First, a correction. An earlier version of this post went out on June 19 opening with "Hell Let Loose: Vietnam launched on Thursday". It hadn't. Team17 delayed the game to August 13 back on June 2, this post had been written and scheduled against the original June date, and it published anyway. That's our mistake, nobody else's, and rather than quietly deleting it I've rewritten it into what it should have been: where Vietnam server hosting actually stands, ahead of a launch that's now less than two weeks out.
The "can I rent a Vietnam server with you yet" tickets certainly haven't slowed down, so the answer's worth keeping in one place.
The short version
- Community server hosting is gated through Team17's partner program, same model as the original. There's no public server tool, and nothing Team17 has said suggests that changes at launch.
How hosting works in Vietnam (vs the original)
The original Hell Let Loose has been a partner-program game since it left early access. Only a small list of approved hosts can rent out dedicated servers, and players browse those servers in the in-game browser. There's no open self-host SteamCMD path. Modding is effectively closed.
Everything Team17 and Expression Games have said publicly points to Vietnam following the same model at launch. The good news: the community-server experience should feel familiar if you've ever rented an HLL server before. The less good news: we can't say "go grab the server tool off SteamCMD and run it yourself", because that tool doesn't exist as a public download and we don't expect it to.
What's new for server owners since June
Two genuinely useful things came out of the July crossplay playtest and the developer Q&A that followed on July 31:
Platform access is your setting, not theirs. Vietnam launches with full crossplay between PC, PS5 and Xbox, and server owners will be able to configure which platforms can access their server – full crossplay, PC-only or console-only. Team17's stated reason is input parity, mouse-and-keyboard against controller. For anyone running a competitive or realism community, that's the most important server setting the game has, and it's a choice you'll want to have made before day one rather than argued about in your Discord on day three.
Battalions arrive after launch. The in-game clan and persistent-group system isn't in the day-one build. If you're planning to move a clan over, plan around Discord and your own roster for the first stretch.
The playtest review also flagged launch-day balance changes worth knowing as an operator: tunnel connections drop from five to four, tunnel travel gets slower, and the Emergency Tunnel commander ability is out entirely while they rethink it.
What about RCON, admin tools, modding?
The original HLL has a documented RCON spec and a working set of admin commands – kick, ban, broadcast, switch teams, force-end match, all the bread-and-butter stuff. Expression Games have hinted at "expanded admin tooling" for Vietnam but haven't shipped specifics, and we won't know whether Vietnam speaks the same RCON dialect until there are real servers to point tools at.
Modding is, by all current indications, not on the table. UE5 with EAC at kernel level is a tough combination to mod against, and the partner-only server model makes server-side mods a non-starter anyway.
If you came in hoping to run a heavily modded Vietnam realism server, that's not on the menu in 2026.
What's next from us
The big things I'm watching between now and August 13:
- The Vietnam partner-host list going public.
- Whether Vietnam ships a separate server app, and what the config surface actually looks like.
- What the platform-access setting looks like from the hosting side.
There'll be a proper launch-day post once the game is actually out – and this time it'll be written after we've checked that it is.
If you've got a specific question – "can I run a 32v32 instead of 50v50", "is there an admin password I need to set", "does it speak the same RCON dialect as the original" – send it in. The questions you ask shape what I write next, and Vietnam is going to take a few posts to cover properly.
In the meantime: see you in the jungle on the 13th.