Report from the Operation Overhaul's playtest
12/29/2025, 2:11:20 PM
by Devamors
After months of waiting, BattleBit Remastered finally opened the gates to its long‑awaited major update — if only for a moment. On November 29th, 2025, players were invited to a four-hour-long playtest that offered the first glimpse into the game’s next era. The session delivered plenty to unpack — and even more to look forward to. Let’s dive into what the developers revealed, what players discovered, and what will come out of those playtests.
Long-awaited playtests
After a year and a half of working behind the scenes, in mid-October 2025, the team announced that they were ready to present the changes to the players and that the playtests would take place over a month later, following some polishing. My personal guess for a reason of annoucing tests a month earlier is to allow players to plan their game time ahead, as well as to handle the Unity game engine update required by the vulnerability that was found inside it. The mentioned vulnerability caused many companies additional work and, in some cases, even to withdraw games from stores (e.g. Obsidian Entertainment games). Those willing to participate could access the tests using the beta branch of BBR directly on Steam. They have also highlighted that these are tests, so the players should expect to see bugs and possibly performance issues and are eager to hear our feedback. Also, to interest more people and build some hype, Julgers has shared some screenshots from their then-current build.
The announcement of the playtests was well received, although not entirely enthusiastic. Still, the players were glad to hear some specifics finally.
So, how did it ultimately go?
First glimpse of the Operation Overhaul
The first success of the playtest was the number of gamers it attracted. According to SteamDB, around 6440 players have run BattleBit Remastered on the 29th of November. It's around 10 times more than the game has daily. It shows that despite not playing, a lot of people are still interested in the game and follow its development. As mentioned at the beginning, the playtests took place for 4 hours. During this time, the players had plenty of things to see, check and test, as quoting Julgers on the Discord server:
The update includes a ton of changes to gameplay, levels, UI, QOL, balancing, graphics, and many other areas.
From the players' reports, the game is generally looking far better now. New effects, shooting and targeting, lighting and sound improvements are among the things that are praised. However, there are also some who claim that some textures are noticeably worse than others. Unfortunately, it's hard to say how much new visuals are impacting the performance due to a possible memory leak. Testers were reporting that the game performance was dropping over time, which would suggest one such. Some say that new effects particles are staying in the air, which can lead to an out-of-memory situation. But these are the kind of things that we can expect to be rid of quite soon. Refreshed UI also gets praised in general, but again, some particular elements are listed as needing adjustment.
Another thing that we can expect to be adjusted before the next playtest is TTK (time to kill). There were plenty of reports that it's too long, and bringing down the enemy is very difficult because of that. Similarly, people are complaining that during the night, the game is too bright, which breaks the immersion and takes away the necessity of using the night vision.
People seem to be moderately optimistic about what they experienced, but disappointed with the performance issues that mostly took all the fun out. There is still a lot of sympathy and enthusiasm towards the game, but also a lot of sorrow regarding communication and transparency and a long wait.
What's next?
As Julgers wrote in his original message, that was merely the first of a few playtests that the team want to run, so in the following weeks we can expect more to come. Game creators received plenty of feedback and data to analyse and things to work on. It's also confirmed that performance issues will be dealt with first and that performance will be the main focus of the upcoming tests. Only after those are solved Oki and company will focus on gameplay.
Let's keep our fingers crossed and hope for the best.
The first thing I spotted when I stopped the video was the refreshed UI. Seems like there is a new font being used, which, in my opinion, looks better than the current one. I find it more suiting to the game, looking less generic. New icons can be seen, e.g. the ones resembling the weapons magazines, which now actually look like ones. Icons symbolising keyboard keys lost their fill and became more transparent.
In the next frame, we can see the player shooting down the enemy soldier using his rifle scope. Kill info previously had a blurred frame around, but now it is more visible, causing the text to be more readable. It may be only my imagination, but I think the trees may also be more detailed now.
Here we can see a perspective of the helicopter's pilot. It seems like the compass lost its labels, and it wasn't present on the previous screenshots at all. There is also a representation of the heli, showing seats, and it is even animated when shooting. We can also take a look at the refreshed score section. I wonder what this green-whiteish square is in the 2/3 of the screen.
Next, we see some shooting scenes. We can see the player rushing through the doors, bullets flying everywhere. Graphics seem to look better in general, skyboxes are gorgeous, and sounds could also have been adjusted. In the screenshot above, we can see the perspective of a driver. Here, the image representing the vehicle is also seen, and it is rotating as it moves.
