Six Days in Fallujah is launching on Steam today, exactly 20 years after the Second Battle of Fallujah. Victura bills the game as the “world’s first documentary video game.”

The Seattle-based team has been very deliberate about sticking to the history of the war that serves as the basis for the first-person shooter game, which was canceled its first time around because the memories of the Iraq War were too fresh.

The studio launched the early access on Steam for the game in June 2023 in a more limited form, and this update features its Command and Control features that highlight the historically accurate gameplay.

This update includes Six Days in Fallujah’s first documentary story missions, taking players inside the beginning of ISIS and the bloodiest encounter for Western forces in nearly half a century. During these missions, players participate in recreations of actual events alongside documentary footage and interviews with Iraqis and Americans who were present during the Second Battle of Fallujah in November 2004.

Additionally, the Command and Control update now includes a solo mode in which players command AI fireteams programmed with authentic military tactics. Harkening back to the original Rainbow Six, Ghost Recon, Brothers in Arms, SOCOM, and other classic “squad-based shooters,” players use sophisticated military maneuvers to overcome simulated real-world events from the battle.

After the early access launch, Six Days in Fallujah became the world’s No. 1 best-selling PC game and remained a Top-10 seller throughout the next week. Conceived by Sgt. Eddie Garcia, a Marine who was wounded during the battle, Six Days in Fallujah was created in collaboration with more than 100 U.S. Marines and soldiers as well as more than two dozen Iraqi civilians and soldiers.

One of the most consequential events of the past half-century, the Second Battle of Fallujah began on November 7, 2004, after Al Qaeda in Iraq seized control of the city of Fallujah. Six months after losing the city, Iraq’s prime minister ordered a military operation in which Iraqi soldiers fought alongside American and British forces to retake the city.

The battle became the bloodiest for Western forces since 1968, re-shaped military doctrine and Western policy, and established a multi-decade alliance between Western and Iraqi forces. In 2006, the Al Qaeda forces who survived the battle renamed their group ISIS, and by 2014 seized more than 40,000 square miles of territory across the Middle East.

“What happened in Fallujah throughout 2004 set the world down a path from which we have not yet returned,” said Victura CEO Peter Tamte, in a statement. “As a documentary video game, Six Days in Fallujah deepens our understanding of the realities of war by combining the most accurate simulation of warfare to date with the words and experiences of the Iraqis and Americans who were there.”

New features

First Documentary Story Missions: The first two single-player story campaign missions available in the Command and Control update draw players into the genesis of ISIS and the opening day of the Second Battle of Fallujah. These missions also act as a tutorial for solo players to learn the tactics and controls for leading three NPC teammates using the newly implemented Fireteam AI system.

Advanced Fireteam AI System: Six Days in Fallujah now gives players command of an AI fireteam to deploy sophisticated tactics such as Fire and Maneuver, Ambushes, Breaching, and 360-degree Security. The innovative “Go! Command” makes it as easy to give orders as it is to fire weapons. One tap commands teams to suppress enemies, watch targets, breach fortifications, or follow in formation.

AI Teammates: Just like actual combat, completing missions successfully requires a full fireteam of four people and effective use of tactics. Now, in addition to controlling AI fireteams in the new single-player mode, players can also substitute AI teammates online whenever all four humans aren’t available.

New “HLZ Wolf” Procedural Mission: In addition to two new single-player story campaign missions, this update includes the new “HLZ Wolf” Procedural Mission. All eight procedural missions can now be played solo with Fireteam AI cooperatively with four players or with fewer than four players with the game filling any missing slots with AI teammates.

Graphical Overhaul: Six Days in Fallujah now features ray-traced lighting and many new visual effects through Nvidia’s RTX Global Illumination (RTXGI) technology, building upon the game’s industry-leading Global Dynamic Lighting and Procedural Architecture technologies, which dynamically simulate real weather and lighting effects. Additionally, most of the game’s characters, environments, vehicles, and effects have been improved for higher visual fidelity.

