Shout, Shout the "Battle Cry of Freedom"

This is my favorite game in years--and no one plays it.

In high school I put hundreds and hundreds of hours into Mount & Blade: Napoleonic Wars. This semi-mod multiplayer DLC expansion for Mount & Blade: Warband introduced me to the Napoleonic Wars and ignited a lifetime obsession with Napoleon and the Duke of Wellington. Musket marksmanship, bayonet dueling, and deathmatch horse riding proved a combination that I had never experienced in a multiplayer game. The thrill of twenty second reloads while balls buzzed overhead, while aggressive Beethoven blared through the speakers--nothing compared. A complete lack of progression systems bothered me not.

But best of all was the Commander Battle gamemode, where you took control of a regiment with twenty to fifty soldiers and tried to outmaneuver the enemy team, usually in ten-on-ten. Bannerlord has this today, but 19th Century military technology made everything so much more exciting. Line battles and cavalry charges, smoke clouding the air, player-managed artillery, and one life only. You won't find that experience anywhere else.

For the last decade, I've always come back to Napoleonic Wars. It is one of my favorite games of all time. But a long time has passed since its heyday, and with time, so fades the player count. These days it's mostly dead.

But a hole remained in the genre of mount-and-musket multiplayer mayhem. It is therefore unsurprising that newer, prettier games have rushed to fill the gaps.

As the only other Napoleonic shooter on the market, the obvious direct successor was Holdfast: Nations at War. And for a certain value of popularizing slow reloads and bayonet charges, Holdfast is, I suppose, adequate. The presentation is excellent, and the shooting mechanics much improved over Warband's kludged together firearms systems.

But Holdfast does not capture the magic of Napoleonic Wars. The reasons would require more space than is warranted in this article, but ultimately boil down to a lack of melee combat mechanics...and no Commander Battle. Holdfast may have enormous battlefields filled with musket smoke, but it isn't very much fun.

A slightly different take on this kind of game is the forever-EA War of Rights. Instead set in the US Civil War, War of Rights is a line battle simulator, with a heavy emphasis on local voice chat and roleplaying. I kickstarted the game literally eight years ago, and am sad to report it's received almost no new content since then--although it still receives updates.

Most engagements in WoR consist of 300-yard shootouts between ranks of Secesh and Yanks, where the resolution on my monitor is too low to actually render whoever I'm supposed to be shooting at. Your time will be spent reloading and firing off toward smoke clouds. There's no scoreboard or pop-up when you kill someone, so you'll never even know if you're getting hits. Because reloading is a simple animation--and not somehow mechanized with an active process--you're mostly doing nothing during this time except staring at your screen, hoping you don't get shot.

When you are inevitably shot, or blown up by artillery, it'll be from someone so far away you couldn't have possibly seen him. Then respawn and do it all over again.

I enjoyed WoR approximately eight years ago when its alpha was first released. Its heavy emphasis on realism and simulation has some kind of value, and I'm glad to have played it. But it is not what I would call a "fun" game, and it does not come anywhere near the brilliance of Napoleonic Wars.

The other game worth mentioning is Blackwake, an excellent, although very different, 18th Century shooter/slasher pirate simulator. But its population has utterly collapsed since 2022. You won't find your musket fix there.

That is the overview of the genre. Four games, two of them dead, another two mediocre.

An overview, minus one. And I really have saved the best for last.

Developed by Napoleonic Wars' original team at Flying Squirrel Entertainment, Battle Cry of Freedom is a near-identical recreation of the original Warband DLC that ignited its own niche multiplayer genre, reskinned for the US Civil. And it is so fucking good.

Shouting the Battle Cry of Freedom

Blue coats line up across from gray. Bayonets are affixed to barrels. Stocks are brought to shoulders. There are hundreds of men on the field, but only twenty players. They can be identified by their epaulets and sleeve insignias (for North or South, respectively). Each commands a legion of bots between ten and one hundred strong.

The command to fire at will is given. Suddenly the ranks ignite in streaks of orange lightning from white powder stormclouds. A thunder of death follows. The kill feed in the upper left floods with a tsunami of names red and blue. You take a hit to the neck; a gory death animation plays, and your regiment is now without its colonel.

