"We definitely hoped to release console versions of Tannenberg from the very start."

Was it always the plan to eventually bring Tannenberg over to consoles, or did the reception to the game compel you to do so?

We definitely hoped to release console versions of Tannenberg from the very start, but we were hesitant to get people’s hopes up until we could be certain that it would be feasible. Following the release of the game and the great reception, we were able to say with confidence that the console versions are on the way.

Will Tannenberg support cross-platform play?

Unfortunately we don’t have any plans to support cross-platform play. In this kind of game, gamers using different devices and control methods could find themselves mismatched in response time or accuracy. Perhaps more important is that we will continue to support and update Tannenberg after launch, and it’s much quicker to push updates to the PC version. This makes it difficult to keep the PC and console versions in sync all the time, which would also make cross-platform very difficult.

Did you have to make any changes to the game’s balance of any sort to make sure it was better suited to consoles?

We try to keep all versions of the game in sync as much as possible in terms of balance. This is actually another reason why we don’t support cross-platform – it means we can balance the game to be as fun as possible without needing to worry about whether particular mechanics give an unfair advantage to players on a particular platform.

Will Tannenberg on the consoles have any additional features or content not seen in the PC release, or are you aiming for parity across all versions?

We always aim for parity across all versions of our games. In fact, we have a big update coming soon for the console versions of our first game Verdun, which will add all the latest new content we’ve brought to the PC version of the game.

"We wanted to portray the fighting of the First World War as accurately as possible while making necessary concessions to gameplay, and it’s something our fans expect from us!"

Do you have plans to add any new modes to Tannenberg down the line?

While we don’t have plans for new core game modes, we do like to offer players unique events within the game. For instance, we recently ran a special ‘Wolf Truce’ event in the PC version of the game, where players could find their battlefields swarmed by hordes of hungry wolves. They could call a ceasefire to deal with the new threat… or try to take advantage of the chaos. That wasn’t exactly a new mode per se, but it was definitely a lot of fun!

Authenticity is something that Tannenberg puts a lot of emphasis on- was that something that you knew from the get go was going to be very important to the game’s experience?

Definitely! Authenticity is one of our core values, and it was also central in our previous game Verdun and the whole WW1 Game Series in general. We wanted to portray the fighting of the First World War as accurately as possible while making necessary concessions to gameplay, and it’s something our fans expect from us! We put a lot of effort into ensuring that uniforms, weapons, and other details are correct. The maps in the game are made up of elements inspired by real photographs and records of actual battles to ensure that they are plausible locations that someone from the time would not have been surprised to encounter.

Has adding a single player campaign ever been something you’ve considered, or do you see this as a purely multiplayer experience?

While it would be awesome to create a single player campaign if we had unlimited time and money, we’re an indie company and we have to carefully focus our efforts and resources. Keeping the game focused on multiplayer battles makes it possible for us to create a more immersive experience. It’s worth noting that we do have AI bots in the game, so you can play on your own if you so wish!

Do you have any plans to launch on the Switch?

We don’t currently have any plans for a Switch release… but never say never.

Will the game will feature Xbox One X specific enhancements? What can players expect if they are playing the game on Xbox One X? Is 4K/60fps on the cards?

We’ll definitely be using a higher resolution on the Xbox One X, however we will also be upgrading all our other graphical effects settings instead of going just for 4K. We will use 4K if possible (and otherwise a middle ground like 3K), but we want to make all the other parts of the game look better as well, we have yet to see what we can pull off with the power of the X. We’re not just upgrading to 4K and be done with it, we want to get more out of the Xbox One X!

"Performance is something we will be working hard on in the next 2 months."

And how will the PS4 Pro version turn out in terms of resolution and frame rate?

Very similar to Xbox One X. We’ll be doing the same graphical tweaks, and if there’s room left we’d also like to upgrade the resolution towards 4K. For instance, 3K could be a nice middle ground combined with other graphical upgrades.

How is the game running on the original Xbox One and PS4, frame rate and resolution wise?

