The new War Thunder Infantry trailer and second closed beta pivot the long‑running vehicle sim toward full combined‑arms warfare, with 128‑player infantry battles designed to plug directly into the wider War Thunder ecosystem.
War Thunder has gradually evolved from a niche vehicle sim into one of the most sprawling military sandboxes in live service gaming. With the new trailer and second phase of the War Thunder Infantry closed beta, Gaijin is finally showing how far it wants to push that concept. Infantry combat is no longer a side experiment; it is being positioned as the next pillar of the War Thunder ecosystem, and the way this test is structured says a lot about the scope, scale, and audience the studio is chasing.
128 players and a shift away from bots
The headline detail from the new test is the move to 128‑player sessions. Gaijin is leaning on two flavors of Domination, including 64 vs 64 and a smaller 20 vs 20 variant, but what matters more than the numbers is a design decision that quietly rewrites the mode’s identity. The first infantry tests leaned on AI companions, with players effectively leading bot squads. In this new phase, squads are made of real people across the board.
That single change meshes with the trailer’s pacing, which emphasizes chaotic crossfires, overlapping fields of view, and rapid flanking more than the methodical, almost PvE‑like feel of the earlier iteration. Gaijin appears to be testing whether War Thunder’s traditionally deliberate pacing can survive when you drop 128 human players into a relatively compact urban battlespace. If the test holds up technically and structurally, it moves Infantry closer to the kind of human‑driven drama usually associated with classic Battlefield.
How Infantry plugs into the War Thunder machine
Gaijin is not pitching Infantry as a separate product or a throwaway mode. The new trailer leans hard on the familiar War Thunder branding, UI, and visual language, making it clear this is another surface on the same live game rather than an offshoot. That matters, because the studio is threading a needle between attracting a fresh FPS‑centric audience and not alienating the sim‑oriented players who have been grinding tanks, jets, and ships for years.
The test sits on top of the existing free‑to‑play framework. Progression, account structure, and platform support carry over, with the Linux logo even getting a cameo in the trailer as a quiet reassurance that this new layer will ride the same cross‑platform backbone as the rest of War Thunder. Gaijin’s own messaging around the beta frames infantry as part of the long‑term plan first sketched out during the Line of Contact update reveals last year: a unified battlefield where tanks, aircraft, naval units, and now infantry are different expressions of the same service.
By keeping Infantry in the same client, Gaijin can also lean on its existing audience to populate those 128‑player matches. This is crucial, because ultra‑high‑player‑count shooters live or die on concurrency. War Thunder’s established population gives Infantry a safety net smaller experimental shooters rarely enjoy.
What the closed test is really measuring
On the surface, this second closed beta phase reads like a simple content drop: new trailer, new map, more players, refined mechanics, new weapons. Underneath, the structure of the test reveals the questions Gaijin is asking about its own game.
The first is whether War Thunder can support infantry that feels responsive and lethal at close range without shredding its network layer. Sixty‑four players per side, all firing automatic weapons, throwing grenades, and bouncing between cover points, is a worst‑case scenario for lag, hit registration, and visibility. The closed test isolates that problem by focusing on Domination objectives in dense spaces that force fights to cluster.
The second question is how much tactical structure players will bring to a battlefield this large without AI padding or strict role enforcement. War Thunder’s tank and air battles reward patience, flanking routes, and positioning, and the new infantry footage suggests Gaijin wants those same values to carry over. But 128‑player shooters can easily collapse into visual noise. This test is where Gaijin finds out whether its map design and capture‑point layout are enough to shape readable front lines.
Finally, the phase is a litmus test for audience overlap. The studio already has data from the first infantry sessions, but those were partially defined by curiosity and novelty. A more focused second test with clearer rulesets should reveal how many existing players actually want to spend their time on foot rather than in a cockpit or turret, and whether there is room to court a new FPS‑first crowd who might ignore vehicles entirely.
A different kind of scale than War Thunder’s usual
War Thunder has always traded on scale, but usually in terms of hardware variety and ballistic modeling rather than raw player counts. A jet streaking across a 16 km map, or a tank shell arcing over a ridge, is a different flavor of bigness than 64 people sprinting toward the same alley.
The Infantry trailer leans into that contrast. Buildings crumble, sightlines are short, and the action is almost claustrophobic compared to the wide‑open tank fields and aerial dogfight arenas veterans are used to. The 128‑player figure is doing double duty here: it is a marketing hook meant to compete against whatever the next Battlefield becomes, and it is a technical statement that War Thunder’s engine, which spent years tuning for high‑fidelity vehicles, is now being asked to handle a very different stress test.
If Gaijin can make those numbers feel like a feature rather than a gimmick, Infantry could evolve into the rapid‑fire counterpart to the game’s more methodical vehicle modes. If not, the risk is that firefights blur into each other and the War Thunder identity gets lost in the noise.
Who Gaijin is talking to
Viewed through the lens of Gaijin’s broader strategy, this trailer and test are a pitch to at least three overlapping groups. The first is the existing War Thunder faithful, to whom Infantry is sold as a natural next step. For them, the mode promises to expand the tactical canvas they already understand, giving tank commanders and pilots a better sense of what is happening on the ground.
The second group is the lapsed Battlefield and combined‑arms shooter audience. The trailer’s editing, the 128‑player headline, and the tight city fights evoke a style of large‑scale FPS that many players feel has been underserved in recent years. By anchoring Infantry in a live game with established systems, Gaijin can argue it is offering a more stable home for that fantasy.
The third audience is platform‑agnostic F2P shooter fans. The fact that this test runs across PC, consoles, and even Linux/SteamOS is not just a tech talking point; it is how Gaijin ensures that someone booting War Thunder for the first time because of the Infantry trailer will find full lobbies and a familiar progression hook no matter where they play.
What comes next
Gaijin is not committing to a full release date yet, but the tempo of communication around Infantry has clearly accelerated. A second closed beta with higher player counts, new locations, and a very public trailer suggests the mode is moving from rough prototype toward something the studio expects to ship in front of the entire player base.
If this test proves that 128‑player Domination can be both stable and legible, the logical next steps are broader map pools, more nations, and tighter integration with traditional vehicle battles. The most ambitious version of Infantry is one where a player’s choice between spawning as a tank crew, pilot, or rifleman is just another role decision inside a single War Thunder war machine.
Right now, the new trailer and test are an experiment framed as a feature. The way Gaijin tunes and expands Infantry after this phase will determine whether it becomes a permanent pillar of War Thunder or a bold side project. What is clear from this latest look is that the studio is betting big on boots‑on‑the‑ground combat as the next stage of its decade‑old live service, and it is willing to put 128 players on the line at once to prove it.