How to Install Beyond the Wire and Join a Server

A trench is a corridor with a corner every few metres. You cannot see more than one bend ahead, you are carrying a rifle nearly as long as you are tall, and the man coming the other way has the same problem. That geometry is the reason Beyond the Wire cares about bayonets, and it is the reason your first serious fight in it will end with somebody swinging a shovel.

Most shooters teach you to clear a room. This one asks you to clear a trench, which is a different problem with a worse answer.

Beyond the Wire is a First World War infantry game built on Unreal Engine 4 and published by Offworld Industries, the studio behind the large-scale infantry games this site lists several of. It aimed at a hundred players on the Western Front. Listings for it collect on the game's hub.

The population, stated plainly

There is no listed population to report, and that is the first thing anybody considering this game deserves to know rather than discover after buying it.

A hundred-player game needs a hundred players. Below some threshold the whole design stops working — trenches that need thirty men to hold get held by four, artillery has nobody to fire at, and the sweeping infantry assault the game is built around becomes a small argument in a muddy field. This is not a game that shrinks gracefully into a six-person server the way a deathmatch shooter does.

Check the store page for the current state of the game before you spend anything, and check the hub for whether anything is being listed. Our notes on reading a server listing cover what to look at and what to distrust.

The rest of this is about what the game does, because it does several things nothing else does, and because a game with a scheduled community evening is a different proposition from a game with nobody in it at all.

What the period actually changes

The First World War is a difficult setting for a shooter and most developers avoid it for good reasons. There are no assault rifles. There is barely any automatic fire that an infantryman can carry. Movement across open ground was the thing that killed people, and a game that models that faithfully spends a lot of its time asking players to walk slowly and then die.

The design answer here is to lean into it rather than around it.

Rifles are slow and lethal. Bolt-action, worked by hand between shots, and a hit is generally the end of the conversation. Missing costs you the time it takes to cycle the action, which is long enough for the other man to fire.

Automatic weapons are rare and heavy. Where they exist, they belong to specific roles and they are not something you carry around a corner. A machine gun set up properly changes the map. A machine gun being carried somewhere is a man who cannot defend himself.

Melee is not a panic button. In most modern shooters the melee key is what you press when you have made a mistake. Here it is a legitimate way to fight, particularly in the trenches, and the game gives it enough weight that people go looking for it.

Gas is a mechanic. Gas arrives, you get your mask on, and the mask itself costs you vision and comfort. Fighting while wearing one is worse than fighting without one, which is the entire point and a rare instance of a game modelling a historical horror as an actual inconvenience rather than a cutscene.

Artillery decides things. Infantry that is being shelled properly does not hold ground, and the games where you are on the receiving end of accurate fire are the ones that stay with you.

Squads, and why you should not wander off

You join a squad and the squad is the unit that matters. One person leads it, and that person is talking to whoever is coordinating the wider effort.

This is not decoration. In a game at this scale a lone player achieves nothing whatsoever. There is no lone-wolf route to being useful, no scoreboard position you can climb by ignoring everyone, and no map small enough that individual initiative substitutes for a group moving together.

The practical advice for a first session is unglamorous. Join a squad. Do not lead one. Stay within sight of somebody who has played before, do what the leader says even when it seems slow, and give it two full rounds before deciding whether the game is for you. The first round of any large-scale infantry game is spent being confused about where the front is.

Getting it and getting in

The install itself is the least interesting part, which is how it should be.

It is a Steam game. Buy it, install it from your Library, and the files land under steamapps/common in a folder named for the game.Our Steam guide covers account creation and the security settings worth changing first.

Give it a proper amount of disk space and expect long initial load times. Unreal Engine 4 games of this size build shader caches on first launch, and the first start after an update takes noticeably longer than the ones after it.

Finding a server

The in-game server browser is the primary route, and on a game with a thin population it is also a browser you will spend very little time scrolling.

Where a population is this concentrated, the useful information is not in the browser at all — it is in whichever community is still organising games. A single community running one server on a Saturday evening is the entire scene, and that server sits empty for six days out of seven. Judging the game from a Wednesday afternoon refresh gives you the wrong answer twice: it looks dead when there is a game on Saturday, and it looks alive if you happen to catch the one hour a week it is full.

The hub is where listings appear if they appear. Beyond that, the guidance in how to find servers worth playing on is about exactly this problem — how to tell a scheduled community from an abandoned one.

Connecting directly

If somebody gives you an address, take the whole thing including the port. Hosts running several games on one machine move most of them off the default, and an address handed over without its port fails in a way that looks exactly like the server being offline. This is the single most common self-inflicted failure in joining any community server, on any game.

Expect a longer wait than you would give a smaller game before deciding the connection has failed. Large Unreal Engine 4 games load terrain and assets before they show you anything encouraging.

Why games like this die, and it is not the design

Beyond the Wire did not fail because trench warfare is a bad idea for a game. It failed the way large-scale multiplayer games with no single-player content fail, which is a specific and well-understood trap.

A hundred-player game has to reach a hundred players in its first months or it never does. Nobody stays on an empty server long enough to make it full, and a player who buys it, finds four people online and refunds it has made an entirely rational decision. The failure compounds on itself faster than a developer can patch.

Games in this category that survive tend to have done one of two things early. Either they had enough of an audience at launch to get over the hump, or they handed their communities the tools to run their own servers and let a small number of dedicated groups keep the lights on indefinitely. The second route is why some far older games on this site still have full listings while a much newer game does not.

That is also the reason a scheduled community event matters more here than a browser refresh. One organised group with a calendar can keep a hundred-player game genuinely alive on a hundred-player basis, once a week, for years.

Where to go instead, honestly

If what appeals is the scale and the squad structure rather than the specific war, the living options are close cousins.

Squad is the modern-combat game from the same publisher and shares the structure — squads, leaders, coordinated infantry, and a heavy penalty for doing things alone. It has the population this one does not.

Squad 44 applies that same framework to the Second World War, and is the closest thing to Beyond the Wire in feel that has people on it.

Hell Let Loose is the other large-scale Second World War game, with a different command structure and a heavier emphasis on the map-wide strategic layer.

Red Orchestra 2 and Rising Storm 2 come from an older lineage and are worth knowing for the same reason: bolt-action lethality, suppression that actually affects your aim, and no crosshair to hide behind.

For the First World War specifically, the field is small. Verdun and Tannenberg are the other serious attempts at the period and are worth looking at if the setting rather than the scale is what drew you here.

None of this makes Beyond the Wire a bad game. It makes it a game that needs a group, and if you have one — a Discord, a unit, twenty people who will show up at the same time on a Sunday — it becomes a very good one again immediately. That is a real thing communities do, and the hub is where it would show up.

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JoinGG is a live directory of community game servers. Every listing is queried directly every fifteen minutes, so the player count you see was measured rather than reported by its owner, and each one carries a copyable connect address. Beyond the Wire servers are listed here, and every game on the site has its own hub. Player counts across every game are on the statistics page.