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So from tanks to aircraft, from land to the skies I go. Fairly impressed with the ease and elegance of the Arcade mode and what they did with the mouse controls. My first ever game, taking a Heinkel 51, I scored two kills. The next game, four kills. Though I wasn't as lucky after that, I think I am convinced I maybe a better pilot than a tanker. As a tanker I was struggling but here I was flying both figuratively and literally. But then as I progress facing more difficult opponents with my biplanes it became a different matter. If anything for many reasons, aerial warfare is even crazier, if not quite a bit more fun.
Now the things that strike me about this game is that its young. Slick UI, the game engine is quite amazing, they are pulling graphics that look better than WoT and other games, and yet still achieve superior framerates. But being a young game, I also see the tech tree branches are still missing many important wartime variants of historic planes. This is in contrast to WoT, where after four years, every concievable historical tank and documented proposals has been put in, and all that's missing is the kitchen sink. But then WoT is suffering from the weight of its content baggage as well. Given time, I would expect WT to eventually fill up those trees.
One of the crucial differences between WoT and WT is how they deal with death. With WoT, the system is like you see in MWO. There is no respawn on the game, but your tank remains dead on the battlefield and won't be avaiiable for further use until the match has ended. So you enter a new game with a different tank in the meantime. In War Thunder, you die, you can respawn in the same match with another plane in your hangers until you ran out of planes. (You can respawn on the same plane, but it means paying gold for it, and the privlege is expendable). This is a system I would like to see in MWO and that has been proposed by players as well although it is unlikely this will ever be implemented.
The damage system also differs although both games use progressive deterioration. In the case of War Thunder however, there are no health bars or points. However, the planes are surprisingly resilient, and WT makes it case through the numerous real accounts of planes returning from battles full of holes, and even with half a wing. On the other hand, a lucky single shot can also knockout or kill a pilot.
The game's plane resiliency seems to be a bit strong, and this puts a heavy emphasis on armament. This favors planes with cannons, and especially heavy fighters. The result of which my BF110 heavy fighter becomes my most productive plane in Tier 1. The BF110 was a flunk in the Battle of Britain but found success elsewhere as a night fighter, but here I openly use it in fighter battles, using boom and zoom, hit and run techniques. Because of their toughness, the waist gunners, and the heavy armament, heavy two engined fighters,which didn't amount to much in World War 2, suddenly becomes a potent force here, like Beaufighters and Dornier 217 heavy fighters. The same goes to assault planes like the Sturmoviks.
As for favoritism, War Thunder has also been accused for favoring the Russians, being Russian developers and all. Although I don't really find that in the case of the planes or their stats. What I do feel is that the game's battle and victory requirements always deal with ground attack and like the case of domination, low level flying, and that tends to favor the characteristics of Russian fighters. However, every nation seems to have planes that can fight well at ground level. The resiliency of the planes also makes cannons a better requirement than groups of machineguns, and that favors nations whose planes pack cannons. Well, actually every nation uses planes that pack cannons, except the US, that is, outside of the Airacobra.
Like WoT, most of the premium planes are planes from another nation serving in a different flag, Zeros for the Americans and Corsairs for the Japanese. I would rather have planes that historical aces use, which there is but a few.
Given that the game conditions are based on killing ground targets, who wins or loses depends on who actually bothered to destroy those ground targets, as it doesn't matter how many planes which side kills or loses. This game is not just a game about fighters, but also about bombers. What you kill has to have an importance context. If you are not bombing or strafing ground targets, you protect your bombers, or shoot down those of the opposing team's. I do get the feeling these requirements are but a failure, people seem to just want to have a dogfight and kill someone. Those who win the games however, are those who bother with mission discipline, that is, to stick to the mission requirements, with their hanger slots filled with bombers and ground assault aircraft, (Sad to say, I'm not one of those). Unlike WoT or MWO, there is really no kill ratio here, the game does not differentiate whether your aircraft is lost in battle, shut down by AA, crashed on the ground by bad piloting, or simply being rammed. A plane lost is a plane lost. The leading and winning pilot in the team may have 6 kills, 4 deaths of various causes, and 5 surface targets destroyed, and he or she would be ranked accordingly higher against the person who has four kills and one death.
