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
Watch On

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.

Contributor

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.

Read more
A fantasy character aiming a bow while a wizard readies a staff to fight monsters
Enshrouded 1.0 target date and 2025 roadmap revealed, new update arriving today, and dynamic water on the way
Manor Lords promo art - knight on horseback looking at a medieval village in the distance, viewed from behind
PCG's best city builder of 2024 is adding a map with a gigantic hill in the middle: the perfect spot for your next castle
Man holding gun up to approaching cannibal
Sons of the Forest's first patch in 6 months is a doozy, adding buildable rafts, a procedural wall system, and fixing more than 100 bugs
Gary Oldman in Squadron 42
11 years and $750 million later, Star Citizen now has a new star system and MMO-scale server sizes
Forever Skies blimp survival game
Take your friends airship scavenging and moth fishing above a ruined earth with the co-op update to Forever Skies
A player character with an ominous mask
The Forever Winter, my favourite extraction shooter, just overhauled its most contentious feature for the second time: 'It was a hell of a rollercoaster to make the adjustment'
Latest in MMO
Gallywix wears an uneasy smile as he's confronted by Xal'atath in WoW: The War Within.
World of Warcraft guild uses exploits to get world 'first' on the game's new raid, gets banned, puts its name backwards and does it again
A World of Warcraft dwarf and human character standing in front of the entrance to a delve dungeon
WoW's nerfed its poor Delve companion into a dwarf-shaped crater after his tank spec made them too easy, and people aren't happy
EVE Frontier promo image - Omo
EVE Online studio CCP Games hires former Iceland Central Bank economist for its crypto game, because nothing says 'fun' like 'removing currency controls and fostering emergent value systems'
An alien waters some cacti in Stars Reach, a new MMO that recently funded its Kickstarter.
Former Ultima Online lead says MMOs have 'been in a rut for a long time', and that cozy games like Animal Crossing have been filling a non-theme park hole
Runescape Return to the Desert Pharaoh's Folly Key art.
Runescape is finally wrapping up one of its earliest storylines, 24 years after the first quest debuted
Three goblins from the goblin cartels smile confidently in WoW: The War Within's Undermine(d) patch.
WoW's new Undermine(d) patch had a live jazz ensemble recording its big-band bangers, and they got to improvise: 'Usually those were the takes that ended up in the final version'
Latest in News
A masked man with an axe in the woods
Rebellion CEO seems kind of awed by major studios making massive videogames: 'How do you organize a game that has 2,000 people working on it?'
A young witch watering a smiling mushroom in a magic garden
Here's a roguelite dungeon crawler Steam reviewers call 'a botanical Diablo' and 'like Cult of the Lamb' except you manage a mystical garden
Destiny 2 Rite of the Nine: The Emissary, massive, ominously standing at the edge of a water basin.
Oops! Bungie rolled out Destiny 2's Rite of the Nine event three weeks early, and new loot is already dropping
Chatacabra from Monster Hunter Wilds
The latest Monster Hunter Wilds event quest gives piles of Armor Spheres for hunting a Chatacabra, making this a very bad week to be a frog in the Forbidden Lands
No Rest for the Wicked Steam early access screenshots
No Rest for the Wicked developer Moon Studios is now 'fully independent' after acquiring the rights to the game from Take-Two
A hunter posing with an absurd Blangonga outfit in Monster Hunter Wilds.
Attention, fashion hunters: There's a Monster Hunter Wilds mod to disable all those obnoxious glowing buff effects that distract from your fits