Performance is something we will be working hard on in the next 2 months, so this is not final. However we’re currently aiming for 1920×1080 at 30 FPS. We will explore if it makes sense for us to use adaptive resolution if that helps guarantee a stable frame rate.

The PS5 specs were recently revealed in an interview with Wired. What are your thoughts on that?

We’re always happy with more powerful hardware as that can make our job easier… although, since consumer expectations rise along with the hardware quality that’s not always the case in the end, haha.

We’re most excited about the SSD drives as that will make one of the biggest differences: finally, speedy console loading times!

The PS5 will have a Zen 2 CPU processor, which is a major leap over the Jaguar found in the PS4. How will this help in games development?

We use the Unity game engine for all our games, and we are always CPU bottlenecked. So with such an improvement to our weakest link (CPU), it will help greatly for getting better performance and producing better looking games.

"We don’t currently have any plans for a Switch release… but never say never."

What is your take on Sony’s reluctant policy on cross-play with Xbox and Nintendo?

While we don’t think cross-platform between PC and consoles would necessarily work for our game, it would be great to support cross-platform between different consoles if it were possible.

Do you think cross platform will be one of the defining features of next-gen consoles?

Predicting the future is a risky business! To be honest, it doesn’t feel like there are the right conditions or the right mood among the big studios for cross-platform to be a major feature of next-gen consoles right now, but things can always change! If it does happen, it’ll probably be one of those things where it feels so natural that you wonder how people ever lived without it.

Much has been said about cross-platform play among the current generation of consoles. The success of Epic Games’ Fortnite: Battle Royale or Phoenix Labs’ Dauntless, the latter having 60 percent of its parties formed through cross-play, does mean there’s room for it. With the current generation winding down and next gen consoles to be revealed in the coming year, could cross-play become a major feature for the PS5 or next Xbox?

GamingBolt spoke to Jos Hoebe of Blackmill Games, the studio behind realistic World War 1 shooter Tannenberg, about the same. We first asked about Sony’s reluctance for cross-play with the Xbox brand. Hoebe’s take is as follows: “While we don’t think cross-platform between PC and consoles would necessarily work for our game, it would be great to support cross-platform between different consoles if it were possible.”

As for whether cross-play will become a defining features of next gen consoles, he answered, “Predicting the future is a risky business! To be honest, it doesn’t feel like there are the right conditions or the right mood among the big studios for cross-platform to be a major feature of next-gen consoles right now, but things can always change! If it does happen, it’ll probably be one of those things where it feels so natural that you wonder how people ever lived without it.”

With services like Google Stadia coming up and offering cross-play across phones, tablets, PCs, and whatnot, the boundaries between Microsoft and Sony could lower sooner rather than later. After all, Sony is collaborating with Microsoft on cloud-based gaming and AI for the future. Who knows where that partnership could lead?

It’s into this environment that Verdun, created by developers Blackmill Games and M2H, is thrown. The game is based on the Battle of Verdun, one of the largest and longest battles of the First World War. The battle began in February of 1918 and lasted 10 months, leaving over 700,000 soldiers wounded, missing, or dead. As a multiplayer game, Verdun bravely attempts to capture the fear, and occasionally crushing boredom, of a war fought between trenches.

"You only have a certain amount of time to capture a trench, and your enemy’s entrenched position (no, I’m not sorry) means that they have a natural advantage, which makes each attack an uphill battle."

The main way to experience Verdun is in Frontlines mode. It’s a game of momentum. While attacking, you charge across the scarred craters and barbed wire of no man’s land in an attempt to seize your enemy’s trench, which the other team must protect. Capturing a trench requires you to maintain control of it for a set period of time. The more allies attempting to capture a trench, the faster the trench is taken. You only have a certain amount of time to capture a trench, and your enemy’s entrenched position (no, I’m not sorry) means that they have a natural advantage, which makes each attack an uphill battle.