Additional Improvements: More than 300 technical enhancements, improving everything from game performance to the effectiveness of enemy AI to the smoothness of interactions and controls.

The core features of the game include a procedural architecture. The Marines never knew what was waiting behind the next door, and this fear of the unknown became a central, all-consuming part of combat. Every time players start a mission, entire buildings change shape inside and out,​ enemies take up new positions, and unique threats emerge.

The game also has four-player co-op play. Players can invite up to three friends or matchmake online to play cooperative missions against AI enemies programmed with the same tactics that made the Battle of Fallujah among the most difficult of the past half-century.

And players can customize parameters for procedural missions, creating a wide variety of unpredictable challenges. Customizable parameters include Time of Day, Weather, Enemy Difficulty, and Procedural Architecture variation.

Six Days in Fallujah is available for purchase for Windows PC in Early Access via the Steam store for $40. To celebrate the release of the Command and Control update, the game is on sale for $30 through November 17, 2024.

Future Steam Early Access updates will add more content and features to the game before Six Days in Fallujah’s full release on PC, PlayStation, and Xbox consoles in late 2025.

Victura creates action games that let players participate in true stories that changed history. The company is led by Peter Tamte, who helped lead Bungie as executive vice-president during the development and introduction of Halo.

Highwire Games is Victura’s internal development studio. Highwire was co-founded by Jaime Griesemer, who was lead designer of the original Halo, Destiny, and Infamous: Second Son games. Highwire is based in Seattle with more than 80 team members located across the world. I spoke with Tamte in an interview.

Here’s an edited transcript of our interview.

Interview with Peter Tamte

GamesBeat: What’s been transpiring for you?

Peter Tamte: I think we last talked about the game three years ago. Since then we released the first 10% of the game into early access in June of 2023. It immediately became the number one seller globally on Steam. It stayed in the top 10 in the U.S. for a while. It might have stayed in the top 10 globally for a week. It did very well.

We’ve released some more content since then, but we’ll release our big new update on November 7, which is the 20th anniversary of the battle. This update is going to include the first two story missions from the game. This is the first time we really get to express what we mean by a documentary video game. I’ll talk about that in more detail in just a minute. But the other piece in this update is the number one most requested feature for the game, which is that you’ll be able to lead an AI fireteam.

You and I are both old enough to remember the days of squad-based shooters, back to Rainbow Six and Ghost Recon, Brothers in Arms, SOCOM. At a point in the industry’s history, those squad-based shooters were a big deal. Folks found out that making games with fireteam AI is very difficult, though. It’s a lot more difficult than making PVP games. You saw the industry move away from the investment that needed to be made in AI fireteams toward PVP. In the last 15 years there’s only been one other game that’s released with fireteam AI that I’m aware of, which was Ready or Not. That sold 5 million units, and only on PC Clearly there’s a community that wants squad-based shooters to come back. That’s the second big feature that we’re going to include in our update on November 7.

GamesBeat: Can you describe that gameplay in more detail? Are you directing the AI characters yourself, like you would in something like Full Spectrum Warrior?

Tamte: Right. One thing that we learned from these Marines is that if you can complete a mission solo, that mission is almost certainly fake. You need teamwork to overcome these challenges. The odds favor the defender. You need a team. In Six Days, until now, the only way you could play as a team would be with other humans. But not everyone wants to play cooperatively online. Some people want to play solo.

We put you in the role of fireteam leader, who’s able to issue orders to AI teammates. They then follow those orders. This allows you to deploy sophisticated military tactics as a fireteam. For example, if you go back to a game like Brothers in Arms, that gave you the ability to use the most basic tactics of fire and maneuver. It’s the idea that you order part of the team to suppress an enemy, to pin them down, which allows the other element within your team to maneuver and flank that enemy to eliminate them.

