This production was originally released in video form on the 26th of November 2022, it was added to Entropic Domain in article form on the 29th of March 2025.

Background on the Game
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What happens when you combine this:

With this:

And this:

Well, I would say you get something like Day of Defeat.

Day of Defeat is a mostly forgotten class based competitive shooter from Valve aimed at producing small recreations of the tail end of the Second World War, featuring battles across Europe between the Axis and Allies.

Similarly to Counter Strike, Day of Defeat first originated as a mod project for the original Half Life back in the early 2000s, being quickly snapped up by Valve and released commercially in 2003, becoming one of the first games to release on Steam, which at the time was a brand new platform.

My playtime in the original Day of Defeat is a grand total of 0 hours, 0 minutes and 0 seconds, and as it seems to be a very inactive game nowadays, usually averaging between 50 and 100 players on any given day, this is unlikely to change anytime soon. My time with Day of Defeat instead comes from the game’s younger brother, Day of Defeat Source.

Back in the early 2000s Day of Defeat was one of Valve’s key Goldsource offerings alongside Counter Strike, Team Fortress Classic and Half Life, and 2 years after its original paid release, Valve set about remaking the game for their new Source engine.

Their original plan for Day of Defeat was very similar to the controversial treatment they gave to the original Half Life, a port from Goldsrc to the Source engine using the same visuals as the original, the beta for this version was announced in late February 2005 and offered up to small groups of testers shortly after.

But this beta, seen here, did not go down well with playtesters at all, given that Counter Strike Source had been a full visual remake of its predecessor and Half Life 2 had recently blown people away with visuals that were cutting edge for their time, fans were not impressed by Valve’s attempt to phone in a Source release twice in a row with copypasted, reused assets, this led them to hastily go back to the drawing board.

Later in the year they showcased a new version of Day of Defeat Source with all new graphics and balancing changes, releasing the game for purchase in September 2005.

Thanks to its rushed development the game was missing elements of the original Day of Defeat, including various classes (the Paratroopers, Sergeants, FG42 and MG34 units), their associated weapons and even a whole faction, the British Army. Luckily the remake still proved its worth in spite of the cut content by keeping DoD’s unique gameplay style intact and acting as a great tech demo for the Source engine.

Gameplay - Overview
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Thanks to its class based system combined with a less cartoony, more grounded aesthetic, some regard Day of Defeat as a kind of hybrid between the Team Fortress and Counter Strike franchises, and DoD: Source does share elements of both of these titles.

The game is primarily objective based with 2 modes, capture points and demolition:

In the capture point mode each map has 5 points to be secured, with 2 already held by each team at the start and a neutral point in the middle to be contested between the two sides, to win a team has to capture all 5 points on a map, which can lead to a mix of drawn out battles and rapid Blitzkriegs to victory.

The demolition mode is a simple balance of attack and defence, one team has to defend various objects around the maps, the other team has to plant charges on them and destroy them. In both of these modes it isn’t possible to win by eliminating the enemy team as there are infinite respawns, leaving the focus on the objectives.

Classes in the game also matter a lot, the 2 teams have 6 classes each: Rifleman, Assault, Support, Sniper, Machine Gunner and Rocketeer, and like Team Fortress each class has a distinct loadout.

Each class has its own primary weapon: The Rifleman has his Rifle, Assault comes with a Submachine Gun, Support has an Automatic Rifle, Sniper gets a scoped Bolt Action, Machine Gunner carries an LMG and the Rocketeer uses, you guessed it, a Rocket Launcher.

But where Day of Defeat differs from the Team Fortress games is that like Counter Strike, the arsenals the two factions have are not equal or identical. For example the Rifleman will have either a Bolt Action Kar98k or the Semi Auto M1 Garand depending on whether the player is fighting for Germany or the US, weapons that each come with their own challenges: The Bolt Action has to pause between shots to rack the bolt but the Garand can only be reloaded when all rounds have been fired.

And even when a class has a similar weapon to its counterpart on the other team, for example Support’s Auto Rifle, their weapons will not be the same: The Axis Support class has a Sturmgewehr while the Allies get the BAR, with these two weapons having their own weapon statistics such as magazine capacity. On top of this, each class and team gets a different assortment of secondary equipment, with a range of Grenades, melee weapons and Handguns between them.

Great classes for camping are the Machine Gunner and Sniper as the Machine Gunner can obliterate a mass of people and spray bullets over a larger area in a short amount of time, while Snipers are great to take out established defensive structures in the enemy team, everyone else’s job is to march forward and take territory. In most servers class limits exist, dividing the team between the campers and the chargers, having great Snipers and Machine Gunners to support the grunts can turn the tides of battle and bring a team to victory.

Unlike Team Fortress or Counter Strike, the player has no opportunity to unlock or purchase new weapons at all, meaning class loadouts are fixed; While this does make things less customisable, it also ensures that each class fits into its own niche allowing each person in a team to play their own role; However, it is possible to drop and pick up weapons, including those from other classes, a mechanic which adds some adaptability into the mix.

Gameplay - Balancing
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Day of Defeat Source is a strange game when it comes to its own specific brand of semi realism and game balancing. Many matches devolve into hour long skirmishes, death many times happens very abruptly leading to confusion and many new players get melted from the experienced soldiers on the battlefield like butter on a pan, and many times there is no timer, meaning that the match will go on, and on, and on, until one team finally manages a breakthrough and manages to hold all of the capture points.

And as to be expected with a semi realistic shooter, Day of Defeat Source also features team killing. It will happen a lot, as confusion or surprise can lead to accidental friendly fire. This adds another element to the gameplay, mainly the fact that you cannot spam grenades willy nilly or spray bullets without consideration for other players, leaning more and more into the strategic elements of this WW2 FPS.

