WW1 shooter Verdun gets new map, mode and weapons in free update

WW1 shooter Verdun has added a 64-player mode, a new map, new weapons, and a new squad of soldiers to control in its latest free update.

The new squad are the Tirailleurs Sénégalese, troops recruited to fight for France from French West Africa. They carry Mle 1907 rifles, OF1 and petard grenades, and machetes.

The new mode is the same as the existing Frontlines, which tasks you with capturing enemy trenches and controlling your own, but with more players. To facilitate larger-scale battles, Developers M2H and Blackmill Games have tweaked the maps, adjusted call-in cooldowns, and reduced the number of grenades. Bots will fill any vacant spaces in the 64-player teams.

The new map is the wooded St. Mihiel Salient, located in France near the German border. It was the site of the first major American offensive of the war, and the only offensive made solely by American infantry. In-game, American and German troops will battle in a mix of forest, trenches and sandbagged positions, and you'll also see the Croix-des-Carmes wooden cross in the centre of the map, which swapped hands many times during the war.

The free update also adds an oft-requested map voting system at the end of each match, as well as a spawn map for each game mode that lets you better choose where to deploy. The full list of changes can be found here.

Samuel is a freelance journalist and editor who first wrote for PC Gamer nearly a decade ago. Since then he's had stints as a VR specialist, mouse reviewer, and previewer of promising indie games, and is now regularly writing about Fortnite. What he loves most is longer form, interview-led reporting, whether that's Ken Levine on the one phone call that saved his studio, Tim Schafer on a milkman joke that inspired Psychonauts' best level, or historians on what Anno 1800 gets wrong about colonialism. He's based in London.