. Some topics were not as easy to find as they could have been, and categorization of various topics could have been better. Now, you can locate discussions more easily.
Another reason focuses largely on suggestions. Instead of one giant catch-all category (as we had before), we now have themed subcategories and a suggestion archive. This helps surface popular ideas, eliminate duplicates, and keep outdated threads out of the way.
Not only this, but we also now have stricter guidelines for suggestions. Weapon and vehicle proposals in particular now must follow clearer rules and are more closely moderated by community volunteers and staff. These guidelines ensure suggestions meet developer needs - especially for rare or unique models - boosting the chances of great ideas making it into the game as part of future updates.
All of this supports our longer-term goal: making the Enlisted forum the place to be. This revamp isn't the final word - you can expect more improvements in the coming months. Big thanks to FastGT007 for helping with these changes. And don't worry, our official Discord server may get its own makeover soon!
Houston, we have a Battle Pass!
Enlisted prides itself on historical authenticity, so adding mainstream weapons and vehicles gets tougher each year as the game becomes more "complete" in terms of the common and well-known World War II arsenal. That's part of why we overhauled the forums - to collect fresh, and more comprehensive, reliable ideas for major updates and measure everyone's interest.
The Battle Pass is our chance to experiment. Here, unusual and unique weaponry models are fair game, so you'll keep seeing eye-catching guns and vehicle camos each season. We've appreciated your feedback and the increased interest on the most recent of these exclusive weapon and vehicle camo rewards so far.
In fact, we decided to show only the newest Battle Pass season rather than all of the next three in our recent announcement to see your more precise thoughts about these rewards as well as allowing us to tease future rewards. Speaking of, the last Battle Pass season of 2025 (in December) will provide a new machine gun for Japan - we'll let you know in the next couple of weeks!
What do you think it is? It's no wonder that Enlisted has been called an interactive museum of weaponry - and we plan to keep it that way!
A Game of Devs
Ever wondered what the development team does when they aren't busy building updates? Our Project Manager launched "Battlegrounds" a year ago - a weekly event where developers, game designers and community managers are randomly teamed up to tackle special challenges. Tasks range from earning a specific Battle Hero medal or winning an event match to surviving the final wave of a "Motivated" event (like Halloween 2025's Operation "Gates of Destiny"). Each session also assigns a random nation and Battle Rating, and we track performance on a live leaderboard.
Season 1's top three players included two CMs and one game designer; season 2 just wrapped up with a different game designer taking first place! I'll stay silent on which CMs made the leaderboard, but definitely not because it wasn't me who won, naturally…
On that note, we've recently added a few new community managers to our ranks. They're mostly working behind the scenes for now, but you may be seeing them around!
Raise your semi-autos, lower your MGs
Enlisted's game designers have been considering various ways of improving the handling of weapon classes in response to balance suggestions, and the next major update brings key improvements to two classes in particular.
You've told us semi-autos felt inaccurate - your first shot often missed even when you aimed right. As you might know, shot dispersion is at its highest for a given gun when you are hipfiring and moving together. When you aim down sights with a gun in Enlisted, shot dispersion decreases. However, it technically rapidly decreases over a very short period, and not instantly as you finish the aiming animation. Semi-automatic rifles in particular had a feature where this "cone" of possible dispersion shrank slower during and after the ADS animation, making that initial shot less accurate if fired very quickly. We will be aligning this parameter affecting it with all other weapons, so this should no longer be a reason to avoid semi-automatic rifles. Dust off your M1 Garand - it's back in fighting form!
Machine guns are also getting an upgrade. For too long have you relied on bipods to properly counteract the heavy recoil of these monsters - but no longer. After the major update, going prone will reduce recoil by 2.5x more than before. Bipods remain useful and give an even larger recoil control bonus, but simply hitting the dirt will give you a much bigger and more noticeable recoil advantage.
These tweaks are part of a larger set of weapon-balance changes coming to every nation in the next major. We'll share the full breakdown in a dedicated devblog soon - thanks in advance to our Helpers for driving many of these updates!
Cloudy with a Chance of Meteors
If you remember from the last SITREP, we said we'd heard your concerns about the Meteor F Mk.3's bomb load compared to other factions' jets - and posts about it continue to appear sporadically on social media.
Now it's time to prove we listened. In the next major update, the Meteor's 2x 1,000 lb H.E. M.C. Mk.13 bombs will be replaced with 2x 500 lb G.P. Mk.IV bombs.
German and Japanese mains might breathe a little easier - but don't be fooled: this jet will still bring plenty of explosive power to BR V.
Frontline fashion
Since you loved the new customization additions in the last major update, we're adding even more - and introducing a feature you've been asking for to boost immersion in each theater of war.
In our next major update, you'll get new winter uniforms for British and Italian infantry squads. As always, these designs are based on real historical photos and references.
That being said, a number of you will remember that you can't yet make customization for each type of weather, for example, forcing you into situations where you see Winter tank camos in the desert landscape of the new Kahif Cave Village rework. This is something else we're focusing on adjusting - a UI menu for selecting preset vehicle camouflages with player-made decal combinations by "location type", or, by season. We'll reveal more details later!
Defining "Soon™"
When our developers aren't busy playing Enlisted, they're hard at work on the next major update - set to go live this December as the final big patch of 2025.
As always, you can expect new weapons, tanks, and aircraft added with it, plus a whole host of other adjustments and improvements we haven't even hinted at yet. Keep an eye out - devblogs are starting relatively soon!
We're also looking into bringing back bonus drop rewards for watching Enlisted streams on Twitch and VKplay to support our content creators. We'll share more details about this if and when we can.
Closing words
The entire Enlisted team would like to extend our heartfelt thanks to every one of you for playing the game, leaving feedback and reporting bugs to us. With this new experimental devblog series, we'll keep you more regularly updated on our plans and progress.
Want to chat more directly with us? Join Community Manager MajorMcDonalds live on Twitch today from 17:00 to 19:00 UTC. He'll walk through this news release series, answer your questions, and gather your feedback in real time. Look for these streams following every SITREP release.
Commanders, you're all caught up - now lead your soldiers to victory!
Cheers,
The CM Team