Tobold's Blog
Tuesday, August 16, 2011
 
World of Battleships announced

I like World of Tanks. But when Wargaming.net announced World of Warplanes as a sequel, I wasn't impressed. Maybe the game will surprise me when I can play it, but instinctively I have doubts about applying what worked for WoT to a three-dimensional battlefield. I would have preferred a very different sequel. Fortunately Wargaming.net today announced the sequel I would have wished for: World of Battleships.

I am a huge fan of naval combat games, since Harpoon on the Amiga. And for me the big selling point of World of Tanks is that is is a non-twitchy shooter game. That is something that I can easily imagine being well reproduced in World of Battleships, while the higher speed and added complexity of the third dimension will presumably require faster reaction for World of Warplanes.

I am positively surprised about the speed of Wargaming.net. Official release date of World of Tanks was in April, 4 months later the website of World of Warplanes is up, and a playable alpha version of the game will be presented at Gamescom next weekend. And that is without neglecting their first game; WoT already has 3 content patches with new maps and new tanks added since I started playing in May. But even with all that display of speed, I would be quite surprised if World of Battleships would come out before 2013. Well, I'll be waiting.
Comments:
Harpoon! Nice one- that sure takes me back.

I was more into the Silent Service series which was a lot of fun but I agree, World Of Battleships will likely translate better with their current format. That said, Warplanes may be interesting.....
 
I though the point of the airplanes one was that it WASN'T WoT, so it will attract new players who prefer airplanes. Those who enjoy WoT will keep playing it, serving more customers, with more potential income. If Warplanes was just there to move all the WoT players over to, that wouldn't exactly be a business grower, would it?
 
Those pictures with the article look pretty interesting - if they're actual screenshots rather than concept art this is some way along in development already. And interesting to see that there are carriers in the game... I imagine they'll fill the same niche that artillery does in WoT, with battleships acting as heavies and cruisers in the light/medium role of scouting and screening. Not sure what could take the place of tank destroyers... battlecruisers maybe, although those didn't really work out very well in practice.
 
Tank destroyers? Their role will be filled by submarines. At least that's what I hope for.

Personally I think I would rather enjoy WoB than WoP. I can't imagine how they'll implement plane battles, especially in 3D.
 
Planes might be more twitchy but I think flight sims are quite popular - or at least they used to be, so I guess Wargaming.net wanted to capture the part of the market. Also, tanks and small planes usually don't have many secondary guns or none at all so they can do what they did in WoT and only keep the primary ones. Considering ships might have several towers with primary guns, a lot of secondary guns, depth charges and often a load of torpedoes, I wonder how do they plan to handle it.

I also wonder about carriers since they seem to be too good to face surface ships. Without them, the ships seem to follow the rock-paper-scissors model with escorts, heavy ships and subs. (I do realize that subs can destroy escorts as long as they're not spotted and escorts often have a load of "fish" they can use on heavies but escorts have an advantages in a fight with submarines over heavies and heavies have an advantage in a direct fight with escorts unless there's another heavy which would take the primary gun damage.)

Unlike Darth Solo, I don't have problems with imagining WoWp although coping with lag probably will be a problem. I can't imagine how a single player would command a battleship without getting overwhelmed or having most of the stuff on automatic drive. (Having multiple players control a single ship sounds like a recipe for disaster.)
 
I would like to point out that a similar game called Navyfield has been around for quite some time. It is a 2d isometric realtime game which in many ways resembles the world of tanks formula just with various ship types (subs, destroyers/cruisers/battleships, aircraft carriers). It has progression by means of grinding through ship trees and improving crew and has been around for something like 5 years.
In fact one could argue that World of Tanks took a lot of Navyfield's concepts.

They were actually working on a Navyfield2 with pretty 3d graphics and all but to my knowledge that game never made it.
 
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