WWII Online 2026 Roadmap

This year WWII Online is poised to do some great things, addressing both the new and existing player experience. We'll be aiming to remove or lessen the impacts of some old design. This ranges from our user interface to your daily experience.

It is also our 25th consecutive year of operations (originally released June 6th, 2001) thanks to your continued subscription efforts. Sincerely, our team expresses its highest gratitude to the WWII Online playerbase for continuing to believe in and support our project. We hope this roadmap does justice to address key things important to you, our outstanding community.

You'll note that this article is primarily text based, as these are developments that need to occur. Please comment with questions or your thoughts on this article. It's going to be a great year of improving WWII Online! Continue reading below.

A more persistent experience

Each time we restart the game server, player investments get wiped out. We're going to address this by making the following survive a server restart:

1. Global supply levels.

2. Fallbacks for moveable brigades.

3. Surrender timers (when towns are cut off).

A better user experience.

We want to make WWII Online a more enjoyable experience, by addressing spawn camping, making the game more accessible to new players, making our voice comms systems more reliable and immersive, and add better flexibility to our mission leaders to seamlessly transition their mission objectives.

SPAWN PROTECTION MODE

Fewer things are more aggravating than spawning into the game world and getting immediately killed by a spawn camper, no matter what game you play - this sucks. WWII Online will be tackling this issue head-on with a new "Spawn Protection Mode."

Here's how it'll work... every player who spawns into the game world will receive 100% invincibility and 50% transparency unless one of these conditions are met:

1. They shoot their weapon.

2. They move X distance from their origin (spawn location).

3. Too much time goes by and they are idle.

If any of those conditions have been met, they are now 100% killable and 100% visible. The 50% transparency is intended to alert all players (in first and third person) to understand that person is spawn protected. It is very likely with Spawn Protection Active that a spawn camper can unload an entire machinegun belt at an avatar, do zero damage, and get blown up by that same person. Solution? Don't spawn camp.

Automatic Transmissions: Ground Vehicle's

Many new players who pickup WWII Online don't know how to start their engine, initiate the gas or move the vehicle into gear... these are devastating first experiences and subjugate players to the feeling that they can only play infantry.

To make WWII Online more competitive and accessible, our intent is to create a fully functional WSAD automatic transmission which will be applied by default. All players will have the means to opt-out of this and play like they always have with manual transmissions. Using the same analysis from our autopilot rebuild, this is represents a strong opportunity open up a wide variety of vehicle game play to anyone joining the game.

CLEANING UP INTEGRATED VOICE COMMS (IVC)

IVC represented such a big opportunity for our game to create more immersive experience, providing a turnkey method to get players to verbally communicate with each other. This year we'll be looking to get Local Area 3D (proximity) chat back online. We will also be investigating more about target chat and why it is not as reliable as it should be. The intent being a better IVC experience and greater usage.

Mobile Spawn Deployments from All Trucks & Haulers

MS's are crucial to keeping the game going and getting players to target faster. We're going to remove all barriers for truck drivers, by giving every truck and hauler (armed or unarmed) to deploy all mobile spawn types. Including self-propelled anti-aircraft and anti-tank platforms.

BETTER SCALING CAPTURE TIMERS

Continuing our effort to provide better balance for WWII Online, we are going to extend our scaled capture timers so they are more granular. Effectively this means that if the overpopulated side has 10% people, they have 10% slower capture times. This also means the underpop would then be 10% faster. This will eventually scale all the way up to 100%, which is time zone agnostic.

Imbalance %	Overpop capture speeds	Underpop capture speeds
10%	10% Slower	10% Faster
20%	20% Slower	20% Faster
30%-100%	30%-100% Slower	30%-100% Faster

The balancing act of population levels remain an ongoing experiment and more changes may occur during this time.

Sappers to receive standard issue rifles

A small but important change is for our specialty sapper (anti-tank) class will be receiving standard issue rifles in accordance with their army.

