Foxhole, the brilliant MMO that simulates a persistent war, gears up to add airplanes in 2025

Foxhole Airborne - Announcement Trailer - YouTube Foxhole Airborne - Announcement Trailer - YouTube
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Thousands against thousands war MMO Foxhole has a new major chapter coming in Summer 2025 with the Airborne update. Announced this week, the update will add various warplanes that complete Foxhole's trifecta of player-driven battles on land, sea, and now air with hundreds of players at once fighting over one giant, isometric battlefront.

The Airborne release will include fighter planes capable of dogfights, bombers, new logistics to build and supply planes, and lots of flight roles to take on. It'll also include Paratroopers, a twist that'll definitely change how the backline partisan and logistics operations of Foxhole are played.

Airborne looks to continue Foxhole's biggest tradition: The idea that everything in the game is made by and driven by a player. That means just like tanks or ships need a crew, a single-pilot fighter will work with one person but a larger bomber will require multiple crew as pilots, turret gunners, and perhaps even bombardiers.

That also means that aircraft will have to tie into Foxhole's extensive production and logistics pipelines—the trailer even shows partially disassembled planes set on train cars for transit. The teaser suggests people will gather resources for and build every plane flown, bomb dropped, and bullet fired by those planes. They'll also have to form ground crews for airfields, doing the job of rearming and refueling aircraft for their next sortie.

The other big update coming to Foxhole is an infantry-focused patch that will release this month, on November 18. It'll include a number of large gameplay overhauls. And melee weapons, which I'm sure Foxhole's community will be completely normal about and definitely won't induce a lot of hundred-player suicide charges from one trench network to another.

"The Infantry update is a major revamp of Foxhole's infantry gameplay, designed to be more team-oriented and tactical. This update introduces deeper suppression gameplay, weapon shouldering mechanics, and a stamina overhaul, alongside other features to make the entire infantry playspace more impactful on the persistent battlefield," said developer Siege Camp.

You can find Foxhole on Steam, and more info about the Airborne update on its Foxhole website and in the joint announcement with the Infantry Update. Developers Siege Camp have already announced their next project in development alongside Foxhole, a medieval warfare MMO called Anvil Empires.

Foxhole is a long-running game now, and hit its 1.0 release back in 2022 but has kept up the stride ever since. It's the kind of game where a dedicated community creates some really good videogame folk stories, or whips up a whole religion around a corpse pile before crashing the server over it. It's also one of those perennially "dead" games that's still very much alive, pulling 3,000 or more peak players even on its weakest days.

Jon Bolding is a games writer and critic with an extensive background in strategy games. When he's not on his PC, he can be found playing every tabletop game under the sun.