This is a multiplayer game from the good old days, meaning that there is no ranked play, no loot boxes or other cancerous monetisation schemes and naturally, the game wasn’t designed for a competitive elite esports G-Fuel demographic of players. The never ending back and forth between the Axis and Allies together with quick respawns and every class being powerful, agile and fragile makes for a great casual experience, as the more serious players can get their fun by exploiting the mechanics to their fullest, staying alive for longer and reaching higher scores, while the not so good players like myself can be the cannon fodder, plunging themselves into the meatgrinder over and over again and having fun doing it. But hold onto your rifle for just one more second before you storm out onto the battlefield!

In any war there are suckers and chances are that in Day of Defeat you will be one most of the time. With many chokepoints, dark apartment complexes, cluttered capture points and a load of grenades happy to find their place right beneath your feet, you are guaranteed to knock on the devil’s door countless times, especially when you don’t care about self preservation at all and banzai charge your foes 90% of the time like I tend to do.

Keep in mind that one or two bullets are all that is necessary to kill you and that you might need to be more calculated in your advances, as charging into conflict head on might be a strategy that ensures defeat.

Many times it arguably is better to hunker down and defend an area of the map together with your brothers in arms as best as you can in order to squash any advancing forces while allowing the rest of the infantry to advance and gain more territory in relative safety.

Gameplay - Themes
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Thematically this gameplay balancing also leads to a surprisingly faithful rendition of Warfare. War does not care about brevity, accidental friendly fire casualties or easy victories and while a Day of Defeat match certainly can be quick, painless and fulfilling for the victors, most of the times a battle stretches on in perpetuity, especially when both teams are situated on a roughly equal skill level.

War is cruel and Day of Defeat manages to portray this cruelty in a fun and engaging manner. Soldiers are fragile, but their weapons are exceedingly lethal. Apartment complexes and the streets between them are a pain to take over as they haven’t been designed for fun deathmatches but for civilians to reside in, skirmishes in the real world have no arbitrary timers and by the way, both factions speak different languages making it more difficult for players not understanding these languages to accurately interpret voice commands on the fly. Also, as mentioned before, suckers exist in any war and the infantry charging into capture points is mostly composed of them.

I think Day of Defeat Source is a great emulation of war, but at the same time it mixes the horrors of war with plain stupid fun. While the maps created by Valve feature realistic streets in a European cityscape with a grounded assortment of sound effects, music and visual elements, in many community made servers you can almost get harassed by quirky music and sound effects and really strange mods!

Community Servers
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Thanks to the magic of the server browser and a small number of modders, there are other ways to play Day of Defeat than the stock format.

The community servers offer various non standard game modes such as gun game, realism mode and sniper only matches, and they can sometimes be coupled with mechanical alterations such as bleeding out and having to call for a medic after taking damage, and even a variety of strange and creative community maps that have their own unique designs and gimmicks included such as destructible structures, wacky map design revolving around parachuting into action and using multiple paths to reach the enemy spawn, or even secrets that may or may not harbour helpful resources to the player, maps like these are made just for fun.

And many of them are also just plain badly designed, but in my eyes this adds to the charm of the early Source game experience. Again, maps are not designed to be competitively viable but purely to just have fun in them, and while some community maps are just bad to play on, they usually still have their fun elements and those community mods do offer a completely new side to this WW2 shooter experience.

While parachuting in floating island maps or goomba stomping soldiers isn’t realistic or in any way a thematically believable rendition of warfare, it is fun. And that is what a game should be at the end of the day right?

The game’s playerbase averages at between 300 and 600 players with around 15 or so servers up at any given time, some populated and some not, nothing to boast about but enough to find a match at any given time and experience a variety of different modes. Even if one day the player numbers dwindle down to nil, Day of Defeat Source has dedicated server support as most Source Engine Multiplayer games do, meaning that while Day of Defeat may be doomed into emptiness eventually, it can always be revived for occasional LAN Parties or even online community events by keen fans.

Conclusion
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The mod support and relative ease of hosting dedicated servers for Day of Defeat Source has given the game a small but dedicated playerbase, which is the reason why it hasn’t quite finished decomposing yet, but it certainly is dead in terms of developer support, having been left untouched by Valve for 17 years now.

Given that DoD’s population is only a drop in the ocean compared to something like Counter Strike Global Offensive, and the fact that the World War Two shooter genre was essentially killed off only 2 years after the game’s release thanks to Call of Duty 4, this is unlikely to change any time soon.

However, the genre does still have its fans and thanks to this Day of Defeat has a spiritual successor of sorts in the form of Day of Infamy, a game released in 2017 by the developers of the Insurgency series, New World Interactive.

Day of Infamy has the same grounded objective based shooter gameplay that Day of Defeat once did but this is coupled with the greater emphasis on harsh realism that the Insurgency games are known for, giving it a different edge compared to its ancestor, and also an expanded variety of weapons and factions to play as.

At its peak Day of Infamy had a playerbase of over 9000 people, but ironically it now has an average player count similar to the original Day of Defeat, between around 50 and 100 daily players, Day of Defeat and its ancestors sadly haven’t managed to reach the longevity of the small but stubbornly dedicated communities of games like Counter Strike Source and Day of Defeat Source.

While Day of Defeat Source is mostly an abandoned game now, overshadowed by its successors almost 20 years on, it still proves to be accessible and enjoyable, allowing for hundreds of happy war reenactors to live out their dreams of smoking out Krauts and Yankees to this day.

While World War 2 shooters are a ton of fun, you might wanna check out Dark Messiah of Might and Magic’s multiplayer, a Source Engine multiplayer game from a much more magical variety!