Spotlight On - World of Tanks Updates, World of Warplanes, and World of Battleships

World of Warplanes

World of Warplanes is Wargaming.net's next free-to-play online action game, and like the name implies, it'll be all about fighter planes rather than tanks. The game is in development in Wargaming.net's Kiev studio with a team of about 200 people, and like with World of Tanks, the vehicles you'll use will be from the mid-20th century, primarily from World War II. At launch, the flyable planes will mostly originate from the major world powers that participated in the conflict (the United States, England, and Japan, as well as planes from Germany and Russia). While the game is intended to have the same kind of accessible, action gamelike pace as World of Tanks, Wargaming.net's Kislyi suggested that the team is still doing some fine-tuning with regard to exactly how in depth it will make the control scheme. The current, alpha version of the game uses a simplified control scheme we saw in a brief, hands-off demo; at the moment, you can control your plane completely using nothing but your keyboard to turn, bank, accelerate, and slow down. Because you'll be airborne for the entire time--the game will not require you to sit through takeoff, though Wargaming.net is considering the possibility of letting players attempt a landing for bonus experience after a match ends--your aircraft will always be on the move. You will have only clouds to use as cover while you face threats not only in the sky from enemy ships, but also on the ground from antiair emplacements. And while you won't have to worry about your fuel running out, you'll still have to stay clear of terra firma because flying into a mountain will cause your ship to crash. This is an important concern because your ship's flight model will be affected if you've taken severe damage. The game will even model specific mechanical damage, such as shorn wings.

World of Warplanes' development team is still determining the sensitivity of the control inputs. In any case, the studio plans to support multiple types of controller input (keyboard and mouse, USB controller, and flightsticks) for the game when it eventually launches. And much more interestingly, the studio plans to (eventually) have Warplanes missions connected to Tanks missions in clan wars mode. The tentative plan is apparently to let Warplanes players struggle for air control over sectors of the clan wars map, with the winning team granting some sort of bonus (which has yet to be determined) to the Tanks players on the ground who belong to the same team for as long as that team maintains air control in that sector. Wargaming.net hopes to have the game in a beta state later this year.

World of Battleships

Projected release date: "When It's Done"
Genre: Action, Massively Multiplayer
Platform: PC
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World of Battleships is the third game in Wargaming.net's planned trio of games, and by its very nature, it'll be the game with the slowest pace. This is because you'll be controlling a warship of some type, such as a PT boat, destroyer, or some class of battleship. Then again, the term battleship itself is pretty broad and can refer to gunships that are merely huge or to truly colossal aircraft-carrier-style ships. Because battleships don't generally turn on a dime, the game experience in World of Battleships will be less about careful maneuvering and presumably more about timing, smart initial deployment, and repeated shelling of key targets. All of this must also be done while avoiding minefields and coastal batteries and capturing key control points and island bases. We're told that for the time being, Wargaming.net doesn't plan to implement submarines into the game, at least not at launch, because this tactical consideration could throw off entire matches, such as a 15-versus-15 battle in which a few players on one team decide to play as subs while no one on the other team makes the same decision. This kind of thing would make matches lopsided in a hurry, and the studio prefers to let players play the game with the vehicles they most enjoy rather than have them feel that someone has to play a different vehicle because the game mode requires it. The game was not in a playable form when we saw it, and because it's the third game to go into development (a team of about 60 is currently working on the game at Wargaming.net's St. Petersburg studio), it'll most likely be released after Warplanes or as Kislyi put it, "When it's done."