A better user interface (UI)

We have long discussed a better UI, eliminating un-necessary clicks and pain points. Everything in the UI to date has been hand-written, and has been one of our greatest challenges for our development team to introduce the most simple of things to the game. But we don't want to just think about our UI as it is, we want to consider how this can be leveraged for a future generation of the game, usable in other engines if desired.

We will not be creating a whole new UI this year, but we will add some elements and lay the foundation for a new UI to be generated going forward. Continue reading to "Creating UI Development tools."

Creating ui development tools

To build anew, foundational tools are required. We'll be building tools that enable developers and producers to make straight forward changes to the UI. We'll endeavor to make these tools stand the test of time and be able to work with WWII Online's proprietary engine and a direct aim at working within Unreal Engine 5+. The goal being that when we develop and build it can be done with one toolset and have two pipelines.

Instant Action Button

You've seen this on our roadmap before, and we haven't forgot about it. The intent here is that at the click of a button, players can bypass a lot of UI and get straight to the battle an algorithm that we think has the best odds of giving them action. This is something we want to accomplish in 2026.

map Capture Point (CP) flag markers

Ever open your ingame map, and the CP flags are placed randomly, and not on the actual capture building you're looking for? This task is designed to algorithmically associate the map flag markers with the actual capture buildings. This will help new and existing players find capture points with zero confusion.

You can see two good examples of a CP and an AB flag marker not corresponding with their actual building. This task is to better align these map flag markers, so everyone knows exactly which building to go for.

Show Facilities on the HUD Mini-Map

The mini-map is located at the upper right of your screen (heads up display). By adding those CP flags on the mini-map we're ensuring that players can easily navigate from one strategic building to the next. It will also show the ownership (Allied or Axis) of each flag on the HUD providing better situational awareness for players fighting on the ground.

The image on the left shows the main map view with the facility (CP) flags present. Translating that over to the Mini-Map on the HUD ensures faster recognition / action by ground-based players.

TRANSITIONING YOUR TARGET, MID-MISSION

We will add a way for mission leaders to adjust their target on the fly (mission target change) for air, land and sea forces. This will give mission leaders the ability to better place mobile spawns and keep their people together. For example, if you are a pilot, your objectives change routinely. Having to leave your existing mission and then rally everyone onto a new one can take time and be difficult for some as others are still mid-flight. This maintains continuity and increases flexibility.

Adding Videos in the game screens

We'll investigate adding YouTube videos into the WWII Online user interface, with a starting point in our manuals section to help better educate players. Many video tutorials have been created, and have been distributed across several platforms. Being able to get that readily available and into the game is a big deal and would allow our veteran players to guide new players, and create muscle memory for new folks that they can get hands on training in the game directly, on-demand.

Calling an audible: If in the event that this task gets more involved than we anticipate (risk does exist), we may instead create hyperlink (click-able buttons) to then minimize the WWII Online application and open up the corresponding training video directly through the browser.

Next AO (Attack Objective)

High Command officers will be receiving a tool called .nextao which will allow them to create a "bat signal" (so to speak) on what the next objective is going to be. It will highlight a town on the map to encourage the playerbase to start setting things up.

Calling an audible: If that gets a bit too involved, we may instead add a new text box above active battles tab (above missions) that is editable so officers can provide text orders to all who are present. It's possible we might just add this either way based on HC/player interest.

New Exclusive Hero Builder Vehicles

Our Hero Builders represent the top supporters of WWII Online. This program will continue and we hope efforts like these show our gratitude for everyone helping the game, and encourages more folks to join up. These mark the first vehicles being dedicated to our Hero Builder subscribers.

Images below are historical references only. We will showcase art as it develops further.

The Puma armored Car

Armed with the KWK 39 L60, the Puma is an iconic armored car. It was an advanced design as the Sd. Kfz. 234 series was the pinnacle of German armored car engineering with eight-wheel drive/steering paired with a powerful diesel engine. The formidable 5cm main gun within a fully enclosed turret, combined with a fast driving speed, mobility, and above-average extended range, influenced Allied designs for decades following the war.