Failing to capture a trench means that momentum shifts to the other team, and it’s their turn to attack. The ultimate goal is to capture enough trenches to reach and capture the enemy headquarters. Because of the inherent defensive advantage, the teams switch between offense and defense frequently, and outright victories are often difficult to obtain. Frequently, matches end in a draw.

You can also dip into Rifle Deathmatch, which is exactly what it sounds like, Attrition, aka Team Deathmatch with Verdun’s full arsenal at your disposal, or Squad Defence, a co-op wave defense where you attempt to hold a trench against wave after wave of enemies. Each of these is interesting enough, especially Squad Defence, which is a great place to learn Verdun’s mechanics as the tutorial does very little to teach you. Sadly, however, these playlists are significantly underpopulated (at the time of this writing, they boasted less than 50 players combined), so Frontlines and Squad Defence are really your only options.

"Defending your trench while under gas assault is legitimately scary, as your gas mask farther hampers your already gas-filled view, and the only sounds are that of your character breathing and the approaching gunfire of the enemy."

Both game modes place you in squads and asks you to fill a role. Some squads are standard attack units with riflemen, gunners, and grenadiers, while others are focused on recon or special weapons, such as flamethrowers. Depending on the squad, the squad’s leader – a non-commissioned officer, also known as a NCO – can call in artillery support, aircraft recon, or poison gas.

Playing in a squad, and with your squad, is essential, and the game rewards you for staying close to your NCO and following his orders. Over time, you and your squad will gain experience and career points. The former will level you up, granting new uniforms and squad buffs, while the latter allows you to unlock new tiers of weapons.

When everything works well, Verdun is an engaging game. Defending your trench while under gas assault is legitimately scary, as your gas mask farther hampers your already gas-filled view, and the only sounds are that of your character breathing and the approaching gunfire of the enemy. Tension builds as your team takes defensive positions in your trench, and all you can do is wait, hoping you’ll see them through the gas before a spray bullet cuts you down. Attacking is just as engaging, as your team charges into no man’s land, hoping to make it across to the enemy’s trench and get into the action before a concealed sniper takes you down.

" It can be especially frustrating when you’re trying to gain a better angle to defend your trench, or running from one part of the trench to another, only for your own soldier to bark some canned line about deserters and cowards being shot."

Yes, Verdun is excellent at capturing the tension of trench warfare. But it also shares its tedium. Matches run long – between 15 and 30 minutes – and most of them are spent doing nothing. If you’re on defense, you’ll have to deal with “dead zones,” areas that cordon off a majority of the map and force you to remain into your trench. A failed attack means that you’ll be forced to retreat into a safe area. Set just one toe over the line, even if the line is just a few centimeters outside of your trench, and the screen will fade to black and white, and a countdown timer to appear.

Fail to retreat far enough into your trench in the allotted time, and you’ll die. It can be especially frustrating when you’re trying to gain a better angle to defend your trench, or running from one part of the trench to another, only for your own soldier to bark some canned line about deserters and cowards being shot. Both of these things will frequently take you into the dead zone for at least a moment, even when it feels like they shouldn’t, which means that if you’re playing properly, it will happen a lot.

So you wait, but even when you get into combat, the tedium is compounded by long respawn times, which can run more than 20 seconds. Worse still, you’re just as likely to respawn out in the open, right in the line of sight of an opportune sniper, as you are in the safety of your trench.

"When Verdun works, when all of its disparate elements combine properly, the mixture of tension and uniqueness it provides is unlike anything else and utterly engaging. Too often, however, the game gets in its own way, either due to technical issues or poor design decisions."

The game’s visual design doesn’t do it any favors. Verdun is an ugly game. No man’s land probably wasn’t pretty, and that’s understandable, but there’s little excuse for how visually bland the levels are, and how technically unimpressive they are, to boot. I could deal with the game’s color palette, which seems to deal almost exclusively in varying shades of brown with the odd smattering of green if the levels were at least well-presented, but they aren’t.