You can order your team to stack on a doorway. You flood firepower into that room as quickly as possible, which gives you a better chance of overcoming enemies that have prepared for your entry. You might also order your team to watch a particular vulnerability, for instance a door or a window, while you maneuver somewhere else in a room or cover a different threat. Being able to do all of this through an AI fireteam allows you to deploy authentic military tactics as a solo player.

GamesBeat: It feels a lot of that challenge is making the AI sophisticated enough to be useful.

Tamte: Exactly. That’s very difficult. It’s taken us about six years to build our technology suite at this point. To be frank, we didn’t think it was going to take us six years. But we have it now. You’ll recall that the other big technical feature in our game is that we have replaced the static environments of other games with procedurally generated architecture. The inside and outside of buildings changes every time you play the game.

We’ve done that because Marines expressed to us that this fear of the unknown was central to their experience. They never knew what was on the other side of the door. That creates a psychological barrier for players, as well as these tactical challenges. But of course that’s the opposite of the way we play video games, because we play the same maps over and over again. There is no unknown. We’ve walked through that door 50 times. In Six Days we built a procedural architecture system that allows us to change the shape of the buildings every time you play, so you never know what to expect. Combining that procedural architecture with an AI fireteam, that’s the reason it took us six years to get to where we are.

GamesBeat: Some of the older games in this style let you have an overhead view of the level where you could position people in advance, and then they’d proceed into action. It was almost turn-based in a way. Here I imagine you want to preserve some fog for the player.

Tamte: That’s correct. Unlike Full Spectrum Warrior, in which you never really fired a weapon, in Six Days you’re the fireteam leader. It’s a first-person shooter in which you give orders to three other teammates. First, you can’t really do what you did in Full Spectrum Warrior, which was zoom up and get that bigger perspective on the battlefield. You’re on the ground. But second, because of procedural architecture, going through the door you don’t know. It’s different from what happened last time. Doors and windows are in different places. Enemies are in different places.

GamesBeat: Do you have something like an episodic game, effectively, that’s emerging here?

Tamte: In some ways. I’d put it like this. We went into early access in June of 2023. This next big update will only include the first two story missions and one more cooperative mission. In that way it is kind of episodic.

GamesBeat: Did you plan on this, or did you sort of pivot into it?

Tamte: The cost of making a game with procedural architecture and fireteam AI brought us to a point where we needed–we’re really in early access for two reasons. One is because making a major game now is an enormous investment. Players can help us with that. But then the second is it allows us to get feedback from literally hundreds of thousands of players to make the game better.

GamesBeat: How much will this cost for the consumer?

Tamte: In early access the game is priced at $39.99. Sometimes it’s on sale for less than that, but the normal price is $39.99. When we’ll go into full release on console and PC the price will go up.

GamesBeat: Which two story missions did you choose to focus on for this release?

Tamte: We’ve been thinking a lot about that. What we needed to do, most of all, is to give players the historical context of why they’re in the city. Second, we needed to give players who are used to playing more artificial military games a better idea of how to be successful with real military tactics.

The first two missions include the events that led to the battle of Fallujah, and then the first hour or so of the battle. It’s called the second battle of Fallujah officially. You get some of the historical context. We incorporate training into those missions so that you can learn these basic military tactics – about 360-degree security, about fire and maneuver, about breaching. You learn these things during the first few hours of gameplay. That will then allow you to be more successful throughout the rest of the experience.

GamesBeat: What can people expect after this? Will there be more installments in early access?

Tamte: We’ll probably release one more update between this update and our full release of the whole game. That full release we expect–right now it looks like it’ll be in the latter part of 2025. We’ll probably have one more big content release between now and then.

GamesBeat: What have you been learning from the feedback in early access? Have things changed that are reflected in the update?