Speaking of ramming, that seems to happen a lot. One time I lost three out of four planes deployed by rammers. And yes, you can end up crashing into a teammate.
Premium ammo does exist but using silvers. They don't cost much, but they don't seem to effect much either. I will only have the tail gunner of my BF110 equipped with such.
If there is a wart in the game is that once again, its the matchmaking and the tiering system. I'm at Tier 1, and yet I would often mean Tier 2 aircraft and once in a while, Tier 3. The game uses an obscure Battle Ratings or BR system which is tagged on the particular aircraft. The higher the collective average BR of the planes set active in your current national hanger, the more likely you will be matched against higher tiers. On paper that is. I tried lowering the average BR by removing the most powerful planes and putting back my biplanes, but still I find myself fighting higher tiers. Correction, its not really the average, but the match maker determines your BR by taking the active plane in your hanger that has the highest BR.
Unlike WoT, which has 10 tiers, there are only 5 tiers in War Thunder, the fifth tier being secret weapon and Korean War jets. Its a complaint in the forums about Tier 4 prop planes having to deal with jets but the matchmaker seems forced to do this because there are not a lot of Tier 4 and 5 players, due to the game's relative youth and the grind to reach those tiers. I do think the game would be better off with the KW jets are removed (F86 Saber, MiG 15) except for the World War 2 wartime jets (Me 262, Gloster Meteor), and more effort put on the missing variants of the historic planes (like Ju-88 heavy fighters).
Great community, the introduction forum has plenty of GuP fans (Girls und Panzer) and refugees from WoT. I suspect WoT has become too big for its britches (its massively successful with over 75 million registrations so far), but success like that, the arrogance can get to your head and you listen less to your user base until they start leaving. I kind of feel that War Thunder might be the disrupter to the incumbent.
Overall, it feels to me that War Thunder is a keeper, although I wonder what is going to happen when I reach Tier 4. I have not tried Ground Forces yet, the videos of which look quite amazing, but they require spending $50 to $60 for a special content pack that lets you into the closed beta. Maybe I will just wait for the open beta.
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My final issues with WoT, at least for now until the 9.0 patch.
Finally blew my top when my Panther, when trying to cross the river, had a ping spike, and suddenly found my tank drowning in the sludge. Unlike some games, WoT doesn't seem to have good motion prediction in the server side. What is motion prediction? Its a trick used by games to anticipate your direction and position in the servers ahead of your latency. If your latency is 200ms for example, the server is going to anticipate where your vehicle is 200ms ahead because you are going to be 200ms late. This is the server trying to guess your position via algorithms, and you want those guesses to be as correct as possible, but its never foolproof. If the position is wrong, you end up with a "warp" like experience finding yourself in a place where you didn't intend to be. This is an experience you find in many games, including MWO, and thus you know the game implements motion prediction.
There are also other problems, annoying though by themsleves, not game breaking. Like dealing being forced to deal with tanks two tiers ahead. The normal tiering should be dealing with a tier above and below you, but Tier 6 facing Tier 8 tanks is just too much. Especially if these are hypothetical proposal fantasy tanks with inpenetratable armor for my tier at least. Every tier also has an unrealistic health bar that is double of that from the previous tier, which means your shot, if penetrated (and the odds getting low on that), also incurs relatively less damage in ratio to the total HP of the target. Its not that strong a problem on the lower tiers but on the higher tiers it can when your main guns is still a 75mm. Its bad enough that the game has gold ammo, which you either pay with a large chunk of your silvers or with gold aka real money, but sometimes they won't even penetrate those higher tier tanks. I kind of gotten use to the idea of using gold in higher tiers, or facing an enemy heavy tank that is a tier or two higher than me. But some sort of an aftertaste remains.
Edited by Anjian, 26 February 2014 - 11:18 PM.