There’s also a number of niggling gameplay issues. The game will often lose your bullets, meaning that you’ll spend a lot of time lining up your shots only for nothing to happen. This would be fine (and would probably mean that you’d missed) if it only happened during long-range rifle shootouts, but I’ve fired into enemies at point-blank range, both human players and AI enemies, shots that couldn’t possibly be missed, and nothing has happened. Team balancing is also poor, and the only way to fix significantly unbalanced teams is for player to switch of their own accord. Verdun seems to lack the ability to balance itself. It’s also quite easy to get stuck on objects in the environment for no discernable reason.

When Verdun works, when all of its disparate elements combine properly, the mixture of tension and uniqueness it provides is unlike anything else and utterly engaging. Too often, however, the game gets in its own way, either due to technical issues or poor design decisions. There’s sparks of glory to be found in these trenches, yes; but at this moment it is largely unrealized, like a great soldier who misses the cry to attack, and sits in his trench as his brothers charge a field, waiting for an order that may never come again.

This game was reviewed on the PlayStation 4.

GamingBolt spoke to M2H co-founder Mike Hergaarden, also one of the three creators of the game, to discuss its inspiration, changes made to the game since its initial launch and more more.

"We’ve released several big updates, did a really cool Christmas Truce event, gave out several free expansions and have been working simultaneously on the console version of the game."

Verdun has been around for quite a while, having gone into open beta in June 2013 and releasing last year in April. What served as the motivation to make a World War 1 shooter, especially one focusing on the 1916 Battle of Verdun?

One of the Verdun creators visited the Verdun region when he was a child, leaving a great impression, also friends (who happen to do some archaeology there) own a house near Verdun which we sometimes visit. At Verdun the remnants of the battle (rifles, grenades and even bones!) are still sticking out of the ground in the many forests that surround the town so it is not hard being impressed by interacting with a history which may be 100 years ago but still very much part of the environment there.

When we met via (tech)university, the idea was formed soon after to create a game with Verdun as its central theme. Being big fps players ourselves we choose this platform because it gives us the biggest opportunity to fully immerse the players into the action.

How much has the game changed in the past one year? What new features and content have been added in the meantime?

Pff, we’ve done a lot with the game the past year. We’ve released several big updates, did a really cool Christmas Truce event, gave out several free expansions and have been working simultaneously on the console version of the game. In short, all of the art, weapons, characters and animations have been replaced by higher quality and more detailed versions. And we’ve added a huge amount of content, like weapons, maps, squads and game modes.

Verdun focuses quite a bit on squad play and teamwork across its game modes (with the exception of Rifle Deathmatch). How was this approach received, especially compared to other military shooters, and how has it shaped the design philosophy going forward?

The choice we made was to focus on a squad-based game where we were able to put into the field (matches) a number of different squad types as could be found on the real front. Such as infantry, jaeger, stosstruppen ,Canadians etc. and within those units specific roles to represent these (for instance the jaeger would get recon snipers, the infantry a machine gunner as a playable role). The focus of the game as a whole therefore is mostly in cooperation with other players.

"We hope to reveal our plans soon, right now we are concentrating on the console release, but interested players should follow our social media channels for more news soon."

The core reason for the choice to integrate squad mechanics into the game is to make it easier for players to actually mount an effective assault on the enemy trenches. You’d often see some role division in a unit storming a specific position (one would flank, one would throw grenades) so the choice to have these units which each have their own style of play and capture the enemy trench is very much rooted in history.

Also in Verdun you are able to level a squad together (by gaining co-op points), which has never been done with this kind of integration in any other FPS. When you level your squad you are upgrading the weapons and uniforms you fight with, where you start as 1914 squad (with the iconic pickelhaube pointy helmets, red trousers for the French) and evolve in a squad as one would find on the front in 1918, with camouflaged stahlhelms, flamethrowers and light machine guns. The squads allow us to represent a lot of historical information into one game. As the transition of the warfare was changing rapidly a lot of times you would find different unit types in uniforms fighting side-by-side. It also a way for us to represent the dramatic change in warfare that occurred during 1914 – 1918 in visual manner.