Tamte: When you count all the smaller things, it’s in the hundreds of changes we made to the game based on feedback. The bigger things–it’s about balancing difficulty. We’ve changed the orientation of the weapon. It’s interesting, because if you look at the thousands of comments we’ve gotten from players, either through our tech support lines or the community forums, about a third of them were specifically about getting the ability to play with fireteam AI. It might even be half. The second most popular response was just “more content.” But then you go into the smaller things, like about which places you might get mortared. Literally hundreds of changes from update to update.

GamesBeat: How hard is it to create smart AI for this purpose? What level of intelligence did you decide on?

Tamte: Across my 30-plus years in the video game business, I’d say the two biggest technical challenges I’ve experienced are procedural architecture and fireteam AI. The trick with fireteam AI is it’s actually–we had the basic fireteam AI working even three years ago. The challenge is the edge cases. It’s death by a thousand cuts. There are so many things you have to accommodate, and the only way you can do that is watching different people with different play styles experience the game. You look for the patterns and try to address those issues systemically as best you can. But the reality is, only a certain amount of that can be addressed systemically. A lot of it is one-off challenges. That’s why I would describe fireteam AI as probably the second-biggest technical challenge I’ve experienced.

GamesBeat: It’s interesting to look at this as we’re on the cusp of so many advances in AI.

Tamte: As AI capabilities become more popularized culturally, we’re finding that a lot of the techniques they’re using to accomplish these really brilliant AI advances depend on massive server farms. For us, of course, we have to make all these calculations for fireteam AI in 16 milliseconds. In order to render at 60 frames per second, we have to handle all of our insurgent AI and all of our fireteam AI, make all of their choices in 16 milliseconds. That’s with 30 or 40 AI characters in the game world.

It’s really hard, harder than we thought it would be, to be frank. I’m relieved that it actually works. The truth is, though, even once you get it to a certain point–we’ll put it out in the wild, and with hundreds of thousands of people playing it, they’re going to discover things that we didn’t.

GamesBeat: The missions you’re releasing, are they the kind where you’re going into houses, stacked up on the doors, or surrounding them from outside?

Tamte: It’s both. That’s an important distinction. Traditionally, military shooters have either been outdoor games or indoor games. The battle of Fallujah was both. Players have to navigate through alleys and streets, wide-open streets, very narrow alleys. They have to deal with this challenge of going indoors and outdoors. You go from these bright outdoors, which have big open spaces, to very claustrophobic indoor spaces that are very dark. You go between those constantly. About half of the game is outdoors and half is indoors.

GamesBeat: How much of the documentary do you include in this addition?

Tamte: Our sequence goes, we’ll show you a video documentary we’ve created, which includes interviews with eyewitnesses, people who were participants, as well as battle footage. We use those to provide context. Then we transition you from that into an in-game scripted animated sequence that draws you into the specific scenario you’re about to face. Then it goes interactive. When we’re finished, then we do the reverse. We take you out through an animated sequence and go back into a documentary that ties up the loose ends of what you experienced during the gameplay. Then we do that again for the next mission. It’s always the sequence of documentary before, documentary after, and then in some cases we have documentary segments in the middle as well.

GamesBeat: Is there anything else you’d like to emphasize today?

Tamte: It’s a long road, especially with events–we’re seeing this question of relationships between countries and the effects of war on people now. It’s important for games to tackle these kinds of events in a more realistic way than we have before. As humans we learn best through experience. We can watch a documentary or the TV news and get glimpses of things happening. Passive media is very good at telling you what happened. But games are very good at letting you experience something.

That’s the formula for us. Mixing the passive media–we can give you the facts through passive media, which video games are not good at communicating. Then we can transition you from the facts into trying to experience it for yourself. That’s when you begin to understand why certain things are inevitable, why certain things are very difficult, because you try to do them yourself. I don’t learn to ride a bicycle by watching someone else ride one. I have to get on and try it myself. I think the same thing applies. That’s the real opportunity for video games. We’re the only medium that can do that.

Our hope is that people will come out of this understanding that there is no such thing as a kinder and gentler war. We need to understand that before we start the fight.