You might have spotted a video doing the rounds in the last couple days featuring a very excited Scottish lad, taking part in a very exciting siege, inside a weirdly unfamiliar looking game. That game is Holdfast: Nations at War, a relatively unknown, historical first- and third-person shooter with a twist, and it turns out it’s an absolute treasure.
Holdfast is a shooter, but really it’s a roleplaying game first. Imagine an extra grounded, Napoleonic-era Battlefield, with servers that can handle up to a whopping 150 players, crossed with the cooperative, teamwork-heavy systems of something like Sea of Thieves, and you’ll get a bit of an idea. Matches roll swiftly from one to the next, with a good number of rotating objectives and maps – sieging and holding forts or castle ruins, pushing war-of-attrition frontlines to reach a total team score, holding out against enemy onslaughts before a timer expires, and so on.
The roleplaying, as it does in Sea of Thieves and others like it, comes in through all the little things. For a start, Holdfast’s weapons are enjoyably useless. The more standard classes, like Line Infantry, Light Infantry, Grenadiers and Guards are mostly equipped with a musket, a detachable bayonet, and your bare fists. The gunpowder-based muskets are completely terrible at anything beyond medium range, have huge bullet drop and randomised spread, and take forever to reload between each round, and the melee system, too, is wildly inaccurate, so everything has to be calculated. There’s no point taking pot-shots at distant enemies that you’d usually fancy if anyone’s even close to charging distance from you, as even if the melee is inaccurate, it’s still a one-hit kill when someone gets it right. Immediately you start to think like a “proper” infantryman, grouping and looking for some kind of strategic direction.
That, in turn, comes from its wonderfully silly, but vivid class system. Each side can have scores of basic infantry, but only five or six of the specialist officers, artillery operators, sappers, doctors and musicians. Each of those classes has some minor buffs that nudge you into playing it a certain way, so Line Infantry gain a boost to accuracy when standing in an actual line with other players, or they get buffs from kneeling, buffs from nearby musicians and flag-bearers, or even from standing exactly where an officer tells you to stand. Guards buff each other and the officers they’re guarding by staying close by, officers can issue proper commands with visual aids, use spy glasses to see further (there’s no map, so proper scouting and communication really helps), and ride the small amount of cavalry available.
Holdfast Nation: Nations at WarDeveloper: Anvil Game StudiosPublisher: Anvil Game StudiosPlatform: Played on PCAvailability: Out now on PC
If it all sounds ludicrously nerdy it’s because it really is, but the thing about nerdiness like this is it tends to come with wonderful enthusiasm and commitment attached. It’s impossible not to get sucked in, so before you know it – like that Scottish player who seems to have been born in the wrong era – you’ll have gone from cursing the hapless rifles to chanting “VIVE LA FRANCE!”, marching in perfect formation and answering “Yes, sir” to a captain whose voice chat orders sound an awful lot like they’re coming from a teenager in rural Alabama.
That, however, isn’t the half of it. Holdfast’s community really gets going in the private servers, which tie into the game’s regiments system. There’s no progression or meta-game to Holdfast – a massive boon, in my opinion – but wider meaning is gained from the regiments that are essentially roleplaying clans. Join one, like the dominant “1st King’s Royal Army” or “51st (2nd Yorkshire West Riding) Regiment of Foot”, and you’ll be encouraged – or forced – to join their respective Discord server, where you’ll find friendly veterans holding training courses, some of which compulsory, and weekly battles at set times.