In the last screenshot, we can see a player dragging his fellow companion. A small icon of a hand can be seen on the latter.
On the 26th of November, Vilaskis, a level designer on the BattleBit team, gave us some updates on his work. In a bunch of messages on the official Discord server of the game, he has presented progress on the rework of two existing maps - Valley and Sandy Sunset.
The reworked layout splits the map into two main lanes, with three objectives each:
The mentioned safe zones were moved further away from the objectives and the terrain was adjusted. It introduces more forests to provide some cover, yet snipers will have to expose themselves to gain visibility and a chance to shoot.
Similar to the Valley, Sandy Sunset also received one additional objective. Same as there, it shortens the time to get back in the action and the way players need to cover to do so. This change along with more buildings in the city creates more possibilities for strategic play. Particular objectives were changed as well, so let's go through them:
What comes out if you mix minecraftish graphics with Battlefields gameplay and scale? That's BattleBit Remastered. This online shooter involves almost anything the big war series would have, even more in some cases. A lot of weapons? Check. Enormous battlefields? Check. Infantry? Check. Land, water and air vehicles? Check. When talking about the latter, BattleBit lacks only jets compared to Battlefield, but I guess that for some - like myself - it's not a huge disadvantage. Let's focus on those things one by one.
Last but not least, the Recon class. This one's role is to take enemies from afar using sniper rifles and, as the name suggests, to do reconnaissance. For that, Recon can use a drone to find enemies and where they are going.
Besides weapons, there are other stuff like grenades, mines, hammers, and binoculars. There is even a drone and a lure device that imitates the glint of a sniper rifle. Uniforms can also be customized, to either blend with the environment or the opposite - to stand out. Players unlock weapons and other equipment by gaining levels and getting kills with particular weapons.
Another argument is the requirements. BattleBit has them really low, so you will be able to play it on older devices, even ones with integrated graphics, with stable FPS. New installments of AAA series like Battlefield or Call of Duty of course have better graphics but this is also what limits those games.
Answering the question asked in the title, I think yes, it is worth playing BattleBit Remastered in 2024. The game has been already out for some time, it has its player base and community. Its scale is unique, seeing so many players at once fighting, hearing their shouts and cries is an amazing experience. The game is still in development, so there is more to come and it already feels like a complete product. Because it is playable on less performant devices, it is also open to more people. Moreover, what I think is most important, BattleBit is simply a good and fun game. 15$ ain't much for a game that one can spend hundreds of hours in.
Can't quite leave your block-based gaming past behind you? Do you turn down the graphics options in your military shooters so low that they tend to look like a long-forgotten '90s gem anyway? Whether you're itching to break your ties to the yearly military shooter or want to throw down with hundreds of players without throwing down a chunk of your monthly rent, an incoming update to Battlebit Remastered, one of the 
Read the full article here: https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2025/10/battlebit-remastered-is-surprisingly-alive-a-huge-operation-overhaul-update-test-arrives-in-november/
Rewind to June 2023, and it looked like Battlebit was going to transform multiplayer FPS games. It had huge maps, destruction physics, and 254-player lobbies. It was also cheap, quick to download, and easy to run on even middling machines - if Call of Duty, Battlefield, EFT, and the other shooter titans were bloated and prohibitively pricey, Battlebit was proof that action and accessibility mattered more than gauche production value. At its peak, it achieved a concurrent player record of over 87,000. But then Battlebit tailed off. And then it went quiet. Then silent. Two years after it was released, Battlebit's player count was way down, its recent Steam reviews were mostly negative, and developer SgtOkiDoki was AWOL. But now everything has changed. A big new Battlebit update is happening.
Call of Duty, Battlefield, and Counter-Strike 2 are fantastic online shooters in their own right, but naturally, you need a pretty solid gaming PC to get them running at top spec. The makers of BattleBit saw a niche and jumped right in - 254 players, destructible maps, but with a visual style that means anyone can join the fun, regardless of their hardware budget. One of the breakout hits of 2023, and proof that talented independent developers can find success in even the most triple-A dominated genres, if you haven't tried BattleBit yet, it's got a 9/10 rating from players on Steam, and it's suddenly gone free to play - at least for a short while.