When I heard a buddy of mine tell me that he was playing a game called “World of Tanks” I thought he was kidding.. I thought he was making some reference to “tanking” in World of Warcraft or something.. But no, he was serious..
Who on Earth would name their game this?! Well.. Apparently Wargaming.net and BigWorld Technology that’s who..
World of Tanks is a real first person shooter style game currently in open beta in which you get to drive tanks, tank destoyers and/or self propelled guns around fairly large maps all with the goal of mass destruction, mayhem and general killing of your fellow man. Booyah! Who wouldn’t like that right?
I have to admit, its a lot of fun but has a lot of flaws that I’m concerned about.. But first the good!
They have a LOT of tanks. Light, Medium, Heavy, Tank Destroyers of every flavor and even Artillery if that’s your speed.. You’re thrust on to one of a dozen or more (not sure how many all told) maps with 15 people per side and you fight it out until your team is the last standing..
You can currently choose from Russian, German and USA when buying your tanks and you’re never restricted to a side. You can easily go up the Russian tech tree and the German tech tree at the same time. By the time of release they have stated that they will have fleshed out the USA tree (its kinda broken at the moment and missing tank destroyers entirely), as well as adding French and Japanese tanks. I even heard rumor of British.. Awesome..
It’s a lot of fun, and I liken it to a really slow first person shooter.. Unlike most FPS style games you go go go, but you have no choice but to go slower in this game as tanks don’t move that fast, barrels are slow to traverse, reload times are slow..etc.. And if you do manage to get in a light tank and zip up to the front line you’re likely to die very quickly as.. well.. light tanks are light for a reason.. So you have to play this game kinda slowly and carefully.. That’s appealing..
The games themselves are usually 5 to 15 minutes long and can never go beyond 15 minutes, plus if you do die early you can always bail on that game to start up another one while waiting for that game to finish.. So you’re never just sitting there waiting for the next round like some FPS games.. If at the end of 15 minutes there isn’t a resolution (all dead on one side or the flag is captured) then it’s a draw. I have played over 300 games and this has happened once.
The objects on the terrain are completely destructible.. (for the most part) Don’t like that house in your way? Drive through it!! Or shoot it.. And it’s free to play!! Even after release they have a free to play model but it will be slow going for you.. but still free is good..
But.. now we get to the bad.. You see the game has a lot of problems too that are starting to effect my fun:
Completely Silent Devs: As with any game, the developers are non-existent. We hear nothing as players and all our pleas, prayers and questions go unanswered. This is the unfortunate trend in the gaming industry that has been going on for years and all it does is piss off customers. Mums the word and that blows.
They also appear to have an extremely slow development cycle or their iterations are very long as patches seem to come rather infrequently.. If ever..
Zero Control: Currently there is absolutely no way to choose which map you want to play on. When you queue for a battle you’re thrown into the first available “room” with a random group of people in random vehicles, on a random map. Okay Fight! This sucks and leads to a lot of issues where you’re in a room with people that have tanks 4 and 5 tiers above yours. Many times have I felt like I brought a bb-gun to a bazooka-fest because I happened to be in my T3 tank going against t8 behemoths..
I want to be able to to decide what vehicle I’m in for what map. If I’m in a heavy city fight, I don’t want to bring artillery..etc.. I want to be able to switch guns to suit the situation and you just can’t, you have to make due with whatever you’re given.
I want to be able to see who/what is queueing so that I can decide to stay or go.. If I know I’m not going to be effective in a battle due to being in too small a kit then I need the ability to opt-out. But you can’t, you’re in it for the fight until your tank gets turned into a smoking hole.. and it will.. This isn’t fun..
Physics Model: The game has a very poor if non-existent physics model, as such it’s possible sometimes to hang a tank off a cliff and fire down the slope in such a way as to defy gravity.. In reality the tank would take a tumble.. This is silly and makes it impossible in some cases to be safe down a hill from someone. Where as you should be safe because they can’t dip their gun low enough.. but.. no.
Graphics Engine: The graphics engine itself is a tad dated.. It’s not bad looking by any stretch of the meaning, but it’s not the most modern thing either, add to that the pretty bad memory leak issues they can’t seem to plug and things start to fall apart fairly quickly.. Frustrating having to restart the client every hour or so..
Damage Model: There seems to be some pretty big issues with the damage model right now too.. Huge tanks firing Volkswagen sized shells at smaller tanks quite often do no damage what so ever.. This is frustrating and leads to a lot of odd damage issues where you should be able to kill a tank 2 or 3 tiers your junior but can’t because for some reason they are impenetrable.. This is frustrating as hell..
Tank Tracks: It seems that the tank tracks for any given vehicle are made of papier-mâché in that if you even bump another tank the damn things fall off and you have to just sit there and wait for your crew to fix it.. This is extremely annoying to say the least..
Line of Sight: Easily the biggest issue though is the line of sight system they have implemented by which tanks constantly just up and vanish.. Unlike other first person shooters where people are always rendered as they run around the map and you have to spot them yourself.. this game has opted for a weird system by which enemy tanks are completely invisible (read: not rendered by the graphics engine) if your “crew can’t see them”..
