Background

A short history of the WWII shooter

By Nancy Wilson, responsible editor Published 21 September 2026

The Second World War has been the backdrop for shooters for more than thirty years, in waves: a pulp beginning, a cinematic boom, a realism counter-current, a long absence, and a return under a free-to-play business model. Knowing which wave a game belongs to explains most of its design decisions.

The pulp beginning

Wolfenstein 3D (1992) was not remotely a simulation, and it did not try to be. What it did was fix the war as a setting in which a first-person shooter could take place at all. Everything afterwards is, in part, a reaction to how unserious that starting point was.

The cinematic wave

The late 1990s and early 2000s recast the war as film. Medal of Honor (1999) and Medal of Honor: Allied Assault (2002) borrowed the vocabulary of war cinema — the beach landing, the scripted set piece, the orchestral score. Call of Duty (2003) added noise, squadmates and momentum, and Call of Duty 2 (2005) refined that formula about as far as it would go.

In multiplayer, Battlefield 1942 (2002) took a different route: big maps, vehicles, and the assumption that players would organise themselves. Its influence on later large-scale shooters is hard to overstate.

The realism counter-current

Not everyone wanted a film. Red Orchestra: Ostfront 41–45 (2006) and Red Orchestra 2: Heroes of Stalingrad (2011) pushed in the opposite direction: bullet drop, no crosshair to speak of, long stretches of nothing followed by a sudden death you never saw coming. This strand is where the modern realism-first shooters descend from.

The decade away

By the late 2000s the mainstream had moved to modern and near-future settings, and the war largely disappeared from big-budget shooters. It came back with Call of Duty: WWII (2017) and Battlefield V (2018), to a reception that was warmer for the former than the latter, and with an audience that had meanwhile grown used to live-service updates rather than finished boxed products.

The live, free-to-play era

Around 2021 two very different answers to the question of scale arrived. Hell Let Loose reached its 1.0 release with large player counts, a command structure and deliberately punishing pacing. In the same period, Enlisted entered open beta with the opposite trick: rather than filling the map with players, it gave each player a squad of AI soldiers to command, so a modestly sized match still feels like a battle.

Enlisted's own restructuring in 2024, which the developers called Reforged, folded its separate campaigns into a single progression governed by a battle rating — a move borrowed, in spirit, from the publisher's other long-running live game. That is where the setting currently sits: continuously updated, free at the point of entry, and monetised inside the client rather than at the till.

What the pattern suggests

Each wave answered the previous one's excess. Cinema answered pulp; realism answered cinema; scale answered both; and free-to-play answered a market that had stopped paying sixty euros to find out whether it liked something. Whichever game you pick, it is worth knowing which argument it was built to win.

Sources and caveats

Release years refer to the first wide release of each title and are drawn from publishers' own material and store listings; early-access and beta periods are noted where they matter. This is a selective account, not a complete catalogue — several worthwhile titles are left out for length.

• enlisted.net — official Enlisted site and news archive
• Publisher and store listings for the other titles named, for release dates and platforms

Trademark notice. All game titles, names and logos mentioned are trademarks of their respective owners. boricen.online is independent and is not affiliated with, endorsed by or sponsored by any of the publishers named, including Darkflow Software and Gaijin Entertainment.
By Nancy Wilson, 21 September 2026. Corrections: info@boricen.online.