Eschdorf was an exciting and fun mission to work on. In real life, the town was bitterly contested with a battle in freezing winter cold and snow. Some of the American push on the town was through the direction of nearby woods and across snowy fields. Therefore, in this scenario I decided to make it a little open ended and let the player make one of three implied choices in how to attack the village by map design - they can go through the woods to minimize losses and ambush the enemy, do a frontal assault down the fortified main road into town, or try to jump between cover to cover to advance across the fields to get into town (or a combination of them all). Thus, utilizing sight lines and cover figured prominently no matter which path the player chose to take.

Although the original objective is a timed one to prevent a convoy from leaving Eschdorf (thereby delivering valuable supplies to the resource strapped Germans elsewhere), there were also secondary objectives that were different depending on the playthrough, such as the elimination of a VIP, capturing enemy Intel, or destroying a crippled tank. If the player does not manage to prevent the convoy from finishing up its loading, or the player reaches the trucks (and the Germans panic), the convoy starts moving and the player then has to focus on efforts to destroy a minimum number of trucks while fighting off the convoy’s escorts (which includes a Panzer IV tank).

The feedback I got for the map was very good, with praise for its tense nature and for allowing the player to have the freedom to make tactical choices however they see fit to assault the town. The demo version of the map proved to be quite fun for Gamescom attendees.