THIS SUCKS. This sucks because half the time you could be and often are a very short distance from an enemy tank that you would otherwise absolutely see.. but just doesn’t get rendered.. At all. Until suddenly POP! There he is! And it seems to be completely random for each individual..
So, for you the enemy tank is invisible.. But for him he sees you just fine, and is shooting you.. So you’re dying but you can’t see the enemy tank that’s shooting you mere feet away because your crew has their heads up their asses..
This is an absolute game breaker! They have to fix this or the game will be doomed to fail. And such an easy fix too! Render everyone, all the time. Done.
Grouping: The game is “free to play” and as such anyone can download it and get in but in order to group up with a friend you have to have paid for the “Premium” access. This sucks as it doesn’t allow players to introduce a friend to it for free.. This is dumb of them, they need to allow anyone to group, free player or paid player.
Not an MMO: They tout the game as an MMO but it’s very much not. It’s more along the lines of “Counterstrike with Tanks”. The largest battle you can have (the only battle you can have at this time) is a 15 on 15 battle, and 30 people aint massive. It’s just a FPS, most FPS games are pay-once/play free games. This game smacks of a company trying to get people to pay a monthly subscription for a really small amount of content that other games give away for free. Imagine if Counterstrike, or Call of Duty tried to charge a monthly fee..
Match Making: The match making system is broken right now in that I’m currently, as I type this, in a game where a tier 3 vehicle is on the same map as a tier 9 vehicle.. That’s completely silly as the tier 3 Marder can’t do anything to a tier 9 IS-4..
I mean come on, that’s not even remotely fair to the Marder player.. The biggest gun the Marder can fit fires an average pen of 158 points of damage using the expensive ammo that costs real money (118 for the free stuff that people are actually using) where as the armor on the IS-4 is 160.. So the Marder actually can’t do anything against this tank.. I’m pretty sure the Marder player didn’t join the game in the hopes of being cannon fodder..
The match tier range needs to be limited to one or two levels at most.. 3 at the absolute outside.. otherwise you end up with a bunch of folks on the map who can’t contribute to the match at all, but count as slots for that team. Whats more is we have that one tier 3, and two tier 4s on our team where as the opposite team’s lowest tiered tank is a tier 6.. Guess which side won..
Balance: I realize fully that due to the sheer volume of different tanks and vehicles its going to be near impossible to balance the tanks. And at some point you have to accept that certain tanks suck when compared directly with other specific tanks..etc.. But it really seems that all of the American tanks, suck horribly.. Where as all of the Russian tanks are pure liquid awesome.. And it’s a Russian made game.. Hmmmm..
It’s telling when the biggest gun my American tier 6 heavy can fit is a 76mm gun that does an average damage of 115 points, and the Russian tier 6 heavy can fit a 152mm gun that does 700 points!!!!!! I mean come on! That’s not even subtle, it’s to the point of being silly.. (Note: this gun is often called the “derp gun” in game cause its just stupid..)
It may be completely realistic and historically accurate (American tanks during this period did very much suck..)but at some point “fun” has to step in and be the guide.. This isn’t a tank simulator and isn’t meant to be..
Pay-to-Win: The other issue I fear for is the Free-to-play model that they are employing.. The economic model they have chosen to use is confusing and messy. There are multiple types of money to be used, money you buy and money you earn. You can convert money you buy into money you earn but both are used to buy things. Some objects in the store are purchased with the earned money, some with the purchased money. Experience is the same way in that there is earned experience for a given thing, and free experience that you can use on anything. You can of course convert experience on a given thing to free experience but it costs money that you purchase.. etc..
It’s confusing to a new player even though I understand it now it still boggles a little. I honestly don’t know why they didnt just go to one type of money, one type of experience.. Done. And to boot the cost for the gold money that you buy is too high compared to what you get, as well as them gouging you to convert experience to free experience.. it’s almost like they see that as a cash cow and are trying like hell to get folks to fork over the $$$..
Plus now they have added things like special tanks and ammo that you can purchase, and while it’s kind of expensive it’s nearly twice as good as the free stuff.. So sure, it’s free to play but you’re extremely gimped if you don’t pony up the cash.. Paid (Premium) players get 50% more experience, access to WAY better ammo and tanks as well as gear and experienced crew..etc.. basically they have tried to monetize the game into a pay-to-win model where by the player who buys the most stuff will win every time. Not cool.
Okay enough.. you get the idea.. And having said all that, I still like the game.. It’s still fun! But I wonder how much of that is just due to a novelty value of getting to drive around in tanks and blow shit up..
I just don’t see how it’s going to hold peoples attention in the long run. The issues are out weighing the fun slowly. The line of sight issue is easily the biggest with people just popping into and out of existence.. they have to get that one fixed or this game will be DOA..
My biggest concern at this point is that I just don’t see how they are going to get all the issues fixed in time for their release at the beginning of next month.
