How to Install Homefront and Join a Server

Most shooters of 2011 gave you a killstreak. Kill five people, a helicopter arrives, die, the counter resets to zero. Homefront gave you a bank account instead.

Every kill and every capture paid battle points into a balance you kept across deaths. You spent them from a menu on the respawn screen, before you went back out, on whatever you thought the round needed. A flak jacket. A rocket launcher. A small tracked drone with a machine gun on it for 500 points, available from the first minute you ever played. An armoured Humvee. An Apache, if the afternoon had gone very well.

Fifteen years later that is still the most interesting thing about it, and it is why the game turns up in a server directory at all. Homefront is one of the last big-budget military shooters that shipped with a dedicated server tool anyone could download, and that tool is still on Steam, free, today.

Listings for it collect on the hub. Before you get your hopes up, read the next section.

The honest state of it

Homefront is still on sale. That is worth saying first, because a lot of games in this condition are not — the store page is live, the price is a normal budget-title one, and both map packs are still listed alongside it. The Steam appid is 55100 if you want to go there directly rather than through a search box.

The population is very small. Steam's public figures put the average concurrent player count for the last month somewhere under twenty, with a daily peak in the low twenties. The in-game browser shows around eight servers, and on most evenings all of them are empty.

Its highest concurrent count on Steam was not at launch. It was December 2017 — just under seven thousand people at once — which is the month Deep Silver gave the game away free through the Humble Store for forty-eight hours. A great many people own this game and have never opened it.

What the players who remain describe is not a matchmaking problem, it is a coordination problem. The routine that works, repeated in this game's discussions for years, is to start a lobby and sit in it. People join. Somebody in one of those threads put it plainly: you will almost never see anyone in a game, but if you put the effort into starting one and waiting, people turn up, every time. Evenings, around seven or eight o'clock local, is when that happens.

Treat an empty browser as information about the hour rather than about the game.

What survived the publisher, and why

THQ published Homefront in March 2011 and filed for bankruptcy less than two years later. The console online services went off after the sale and closure. Crytek bought the franchise rights in January 2013, Koch Media took them afterwards, and a sequel eventually arrived from a different studio with a different design. Kaos Studios, who built this one, no longer exists.

That sequence normally ends a game's multiplayer outright. Homefront's survived for a mundane reason: the PC server browser rides on Steam rather than on anything the publisher was paying for.

This part is worth understanding, because it explains the data on this site. GameSpy's hosted services — the matchmaking and master-list plumbing behind hundreds of games of this era — shut down on 31 May 2014, and that date killed a long list of titles. Homefront servers still answer GameSpy-protocol queries directly, on port 27015 by default, which is how a directory reads a live server's name, map and player count with no master list involved at all. A protocol is not a service. The company that ran the service is gone; the format the servers speak has not changed.

The real casualty is progression. Ranking and stats lived on infrastructure nobody pays for any more. You can get into a match; do not expect anything you do in it to be written down.

One caution from those same community threads: read listings sceptically. Players have raised the possibility of Steam appid spoofing putting entries in the browser that are not really Homefront servers. That is a suspicion rather than a demonstrated fact and it is offered here as one, but it costs nothing to be careful, and a directly measured player count is the only number worth anything on a game this thin. Our note on what makes a server listing trustworthy covers the reasoning.

Getting in, in order

1. Buy and install it

It is on Steam and it installs like anything else there. If Steam is unfamiliar, the guide to installing Steam covers the account side and securing it.

If you played the console version and remember the Online Pass — the code that capped unpaid players at level 5 of 75 — that never applied to the PC release. PC buyers got the whole thing from the start.

2. Fix the settings before your first match

This is a 2011 game and it will not guess your monitor correctly.

Its settings live in .ini files under your Documents folder, in My Games\HOMEFRONT\GCGame\Config, which is where an Unreal Engine 3 game of this vintage puts them. Three things there are worth your attention.

Aspect ratio. The options menu handles 5:4, 4:3, 16:10 and 16:9. If your monitor is something else, the resolution has to be set as an X and a Y value in the engine configuration file by hand.

Field of view. Multiplayer has a slider in the gameplay options that runs up to 110. Use it. The campaign has no such slider, which is an inconsistency in the game rather than something you have configured wrong.

Mouse smoothing. It is on by default and it feels like 2011. The input configuration file carries entries for mouse smoothing and view acceleration under the player input section, and switching both off is the single change that most improves how this game feels in the hand.

3. Play the campaign first

Four or five hours, and it is the part that definitely still works.

The premise is a unified Korea occupying the United States, and the campaign spends its time in Colorado suburbia — basketball hoops, mailboxes, a big-box retailer — rather than anywhere that looks like a war. The scene everyone brings up is a mass grave beside a suburban road, viewed from the back of a truck. Whether the game earns that moment is a fair argument. It is undeniably something no other shooter that year attempted.

It also teaches you several of the multiplayer maps, which are drawn from the same places.

4. Find a server, or reach one that is hiding

Two routes, and you want both.

The in-game browser is the obvious one. On a game this size the entire list fits on one screen, which at least makes it quick to read.

Direct connection by address is the other, and here it is not a fallback. A Homefront dedicated server only appears in the in-game list if the machine hosting it is also running the Steam client, which is a genuine quirk of how this game was wired. A server whose host has not done that is running, playable and invisible to the browser. Direct entry of its address reaches it anyway, which means the list you can see is a floor rather than a total.

So copy addresses whole, port included, and do not assume 27015. A host running more than one server has moved the others off it, and an address missing its port fails in a way indistinguishable from the server being down.

