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.