The first-ever demo of the free-to-play World of Warships - sister game to the enormously popular World of Tanks - was made up of two 6v6 battles, with small fleets consisting of American and Japanese destroyers, cruisers, battleships, and aircraft carriers. (Each was controlled by a player at the Wargaming home office is Kiev.) The scale, obviously, is immense, with each round taking place on a huge swath of ocean more than 100 kilometers wide. In these cases the maps contained multiple islands to give players some interesting geography to navigate around.
They need that space because battleships, like the North Carolina class shown, have an effective range of 40km, and can blind-fire artillery into the fog of war hoping to get lucky. But that’s not very ammo-efficient, so both sides almost immediately launched fighters and scout planes from their carriers and cruisers (using a short-runway catapult system) to spot the enemy.
The developers zoomed in for plenty of beauty shots as they closed the gap between the fleets. Every ship, Wargaming says, is modeled based on the actual blueprints of their WWII counterparts. The down-to-the-rivet detail is impressive, though there was a noticeable absence of crewmen visible running around on the decks, which gave it a sort of lifeless look. (Disclaimer: it’s still in alpha!)
WoWS is designed to be a rock-paper-scissors balance between classes. Battleships are no good at close range, and it’s hard for their heavy guns to hit nimble destroyers. That’s the job of the cruisers, which beat up on destroyers but are themselves fodder for battleships.
The carrier, meanwhile, has no guns to speak of. That player is playing an almost entirely different game, controlling squadrons of WWII fighters from an RTS-style UI from an overhead camera, counting on his allies to keep the heat off of him. No, you can’t pilot a plane personally, but that overhead perspective should give that player a role similar to a Battlefield 2 (and Battlefield 4) commander, allowing him to help coordinate his team.
Like World of Tanks, the goal is to capture the center territory and hold it, and both sides raced to take position. The independently swivelling cannons fired with thunderous booms. Only the main guns are player-controlled - the smaller weapons automatically fire on anything that comes into range. Those big guns are targeted using an unrealistic scope view that zooms the camera along the projected path of the shell. The challenge is finding the range, and leading your target by enough of a margin so that it’s in the right spot to catch your incoming shells. When they hit, there’s a satisfying cluster of explosions that depletes the red health bar of the ship, much like in World of Tanks.
Once in close, the smaller, speedier destroyers on both sides launched torpedoes off their decks. Those things are vicious - a hit above the water line depletes the red health bar, but below it, the blue buoyancy bar takes damage, reflecting flooding below decks. The destructive effectiveness of the torpedoes was demonstrated by having a maneuverable destroyer sacrifice itself, swerving to absorb an incoming wave of torpedoes before they could strike the cruiser it was escorting. It took only two or three before heading directly to the bottom. (Again: alpha! Balance isn’t near final.)
These two 10-minute battles played out pretty quickly, despite the slow pace of the ships. The carrier was the last man standing on the second map, and watching it suffer a death y concentrated pounding of a battleship and two cruisers made me wince a bit in sympathy.
So this is definitely a bit more than a reskinned tank game - you can expect to see things play out very differently from the action in World of Tanks, though their economies will be intertwined with shared resources and experience points (and of course a universal login) when Warships launches into beta, probably sometime in 2014. It’s only announced for PC at this point, but if World of Tanks: Xbox 360 Edition is a success for Wargaming, its eventual arrival on consoles is all but assured.
Dan Stapleton is IGN's Reviews Editor. You can follow him on Twitter to hear all about how awesome PC gaming is, plus a healthy dose of random Simpsons references.
Source : ign[dot]com
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