How to Install Frontlines: Fuel of War and Join a Server

You are an infantryman with a rifle and a backpack, and in the backpack is a small remote-controlled car with a rocket bolted to it. You put it on the ground, take control of it, drive it along a gutter and under a tank that has been holding the street for four minutes, and detonate it. Then you are back in your own body, in the same doorway, having killed a vehicle without ever leaving cover.

Frontlines: Fuel of War came out in 2008 and put drones in the hands of ordinary infantry a long time before that was a normal thing for a shooter to do. It is a near-future war over the last of the oil, fought between a Western coalition and a Russian-Chinese alliance, on an engine that was cutting-edge at the time and looks its age now.

Listings for it collect on the game's hub. What that means in practice needs saying early, and this guide says it in the next section rather than at the bottom.

The state of the game

Frontlines was published by THQ, and THQ no longer exists. The studio that made it, Kaos, was closed after its next project. The game was pulled from digital storefronts, and its multiplayer depended on the kind of shared matchmaking infrastructure that games of that era and that publisher generally routed through a third party — infrastructure that was switched off in 2014, taking the server browsers of a great many titles with it on the same day.

So this is not a game you buy this evening and play tonight. Anybody telling you otherwise is selling something.

What exists instead is the same thing that exists for every abandoned shooter with a small, stubborn following: occasional community efforts to make the game reachable again, which come and go, and which are worth investigating with your eyes open. If a listing appears on the hub, our notes on reading a server listing critically are the right frame for it.

The rest of this covers what the game did, because it did two things nothing before it had done properly and both are worth knowing.

The frontline, and why it fixed conquest

Here is the design problem Frontlines set out to solve.

In a conventional capture-point shooter, every objective on the map is live at once. Both teams spread out, everyone runs past everyone else in opposite directions, and half the match is spent travelling to a flag nobody is defending. It works, it has worked for twenty-five years, and it produces a match with no shape.

Frontlines gave the map a single contested line. Only the objectives on that line are active. Take them, and the line advances — new objectives open ahead of you, the ones behind lock, and both teams' spawns move with it.

The effect is immediate. There is a front, and everybody is at it. You know where the fighting is because there is only one place it can be. Ground you take stays taken. A team that is losing gets pushed back onto its own territory and has a genuinely desperate defence to fight, rather than quietly capturing an undefended flag on the other side of the map to even the score.

It is a better structure than the one the genre settled on, and the fact that it did not catch on more widely is one of the small injustices of shooter design.

Drones, and the loadout system

The other thing Frontlines got right was making unmanned vehicles a role rather than a reward.

You did not earn a drone for a kill streak. You chose to be the person who carries drones, in the same way that another player chose to be the person who carries anti-vehicle weapons, and then you had them from the start of the match to the end.

The system worked by letting you combine specialisations rather than picking one class from a fixed list. Somebody built for ground drones brought the little remote vehicles and the equipment that supports them. Somebody built for air support brought things that fly and look down. Somebody built for anti-vehicle work carried the launchers. The combinations you chose defined what you were for on the frontline, and a team that had all of one thing and none of another lost.

What made the drones interesting was the vulnerability. While you are driving one, your actual body is standing still somewhere, defenceless, with no idea what is happening around it. Every second spent looking through a drone camera is a second spent not looking at the doorway you are standing in. That trade is the whole mechanic, and it is a far more interesting one than a killstreak reward you spend for free.

The lineage, which explains a lot

Frontlines makes more sense when you know where its developers came from.

Kaos Studios grew out of the team behind Desert Combat, the modification that turned Battlefield 1942 into a modern-warfare game and was, for a period, more played than the game it was built on. Those people went on to build Frontlines, and the fingerprints are everywhere: large maps, combined arms, vehicles that matter, infantry that has to think about vehicles.

After Frontlines they made Homefront, which took the near-future occupation premise further and was the last thing the studio shipped before THQ's collapse closed it.

If Frontlines appeals and you cannot play it, that lineage is the best guide to what to try instead. Battlefield 2 is the game Desert Combat's audience moved to and still has community servers. Bad Company 2 and Battlefield 3 carried the destruction and the vehicle balance forward.

The closest thing to the frontline mechanic itself is Enemy Territory: Quake Wars, which came out the year before and built its whole campaign structure around a line of objectives that advances in one direction. Different setting, different engine, same insight, and it has the advantage of still being reachable.

If a server does turn up

Everything below applies to any Unreal Engine 3 shooter of this generation whose official infrastructure is gone.

The in-game browser will probably show nothing. Browsers from this era ask a central list service for addresses. When that service is off, the browser is empty regardless of whether servers exist. An empty browser is evidence about the browser, not about the game.

A direct address is what works. If somebody hands you one, take the whole thing including the port. A host running several games on one machine has moved most of them off whatever the default was, and an address missing its port fails in a way that looks exactly like the server being down. This is the most common self-inflicted failure in joining any community server anywhere.

Expect to install something. Reviving a game whose matchmaking lived on somebody else's machine means replacing that matchmaking, and replacing it means a component the project distributes itself. Understand what you are installing before you install it. That is ordinary caution rather than suspicion of the people doing the work, and the people doing the work will tell you so themselves.

Patch version matters more than usual. Games of this era are unforgiving about client and server running different builds, and the error message rarely says so clearly. If a connection fails for no visible reason, version mismatch is the first thing to check.

Why games like this vanish, and which ones do not

There is a pattern here worth naming, because it explains most of the empty hubs on this site.

A game whose server list is a convenience survives its publisher. A game whose server list is a dependency does not. Titles from the 1990s and early 2000s shipped with a console that accepts an address and a server binary anybody could run, so when the master server went dark the community lost a directory and kept the game. Titles from the late 2000s onward increasingly assumed a central service would always be there, and when it was not, the game stopped working in a way no patch from a player could fix.

Frontlines landed on the wrong side of that line by a couple of years. So did a great many other competent shooters from 2008 to 2012, which is why this site's healthiest listings skew so strangely old.

It is also why the survivors survived. A twenty-five-year-old Half-Life mod has more running servers today than most games released in the last five years, entirely because Valve handed out the server software and never took it back.

Where to go from here

If the drone mechanic is what caught your attention, nothing has done it quite the same way since, and that is an honest answer rather than a dodge. The nearest experiences are games where remote vehicles are a role rather than a reward, and they are thin on the ground.

If it is the moving frontline, Enemy Territory: Quake Wars is the direct comparison and the one to try first.

If it is the scale and the combined arms, the Battlefield hubs are where that audience actually lives now — Battlefield 2 for the community server culture, Battlefield 4 for the largest surviving population of the modern ones.

And if you want to know why a game with servers stays alive while a better game with none does not, why nobody joins your server is written from the owner's side of that question, and how to find servers worth playing on from the player's.

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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. Frontlines: Fuel of War servers are listed here, and every game on the site has its own hub. Player counts across every game are on the statistics page.