With the addition of new fighter planes all three factions in the game now have two Medium Fighter planes besides a Reconnaissance airplane and a Heavy Fighter. Bringing the total number of planes to 12 – and more are coming.

The three new planes in the ‘Planes & Ladders’-update are:

• The Soviet Medium Fighter Mikoyan-Gurevich MiG-3
• The German Medium Fighter Messerschmitt Bf 109D-1
• The US Medium Fighter Seversky P-35A

The new planes are placed as the first Medium Fighters players unlock after Reconnaissance planes. They are easier to control, easing the learning curve for new pilots on their path toward higher tier planes.

Introducing leaderboards in Heroes & Generals

Players in Heroes & Generals now get to compare their performance with other players across a wide variety of activities and achievements. More than 30 new leaderboards cover not only classic stats like kills, headshots, etc, but also stats for support roles, tactical actions and how good the Generals are at commanding their troops in the war.

The leaderboard categories are:

• OVERALL – ranking soldiers based on score, kills, headshots, etc.
• SUPPORT – ranking by support activities such as first aid, deploying vehicles, etc.
• TACTICAL – ranking soldiers based on their tactical performance.
• WEAPONS – ranking soldiers by weapon usage.
• VEHICLES – ranking soldiers based on their destruction of enemy vehicles.
• ASSAULT TEAMS – ranking assault team performance and activity in the war.

The leaderboards can be found at www.heroesandgenerals.com/leaderboard/ and they all show player performances from the last 30 days. So to stay on top, you will need to play regularly.

“We’re really excited about giving the players another layer of engagement for Heroes & Generals with the new leaderboards. I’m especially glad that we, besides the usual boards with kills, etc, also give credit to support roles and other aspects of the game.” says Jacob Andersen, Game Director at Reto-Moto: “It is a team effort and eventually we would like to expand the leaderboards to cover enough aspects of the game for every player to find a board where he ranks high on or even for players to set up their own leaderboards using an open API.”

Future updates for Heroes & Generals will provide even more more leaderboard categories.

The full changelog for the 1.08 Update ‘Planes & Ladders’ can be found HERE.

Heroes & Generals is available for free at HeroesAndGenerals.com.

More than 60 different weapons can put an end to your life as a soldier in WW2 MMOFPS Heroes & Generals. However, with the just released ‘Medic!’-update and the new First Aid Kits you can now treat a wounded teammate or heal yourself in battle.

“Soldiers who know how to effectively utilize a First Aid Kit on the frontline will provide a major tactical advantage to their teams,” says Jacob Andersen, Game Director at Reto-Moto: “First Aid Kits have been one of the most requested features among the community, and we are happy to finally have them in Heroes & Generals.”

With the ‘Medic!’-update all soldiers in Heroes & Generals have the option of equipping either the standard First Aid Kit or the larger Medic Pouch. By doing so, players can now support their friends in combat in addition to “just” shoot at the enemy – they can even, if they so desire, equip their soldiers with multiple Medic Pouches and minimal weaponry to create in effect their own field medic class.

The First Aid Kit and Medic Pouch are available for all factions and for all soldier types in Heroes & Generals today.

Along with the new update Heroes & Generals also offers players a Veteran Year Bundle available in the ingame store for a limited time only.

The full changelog for the Update 1.05 ‘Medic!’ can be found here.

Heroes & Generals is available for free at HeroesAndGenerals.com.

Performance is key when making a difference in World War 2 as portrayed in the MMOFPS Heroes & Generals. This is something the game developers at Reto-Moto are acutely aware of and one of the major reasons for introducing a new render engine for the game.

“Our community has been very active and helpful in testing the new render on our prototype servers. We have seen a 20 percent framerate improvement on average, and 70 percent of the players that took part in latest test of the new render reported either a better or much better performance,” says Henning Semler, Lead Render Programmer and co-founder of Reto-Moto.

Heroes & Generals is running on its own proprietary technology called Retox. The ‘Engine Room’-update is the result of a complete rewrite of the render engine optimizing it for a modern dataflow by using advanced multi-threading techniques so it better utilizes multiple CPU-cores, improving game performance.

Another reason that Heroes & Generals is seeing a general boost in performance is the decision to end support for DirectX 9 based graphics cards as the old technology in part served as a hindrance to game performance.

Heroes & Generals now supports mixed resolution rendering making it possible for players to keep the user interface at a higher resolution while playing with low resolution gameplay setting to further increase performance on low spec computers.

In addition to the improvements in performance, the ‘Engine Room’-update also introduces a new tone mapping system providing crisper and more saturated colors in the game. As well as Temporal Anti-Aliasing giving players a more stable image with less pixel flicker when in motion.

As part of the ‘Engine Room’-update players also have been given the option to try out a new DirectX 12 experimental setting.

Heroes & Generals is now translated into Brazilian Portuguese bringing the total number of language options for the game to nine.

The full changelog for the ‘Engine Room’-update can be found here.

Heroes & Generals is available for free at HeroesAndGenerals.com.