FOXHOLE players battle the odds and build a religion around a corpse pile
Foxhole is a sandboxstyle war MMO that has been available in Early Access since 2017. The schtick is one persistent and gigantic war game where thousands of players battle for one of two factions, but with the twist that the logistics, resource and supply side of the armies is just as important as firing guns and piloting vehicles.
Like many of the best social games great stories happen as a matter of course, and a recent example was a 48-hour long battle between an isolated island called Silver, cut-off from all logistics support and supplies, facing down an endless invasion force. Foxhole’s two factions are the Colonials and the Wardens, and in this case the Colonials held Silver island, part of a larger area called The Oarbreakers Isles.
FACING SUPERIOR NUMBERS FROM AN ARMY THAT COULD RESUPPLY ITSELF
The Colonials were doublescrewed: they were facing superior numbers from an army that could resupply itself, while being cut off from their own supply lines. Silver island had a few silver linings, however: a natural choke point, some basic defences, and four field hospitals that can turn critically wounded soldiers into “shirts”, basically respawn tickets. Attackers that landed on the beach quickly ran into withering blindfire from the defenders and “the sandcastle”: a winding, interconnected mess of sandbags and barbed wire.
THE PILE
Then the defenders, who had no medical supplies to treat their wounded, began to worship “the pile”. The pile lay outside those hospitals. The Colonial strategy was that all wounded soldiers were to be fatally wounded, in the hope they would become “critically wounded soldiers” to be added to the pile. Field hospitals would turn some of these wounded soldiers into a trickle of respawns.
