Foxhole and the beauty of the true classic MMO
I wanted to post my review of Foxhole to raise awareness of it, since the game is so worth it, but I'm genuinely baffled how almost noone heard of it. It is an MMO running for almost ten years. No AI was used here since I find no need for it.
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Foxhole is a strange game. It is an MMO about a world-war era conflict between two fantasy countries, that at this point is raging on for centuries.
It looks like a strategy game with its bird-eye view camera, but every soldier fighting, every truck driver, pilot, factory foreman, helmsman for a large warship, his gunners and damage control staff, is each a single player.
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The game is a return to the past in the current gaming environment dominated by the greed publishers, requiring only its sticker price on Steam, with no subscriptions and no microtransactions. There are uniforms and cosmetics, but they have a gameplay use and are all only obtainable in the game.
Regardless, everyone is not locked to a job but can choose freely what they want to do.
The world is persistent and the frontlines will be animated by other players regardless if you login or not.
The overall objective is "winning the war" by controlling the majority of the map, and once a faction managed to do so after about a month of real-life struggle, the map and tech is reset to randomized conditions and its soldiers and logistical personnel return to defend their digital land.
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Did I mention that all the ammo, weapons, tanks, bunkers, bombers you can find at the frontline had been built (and often transported there) by actual players?
The game is built around cooperation. You can often accomplish very little alone (unless you are a skilled commando, cutting off supply lines in enemy territory), and so you are encouraged to talk with others and ask for help.
I found the community to be actually superb, besides very rare bad apples, you will always find someone willing to help and guide you whenever you ask. I have known so many people through this game, and seeing them online and playing with them almost every week really reinforced the attachment I got to them.
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Even if the game is built for you to feel as "a cog in the machine", you can always be the one that changed the tides of the entire war but will never know. Maybe you brought the truck of supplies that allowed the city to survive, organized the op that blew up something important, landed that grenade on the last enemy construction vehicle.
Maybe your actions prevented a massive morale loss for your faction, or you trained the players that did it after you stopped playing a long time ago.
The game really promotes giving you tools to decide on your own objectives, and reaching them is up to you and the people you decide to play with.
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Having played many multiplayer games in the past, I think that it is silly how good and unique of an experience this game is, and how little it is known.
The developers recently added warplanes with an huge update that was unfortunately undercooked, but they are swiftly making amends and doing huge positive sweeping changes.
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Hopefully you are going to check it out because it has been my favorite game in a long, long time.