This approach was received pretty well, the players and community really like the way we deal with the historical aspects and we have a lot of fans who really know their history. It’s hard to compare this with other shooters, since there aren’t really WW1 competitors. With the recent announcement and gameplay footage from BF1, we’ve heard loads of players praising the historical accuracy Verdun has to offer compared with the more ‘modern’ take from BF1.

Are there any other intriguing modes currently in mind for the game, perhaps some with interesting rules like Rifle Deathmatch?

We have some future plans in mind, but can’t share these yet. Hope you understand.

With Verdun releasing on Xbox One and PS4 next month, what changes can we look forward to in current game modes?

Besides the normal tweaks and small fixes there won’t be big changes in the game modes. We did look at the console gamers and made some tweaks to have an optimized console experience, since games tend to play a bit different on console.

"It turns out there is quite a demand for it and a huge online community that knows a lot about the WW1."

Are there any interesting new items, weapons or new maps in the pipeline? If so, when players expect them?
A question that many ask. We hope to reveal our plans soon, right now we are concentrating on the console release, but interested players should follow our social media channels for more news soon.

How difficult was it to translate Verdun to the current gen consoles with regards to controls, network infrastructure, etc?

Major challenges are always: GUI, controls, networking, performance, platform specific implementations (friends, error codes etc.). We completely redid the GUI, so that was a big topic. Networking is also hard: while it worked out of the box, meeting all the console requirements takes a long time. Lastly maybe the biggest challenge is the always ongoing performance optimization. Since this is our first console title we were new to these console specific challenges.

Will PS4 and Xbox One versions receive patches and updates at the same time as the PC version?

Pushing patches and updates on the PC differs from both consoles and the development for these platforms is also done differently. However, we have the intention to push our new patches and updates on to all platforms.

What are your thoughts on the popularity of World War 1 as a setting, especially with Battlefield 1 coming up?

As gamers ourselves we missed the WW1 theme, there are plenty good WW2 games out there and we hoped to show that it’s also possible to develop a good WW1 FPS game.

It turns out there is quite a demand for it and a huge online community that knows a lot about the WW1. We hope that Verdun inspires people and that the game gives a bit of an impression of the war. We do get feedback from players, press and other developers saying that, which makes it totally worth it in our opinion.

What does the future hold for Verdun after the console release?

We see a bright future for Verdun and aren’t done developing on both PC and console! Hmm..I might just give have given a hint here.

"On the Unity engine we’re mostly CPU bound. So for us the CPU seems to be all that matters for performance, it’s unclear if Scorpio has a better CPU."

Will the game run at 1080p and 60fps on both the PS4 and Xbox One?

The game will run on 1080p on both consoles. As for the FPS, we are continuously optimizing the game so can’t give you an answer yet.

I am sure you must have heard about the upcoming PS4 NEO and Xbox One SCORPIO. From a development perspective what kind of advantages will these new and upgraded consoles bring to games development due to their additional power?

Ultimately nothing will change: because of the new power everyone will expect 4K support and then we’ll still be optimizing games just as hard as today.

Microsoft certainly seems to be pushing 4K gaming with their upcoming Scorpio launch next year. As someone who is been developing games for a long time, will you push for 1080p/60fps or 4K/30fps on the new Scorpio?

If we need to choose, 1080p/60fps. Smooth gameplay is more important on the long run.

On the other hand we have Sony, whose NEO reportedly has a weaker hardware compared to Scorpio. Given the current trend of better performing games on PS4, do you think Microsoft will finally have a one up on Sony in the performance/resolution department when the NEO and Scorpio launch?

On the Unity engine we’re mostly CPU bound. So for us the CPU seems to be all that matters for performance, it’s unclear if Scorpio has a better CPU. So we’re not sure just yet…but it might not differ so much.

Will you support the platforms (with games) when they launch?            

We have no plans for games specific to these platforms. We’ll keep making the games we envision and then check the suited platforms.