5. Bring people

For a game with this population, arranging a match beats finding one. The dynamic is the one set out in why nobody joins your server, written from the owner's side: empty stays empty until several people decide to be early at the same time. Four people agreeing on an hour will fill a Homefront server. One person refreshing a browser will not.

What you are actually playing

Three modes shipped with it.

Ground Control is the headline and it is a rolling front line rather than a fixed set of flags. Two teams contest a pair of objectives; taking both pushes the line forward and opens the next pair deeper into enemy ground. The fight travels across the map instead of orbiting the same three points, which is what makes thirty-two players on a map this size legible rather than soup.

Team Deathmatch is team deathmatch, and on Homefront's larger maps it is where the vehicle purchases look most absurd.

Battle Commander is the strange one and it is the mode worth turning up for. An AI commander watches both sides and marks whoever is doing the most damage as a priority threat. Three kills in a row earns you a star, roughly the way a wanted level works in Grand Theft Auto — along with a buff, and along with a specific enemy player being told to come and find you. Keep killing and the rating climbs and more of them are sent after you. The bounty climbs with it, so hunting down a highly rated player pays real battle points to whoever manages it. Dying wipes your stars and your buffs, and pays the person who did it.

It turns a good round into a public liability, announced. Very few shooters have been willing to punish their best player in front of everyone, and it produces the one thing killstreaks never do: a reason for the losing team to cooperate.

The purchase menu

Battle points come from kills and from objectives, so playing the objective pays rather than being something the scoreboard quietly ignores. The balance carries across your deaths, meaning a poor round still accumulates. And you sit in front of the menu every time you respawn, under time pressure, which is where the whole design lives.

The catalogue is the interesting part:

• MQ50 Wolverine — a small ground drone with a machine gun. 500 points, and available from the first level you ever hold. This is the cheap one you buy constantly, lose constantly and do not mind losing.
• AQ-11 Buzzard — the aerial drone. 800 points, and gated behind player level 28.
• MQ-60 Rhino — the anti-tank drone, for when the other side has spent big.
• M1151 Humvee — armoured transport, and the first thing most people save for.
• Tanks, Apaches, airstrikes, rocket launchers and flak jackets, in ascending order of how well your afternoon has gone.

Two things about this get repeated wrongly. Purchases are not all open from the start — the Buzzard sits behind a player level, so a first-timer and a veteran do not have identical shopping lists, even though both are spending points earned in this match. And body armour is on the same menu as the tanks, which means the cautious player and the reckless one are both making real spending decisions rather than one of them saving up for the good stuff. Very few shooters let you buy survivability out of the same purse that buys firepower.

The drones earn the attention they get. A cheap remote vehicle sent up the street ahead of you does three jobs at once: it finds people, it makes noise somewhere you are not, and it kills whoever turns round to look at it. Losing three in as many minutes is not a mistake, it is the intended usage, and it is the only piece of expensive equipment in a shooter of this era that people used casually.

The maps

Thirteen across the base game and the two packs — Angel Island, Borderlands, Crossroads, Cul-de-sac, Farm, Green Zone, Lowlands, Overpass and Suburb, plus Big Box and Spillway from the Fire Sale pack and Alcatraz and Bridge from The Rock. Both packs are still on sale, which for a game with this ownership history is unusual enough to mention.

Farm and Crossroads are the ones people name when they talk about thirty-two-player Ground Control. Big Box is a warehouse retailer fought over among its empty shelves, and it is the map that best sells the premise the campaign spends four hours trying to make you feel.

None of this was invented here. The same battle-points economy was in Frontlines: Fuel of War, by the same studio, three years earlier. Homefront is the second attempt at that idea with a better-known setting attached.

Running one yourself

For this game that is the shortest route to actually playing, and it is easier than for most titles of the period.

The Homefront Dedicated Server is a free tool on Steam under appid 55280. It shows up in your Steam library when you filter by Tools, and SteamCMD will pull it instead if you are putting it on a machine without a desktop. You do not need to own the game to download the server.

It runs from its own executable and takes its configuration on the command line — a maximum player count, a query port that defaults to 27015, an authentication port, and a pair of RCON ports for remote administration. Map rotation and gameplay rules go into a server profile rather than onto the command line.

The non-obvious requirement is the browser visibility problem from earlier. For your server to appear in the in-game list rather than only being reachable by address, the Steam client has to be installed in its default location on that machine, signed in, and running in the background beside the server. It is a small ask and it is the difference between people finding you and not.

Steam's figures for that tool currently show roughly one machine running it at a time. Start a second and you have measurably changed this game's situation, which is not a sentence that applies to many titles. What a game server costs covers the money side of the decision.

Who this is still for

People interested in design, honestly. Battle points and Battle Commander are two good ideas the industry mostly walked away from, and half an hour with them teaches more than any amount of reading about them.

People who played it in 2011 and remember the shopping. That affection is real and it is about the economy rather than the setting.

And people who collect this specific moment: the last few years when a large military shooter shipped with a downloadable server binary as a matter of course, before the category moved to matchmaking and stayed there.

If you want the same period with a healthier population, Call of Duty 4 and Bad Company 2 are both from that window and both still have people on them. Battlefield 4 is a few years later and considerably busier. Crysis 2 is from the same year as this one and tells almost exactly the same story about a good multiplayer game outliving the arrangements that supported it.

Homefront: The Revolution is a separate open-world game by a different studio and shares nothing with this one but the name and the premise. Judge them apart.

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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. Homefront servers are listed here, and every game on the site has its own hub. Player counts across every game are on the statistics page.