Fans of Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory have maintained custom servers for the game since its initial 2003 launch, but many use mods, custom maps, and other special gameplay conditions. While id Software fully supports fan efforts, they also want to offer gamers a way to play Enemy Territory as Splash Damage designed it.
The World War II-themed multiplayer first-person shooter remains popular after 19 years, evidenced by Bethesda’s continuing support of the game. This week, id Software announced it has opened official dedicated servers for Splash Damage’s classic freeware shooter, ensuring fans will always have somewhere to enjoy matches under vanilla settings.
There are four official servers: a US server in Texas, a European server in the Netherlands, an Australian server in Canberra, and a UK server in London. All run Enemy Territory’s “Campaign” game mode with 8v8 matches (as opposed to the game’s 16v16 maximum) in all six of the original maps. Friendly Fire and Anti-Lag are enabled, while Punkbuster, Max Lives, and Weapon Restriction are off.
For those unfamiliar, Enemy Territory is an objective-based first-person shooter where players control either the Axis or Allies on maps based on real World War II battle locations. Players can pick from classes including Engineer, Medic, Soldier, Field Ops, and Covert Ops.
Splash Damage originally planned the game as a multiplayer expansion for the 2001 title Return to Castle Wolfenstein (which recently arrived on the Microsoft Store and Game Pass). However, problems during development forced the company to spin it off into a standalone title. Due to the game’s warm reception and support for custom dedicated servers, players continue to enjoy it almost 20 years later.
Bethesda and Microsoft expanded their support of Enemy Territory earlier this year by making it easily downloadable on Steam and the Microsoft Store following Microsoft’s acquisition of Bethesda and the shut down of Bethesda’s PC game client. The game has also been freely downloadable from places like Splash Damage’s website and TechSpot Downloads for a while. Players can access the official servers no matter where they grab Enemy Territory from.
In recent years, id and Bethesda have refreshed and maintained several of their old-school shooters, including multiple Doom titles and the original Quake.
