Gaijin Entertainment announces that the “Line of Contact” major content update for the online military action game War Thunder will launch in late December — with infantry fighting.
Gaijin said the new update will feature closed testing for a completely new mode. This mode focuses on infantry fighting alongside modern ground and air combat vehicles in urban environments.
The mode was announced in April 2025, and its open testing is scheduled for 2026. Furthermore, “Line of Contact” will bring new maps and dozens of new vehicles, as well as other improvements and content for existing War Thunder modes.
Infantry battles will take place exclusively on new maps specially created for the new mode. Test participants will be able to fight for two in-game nations (the USA and the USSR/Russia) with pre-installed sets of modern weapons and gear, as well as ground and air vehicles. New maps, nations, and military hardware will regularly be added to the game in the future, just as in other War Thunder modes.
Infantry squads in the Closed Beta will be armed with M4A1, M16A4, M7, AK-74, AK-12, and ASM Val assault rifles; M249 Para and RPK-74M light machine guns; M110A1 SDMR and SVD-M designated marksman rifles; MAC 11 and PP-19 Bizon submachine guns; as well as hand grenades, grenade launchers, MANPADS, reconnaissance drones, and FPV drones. During the Closed Beta, infantry will be supported by M1 Abrams and T-72B tanks, M3A3 Bradley and BMP-3 fighting vehicles, and AH-64A and Mi-24V helicopters.
Gaijin will provide more information on how to access the closed beta test on the official War Thunder website.
War Thunder is a free-to-play vehicular combat MMO developed by Gaijin Entertainment, first released in 2011 in testing modes and formally launched in 2013.
The game has become one of the largest military simulation games, covering aircraft, tanks, and naval vessels from multiple eras. The company added tanks and armored vehicles back in 2014 and 2015. It added naval forces in 2016, and it expanded to modern vehicles, including jets, helicopters and advanced tanks in 2018 through 2020. It also added consoles in 2020.
To date, the free-to-play game has tens of millions of registered users, and it competes with titles like World of Tanks. It has hundreds of thousands of daily active players.