v33 is live.
The biggest update OpenFront has ever had. It's out right now at openfront.io — free, in your browser, no download and no account needed.
Doomsday Clock
A new battle-royale gamemode, which is not a sentence we expected to write about a strategy game.
A doom zone closes in and drains troops and warships from everyone caught outside it. There's a ten-minute grace period, then it squeezes in waves. It exists because late-game stalemates were getting comfortable, and comfortable is the enemy of a good match.
It's in the public rotation now.
Ranked 2v2
Ranked matchmaking now runs 2v2 alongside 1v1, with its own ladder. It'll try to pair you with clanmates, and it cancels matches that don't fill properly instead of dumping you into a broken game.
22 new maps
Sol — the entire Solar System. Russia, United States, France, Germany, China, Vietnam, Scandinavia. The Las Vegas Strip, where the roads are water and the casinos are nations.
Several are built around impassable terrain, which is new: mappers can now mark terrain as genuinely impassable, so mountains and obstacles change how an advance has to be planned rather than just slowing it down.
Everything else
- Account usernames and a verified badge — claim a name and play under it
- Login with Google
- Custom tribe names — buy one and it can show up on bot tribes in public games, with a public leaderboard tracking how they do
- MIRVs are real nukes now — warheads actually fly, and SAMs can intercept them
- Warship veterancy — ships improve over their service life
- Anonymous names — a lobby setting that hides everyone behind memorable animal names
- New cosmetics — nuke trails, explosion effects, crowns, warship recolours
Full changelog, including every contributor, is on the wiki.
And a lot of work you won't see
Under the hood, v33 cut core live memory by 45% on large maps, reduced garbage collection churn by 75%, and dropped late-game frame-time p95 by 65%.
In plain terms: the moment when a big match gets busy and everything starts chugging — that moment is much further away than it used to be.
This is the same work that makes a native Steam client worth building, and there's more of it coming.
If you've landed here from Steam and haven't played yet
OpenFront is a real-time strategy game where up to a hundred people carve up a world map. Alliances form mid-match, hold for a while, and then somebody breaks one at exactly the wrong moment. Over 200,000 people play it every day.
It's free in the browser right now and it stays that way. The Steam client is a native build on top of it — better performance, no ads, and everything the platform adds.
You can play v33 today. You don't have to wait for us.
We're going to Gamescom
Cologne, 24 to 27 August.
We'll be at the MIX showcase on Monday the 24th, showing OpenFront to a room of 120 journalists, then at gamescom dev and the business area through the week.
Here's the thing about that. OpenFront reached 200,000 players a day without games media ever really writing about it. No previews, no coverage, no press push — just people telling other people. That's a strange position for a game this size to be in, and in August we're going to do something about it.
We're not bringing a slide deck. We're bringing a live match against our actual player base, on a big screen, with real people in it. The scale is the whole point and it doesn't come across any other way.
Tonight, on stream
I'm streaming the v33 release live from 7pm BST / 2pm ET, with Lonely_Millennial, Evan and Jish for the whole thing.
Playing the new maps, taking questions, and announcing something we've been sitting on for a while.
We'd rather tell you live than put it in a post. If you've been asking us about it, you'll want to be there.
Wishlist it
Wishlisting is the most useful thing you can do for us before launch. It decides how many new people find the game on the day, and you'll get a notification the moment we go live.
Everything drops in Discord first
See you at 7.
— The OpenFront Team