Open-source RTS Beyond All Reason showcases large-scale engine update as player interest climbs

Beyond All Reason (BAR), an open-source real-time strategy (RTS) title built on the community-driven Recoil engine — originally forked from SpringRTS — has significantly enhanced its ability to handle massive multiplayer battles. Following its Season 2 update in March 2025, the developers implemented backend improvements optimised specifically for matches featuring thousands of active units, demonstrating the game's capacity for real-time performance at unprecedented scales.

Stress tests have proven BAR's capabilities, with community battles in early 2025 involving over 100 simultaneous players and upwards of 10,000 units. In an April 2025 interview with MB Gaming Reviews, lead developer Beherith explained the team's approach to clarity in design: "You take a look at a unit, you can with a few clicks move it around, attack ground and see, okay, this shoots a plasma projectile, this shoots a missile, it has this reload rate, this projectile speed, this amount of area damage… We think that's a very good direction going forward."

Player feedback has been strongly positive, particularly around the game's large-scale RTS battles. One player, Wulfric_Drogo, called it "a love-letter to big, sprawling team-vs-team RTS lovers," while anab0lic described it as "the best RTS around right now." Sean Plott, better known as Day9TV and a respected voice in the RTS world, described BAR's massive 8v8 matches with thousands of units on screen as "pretty sweet."

Although BAR remains outside mainstream commercial platforms for now, its steady growth, transparency, and technical focus continue to attract developers and players interested in the possibilities of open-source RTS design at scale. The developers have confirmed plans to bring the game to Steam, though no release date has been announced. Meanwhile, BAR is undergoing significant internationalisation, with French and Russian already fully integrated, and several other languages including Simplified Chinese and Spanish nearing completion.