Type	Armored Car
Speed	80 km/h
Weight	10,500kg
Armament	50 mm (1.97 in) KWK 39 L60 7.92 mm (0.31 in) MG 42 coaxial

The M8 Greyhound armored Car

Armed with the 37mm high-velocity gun, the M8 Greyhound is fast, agile and capable.

A fast recon vehicle with excellent speed, a high-velocity 37mm gun for defense, and good driving characteristics.

This open-topped platform represented the best of scout car development by the United States. The Greyhound's strengths were its speed and mobility on the road and cross-country, a stealthy Hercules JXD motor, a versatile 37mm high-velocity gun, reconnaissance role with low profile, and the Open Turret offers excellent visibility for scouting targets and terrain.

Type	Armored Car
Speed	89 km/h
Armament	37 mm gun M6 1x .30 cal Browning M1919 machine gun 1x .50 cal Browning M2HB machine gun
Weight	7348kg

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WWII ONLINE: CHOKEPOINT

During 2025 Chokepoint did not make as much visible progress as we would have hoped for, but we did make a lot of progress behind the scenes in continuing to move the project from UE4 to UE5 and repair or rebuild things that broke in the process. New contributors got up to speed, and we found out a lot about the sound design and engineered/documented a new process to restore content, primarily weapons.

This year marks a continuation of restoring content that once was, with an emphasis to be laser focused on this mission and pick up the pace.

Play testers can expect to enter Carentan in Q1-2026 as we have our sights clearly set on getting that level ready to go. Eglise will follow probably Q3 (current estimate).

The center of Carentan in UE5 (remains a work in progress).

A German field base (quarters) near Carentan in UE5 (remains a work in progress).

 Priorities Area:

1. Restore map(s).

   1. Carentan

   2. Eglise

2. Restore weapons.

   1. Grenade(s)

   2. Mk2 Frag

   3. Potato Masher (M18 Frag)

   4. M24 Smoke Grenade

   5. M34 Smoke Grenade

3. Submachine Guns

   1. MP40

4. Rifles / AR's

   1. Sturmgewehr 44

   2. Kar98 Sniper

   3. Browning Automatic Rifle

   4. FG42

5. Machine Guns

   1. M1919 .30 Caliber

   2. MG34

   3. MG42

6. Restore admin panel to manage maps/game rules.

7. Restore ingame VOIP.

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FINAL NOTES

Each year represents major progress being made to enhance WWII Online. Although our team is mostly compromised of volunteers, we do outsource heavy lifting items and invest in development, hardware, software and of course keep things online (operations).

I say all this as a reminder that subscribers of WWII Online continuing their subscriptions, and upgrading them, when possible, enables our team to target crucial tasks and bigger implementations. It costs real money to do these things.

Our yearly fundraiser is coming, as usual in March 2026, so I ask you to prepare for that and support us. We completed our 2025 roadmap to 100%, this was done with only 40% funding to our fundraiser (last year) and with some of our veteran players discontinuing their subscriptions. This hurt and made the job pretty difficult... but our commitment to follow through for you was strong. The price is straining resources and a lot of extra stress on contributors. This is why I emphasize the below commentary.

Here is how you can help us continue to keep WWII Online operational and development going at a strong pace:

1. Continue logging in and playing WWII Online. Help where you can.

2. Pay your subscription 100%. (Resub/renew, make sure things are good to go).

3. Upgrade your subscription if you can. (Get rewarded as a Hero builder).

4. Actively recruit new and returning players.

5. Prepare for our fundraiser campaign in March 2026.

6. Keep the comms healthy, stay optimistic, encourage others.

The recipe is simple, but it must be acted upon. WWII Online has a strong future ahead but only with the help of its community members stepping up, as you are the literal lifeblood of the game, in all ways. Please don't read that and say, "someone else will take care of it." No, we are talking to all of you, and especially fans on the sideline "waiting" for something. Don't be that guy, your efforts matter now.

Subscribe to WWII Online (account pages).

Thanks for continuing to support the best game ever to be created and keeping the dream alive. We look forward to bringing you yet another great of WWII Online!

S! (Salute)

Matt "XOOM" Callahan

President and CEO

Playnet, Inc.