That's okay, though. You had a captain as a back-up. You take control of him next. And so forth, down the line, until no one but a private soldier is left; and when even he falls to musket fire, respawn and do it all again.

Bannerlord has a Commander Battle multiplayer mode, but Battle Cry of Freedom is the first musketry-based game since the original Warband DLC to feature bot-commanded soldiers led by player officers. Choose your regiment, from Berdan's Sharpshooters to the 52nd Massachusetts (of Glory fame) and the Virginia Military Institute, and lead them victory--as an officer, on the ground. Do this all as Civil War-era popular music (courtesy of the 2nd South Carolina String Band) aggressively plays through your speakers--just like Beethoven in the lost days of Napoleonic Wars before.

But while Commander Battle is a notable--and incredible--feature of the game, it, like its predecessor, similarly features normal Battle, Siege, and Deathmatch modes, where players go head-to-head as individual soldiers. When the playercount supports them, these are even more enjoyable than Commander Battle. An attention to detail and focus on historicity, without yielding gameplay to "realism," makes BCoF's gameplay relentlessly enjoyable. A suite of Civil War-era weapons--sabers, revolvers, muskets, shotguns, and carbines--gives variety, while intelligently designed maps force interesting engagements with minimal time-wasting (my biggest problem with both Holdfast and WoR by far).

But it always had a problem. In addition to some bad lag, annoying precision issues in shooting, and performance problems, BCoF never seemed capable of supporting a large enough population to enable real participation in any game mode other than Commander Battle. For this reason I played it only rarely.

But earlier this year, the game's 2.0 update added cavalry and significant polish to the extant systems. At this juncture the game went on a deep sale, and thousands of new players were brought into the base. For a solid two week period in March there were regularly 300 players in Siege and Battle gamemodes. The resultant mass-scale exchanges of first/third person bayonet and sword brawls and musket sniping sessions are among the most fun I have ever had in a video game. Shootouts with Colts and Springfields, where no one ever has more than six shots on tap at a time, are tense and thrilling without fail. A 100-player team deathmatch in this context beats out mindless first person shooting ten times out of ten.

I told everyone I knew to buy the game. I raved about it endlessly. I was so busy playing it that I barely found the time to eat and drink. Battle Cry of Freedom was the game I always knew I wanted, and it delivered--despite its share of issues. And it seemed like, finally, it was here to stay.

And then everyone stopped playing.

Where have all the players gone?

It happened overnight. On Sunday, over two hundred players were in a single server, duking it out over control of the Alamo. The next afternoon, the count was down to forty. A week later there were hardly ten people online. As of today--5/20/23--even Commander Battle, which thrived during the underpopulated period before 2.0, is hardly playable, with only six people online.

An attempt to revive the game with another sale saw a day-long resurgence, but Battle Cry of Freedom has been almost completely dead since then.

Where have the new players gone? I don't know, but gone they most certainly are.

It's true that a lot of polish is still missing. Performance in particular is still very poor. But the community seemed to be thriving. Chat was full of players, like me, astonished by how much fun they were having. We collectively dissed Holdfast and War of Rights. I thought these players would be here to stay.

They weren't.

It's always tragic when a good independent game dies. I don't know why it happens. Blackwake is phenomenal and totally unique; it thrived for years. Now literally no one plays it. It's understandable for Napoleonic Wars, although sad, because newer titles have supplanted it. But Battle Cry of Freedom dominates its niche. There is nothing else on the market except War of Rights, which is really a very different kind of game.

Yet War of Rights, despite its total dearth of content and meaningful updates, has 200 people online today. BCoF has eleven. This inevitably leads to new players giving the game a bad review on Steam, thus warding off potential purchases in a vicious feedback loop.

I hate this so much. If I could choose any game to be stuck with forever, it would be this one. But it seems like there's no possible way to escape its downfall.

I don't suppose I wield much influence as far as these things go. But I wanted to write this up to say: please, buy War of Rights. Play it. Savor it. And to everyone at Flying Squirrel, thank you for making this game. I pray that it at least made enough to support whatever comes next. Whatever that is, I will buy it the moment it enters Early Access.