GOL Cast: Revisiting the trenches of Verdun

It’s been some time since I shared my thoughts about Verdun and I’ve heard the game has changed in a positive way since then, so let’s check out how this WW1 multiplayer shooter does!

Verdun is a squad-based multiplayer FPS set in the World War 1 and was developed by M2H and Blackmill games. Verdun puts you in the boots of a soldier in one of the battling armies. Your task is to run through the deadly machine gun fire, artillery strikes and gas clouds and capture the enemy trenches.

If you wish to see my previous coverage of Verdun, you can find the article here. In this article I will focus mainly on the changes and only touch on the basic gameplay mechanics lightly.

Note to readers: The GOL Cast is going through a rebranding process due to potentially being confused with the GOL Podcast. If you have naming ideas, please share them in the comments. I am absolutely terrible with names.


Last time I talked about Verdun I was quite happy with it but there were definitely some quite big issues with it, so I ended up being somewhat negative about the game back then. The game has been continuously updated since then and the recent free expansion Horrors of War gave me an opportunity to step back into the trenches and have another go at surviving the lead storms of the these unforgiving battlefields. And I do have to say, things have improved quite a bit.

The base game hasn’t changed too much from my last visit. The basic gameplay is still exactly the same: you alternate between dashing madly against the enemy’s positions and defending your own positions from the enemy, who are doing more or less the same thing. There’s also more traditional team deathmatch game modes but personally I have found them fairly boring, unless you want to do some weapon testing. Lives are still just as cheap as they were previously and artillery, machine guns and gas attacks will definitely claim yours very frequently. I would say the game is just as difficult as it was before, if not slightly harder.

Due to the time period your weaponry naturally mainly consists of bolt action rifles but the game has received some more variety on this front in the updates. The Entente powers have access to shotguns and BAR and Springfield rifles which are carried by the new US Marine and Doughboys squads. The German side hasn’t been neglected either and one of the more awesome additions is the flamethrower carried by the flamethrower specialist of the Pioniers squad. I found the flamethrower awesome, if a bit clumsy, to use and recorded some really nice moments of me clearing out long sections of the enemy trenches with it. The weapons also seem to balance out nicely between both sides and during gameplay I didn’t feel like either side was dominating due to their weaponry, even when I was wielding the scary flamethrower.

Other changes are the couple of new maps that have been added to the map rotation and the gore options. Dying is an integral part of the Verdun experience and you will see the respawn timer quite a lot. So, it’s good that the developers have added some gore options to make the deaths just a bit more spectacular. With the gore option turned to the maximum you will start to see dying soldiers screaming the rest of their short lives away with arms and legs torn away by explosions and gunfire. Corpses also seem to stay on the battlefield longer, helping create an atmosphere of a horrible bloodbath. If the gore is too much for you, you still have the option of turning it off entirely but for an authentic WW1 experience I’d recommend turning it up to 11.

While everything I’ve mentioned is definitely cool, I likely wouldn’t even be writing this piece if it weren’t for the performance. And oh has it improved since I last played. When I did my initial article on the game I complained about bad performance on my GTX 760 on the proprietary Nvidia driver. Even on the lowest graphical settings the game would tank hard. However, these days an R7 370, which in pure hardware power is relatively close to the 760, can run the game on medium settings at 1080p on open source drivers just fine. Fine in this case means around 60 FPS all of the time, with occasional drops to 40 FPS. The difference in performance is quite staggering. I haven’t tried Verdun on Nvidia yet but knowing the performance difference between the open source AMD driver and the proprietary Nvidia driver, I believe the 760 would run the game with no problems whatsoever. The performance was one of the bigger issues I had with the game and now I think it won’t be as much of a concern as it was previously.

Another issue I had with the game was the buggy state it was in when it exited Early Access. There were crashes, sometimes weapons would just stop causing damage and servers would somewhat frequently kick all the players out to reset things back to a more normal state. This kind of behaviour was even captured on the video I recorded for the article. This seems to have improved too, as I haven’t seen any major bugs during the about 6 hours I’ve played the game for this article. Crashes still seem to be here, at least to some extent, but they don’t seem as frequent as they used to. It’s also possible that my open source drivers might have contributed to some or all of the crashes I’ve encountered. I’ve seen a couple of small bugs, like machine guns not getting placed correctly on the ground and the spectator cameras occasionally freaking out due to someone using a scope instead of the normal iron sights. These issues are very minor though and I never felt like they had a big negative effect on my gameplay experience.

Verdun used to be a very good WW1 shooter plagued by technical issues last time I played it. Nowadays I think it’s an excellent WW1 shooter that I have thoroughly enjoyed. It still might not be for everyone; it’s tough as nails and it doesn’t hold your hand. You will die a lot and at times things might seem unfair and you might feel like you aren’t contributing to you team’s performance when you die for the tenth time to a particularly annoying sniper. But if you can force your way through the initial learning curve you might find really cool experiences between your respawns. It takes a lot to make me play a multiplayer-only FPS for over 40 hours and Verdun definitely has just that.

Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.