War Thunder by Gaijin

Games
1

There seems to be a lot of confusion between the two upcoming games, World of Planes and War Thunder, so rather than have people post impressions of both into the existing WoP thread, this one is for WT only.

The NDA on WT was lifted a little while ago.

War Thunder is an MMO flight simulator game than can be played in a simplified arcade mode (with just a mouse if you choose), or a more detailled and realistic sim fashion. There are plans for a 'World War" mode but there are no details on this yet.

I’ve played quite a bit now, and I’m very pleased with it. It feels like a polished and pretty IL2, in a mulitplayer format that is easy to jump into and has tangible objectives and rewards. There are plenty of game modes and several single player options as well (although I think you need to always be logged on to the server.)

The two most developped game modes right now are arcade mode and historical battles. Arcade is fast, quick, and messy, and provides plenty of helpers to get in there and start blasting. Even a joystick purist like me had fun here, although I did start longing for a more tactical and realistic experience, where the HB battle mode shines. Mouse users can still mix it up there too, and seemingly might even hold an avantage over my X-45 stick, but it’s immersion I’m after and I’m still scoring kills so no matter the input method.

The XP, money and plane purchase system has gone through a few iterations. Gaijin originally gave me a free batch of lions for my previous IL2:WingsOfPrey purchase, and on that I’ve moved quite far up the tech ladder, although since then some rather effective planes I own have been significantly bumped up in level requirements. I also purchased their single player Pacific campaign (which is decent, but a bit hammy and hard in spots) which also gave me a free p-38 and a batch of lions.

The usual squabbles have been going on in their beta forums about plane performance and balance, mouse vs joystick, costs vs level tiers etc. But my bottom line thus far has been: Is this a fun ww2 sim with a good balance of gameplay vs immersion? So far it’s an enthusiastic thumbs up from me. I’ve collected just enough fun planes for me to have very satisfying flight sessions. It is slightly irritating to start the game with gimpy little planes and get mauled for a while, but once you get in the groove, it’s second to none for the experience.

My only quibble is that I much prefer Rise oF Flight’s system of simply allowing you to buy all your planes outright, but I respect the desire for a more steady cash flow that comes with XP grinding. Luckily for them, simming isn’t grinding to me, and I really hope this works out as I see myself playing this for years to come.

2

Gaijin? Are you saying there’s a WWII dogfighting game by the guys who make the bit.Trip games?

3

No?

4

Ah. It’s a difference between Gamesand Entertainment, apparently. Commence!

5

World of Planes is not an upcoming game. World of Warplanes is.

World of Planes is what War Thunder used to be called.

6

This is the first time I heard about this game but I guess it was also interesting to play and has a cool graphics and game play.

Kill the zombies

7

I am going to download it tonight to try it. I love war related flight sims. The website has some keys to giveaway, but it is out now.
http://www.dotmmo.com/war-thunder-15685.html
http://www.mmowood.com/war-thunder

8

I’ve been playing this a lot recently and it’s a lot of fun, primarily because not only do you not need a joystick to play on the “arcade” missions, but the mouse is actually better. After playing a little while with my HOTAS set up I used for Rise of Flight I put it away and went to the super-advanced mouse-on-the-arm-of-the-chair control system, which requires a lot less set up and works just fine. I’m told the historical and realistic missions need a stick, but I’ve been having such a blast in arcade mode that I haven’t touched those yet. I think I also heard there’s a mission builder and you can make co-op missions, but I haven’t played with that yet.

And it’s ridiculously pretty…

Even when playing with a mouse in arcade missions the game still recognises and requires different styles of play, depending on what you’re flying. There are some planes that are going to be happy mixing it up in a turn fight, (especially the crappy low-level biplanes), but there are others that are going to require boom and zoom tactics, like the P39. If you like more sedate play, there’s a range of medium bombers and, inbetween, are the ground attack craft which require you to keep up high speed seven feet off the ground.

There is some small amount of pay-to-win… each mission allows you to take three different planes, (so my current RAF set up is Spitfire I, Hurricane II and Beaufighter), but the “Golden Eagles” currency you buy for real money can be used to buy backup planes allowing you to take a plane out twice in the same mission. Outside of that though everything else seems to be purchasable with the currency you earn by playing, (Silver Lions), so cash just accelerates things.

A couple positives are that levels are horizontal rather than vertical, like World of Tanks. This means that when you reach a certain level, all planes of that level become available. So you can unlock a certain bomber by leveling up a fighter, for example, unlike WoT where German artillery was separate from German TDs are separate from German tanks. This means you can avoid grinding through horrible planes to get to a good one.

Also, there are a number of tutorials and the game pays you in Golden Eagles for completing them, which incentivises everyone to go through them and this means most people have something approaching a clue.

And yes, pretty…

9

schruem will come on here any second complaining about how big of a grind War Thunder is :)

I played around with this for a couple of days. The long wait queues and typical MMO audience turned me off, so I went back and am playing Birds of Steel, the console (PS3) prequel to War Thunder. They’re basically the same games, right down to the UI, but at least BoS lets me play single player.

10

this is probably the next world of tanks.

my brother want me to play it, but I don’t want to touch it, the skill ceiling (unintended pun) is very high in flyiing games.

11

Except that there is already World of Warplanes.

Nothing like having two mirror-image pay-to-win flight MMOs coming out of beta at the same time, I guess.

12

In world of tanks I was largely immune to the grind because I always had great fun tooling around in the lower tier tanks. That doesn’t translate quite so well in War Thunder, because population isn’t especially high and lots of people are zooming up the plane tree, which means the tiering doesn’t work very well and you can happily pick your low tier biplanes and end up mixing it up with P-40s, Spitfire IX’s and 109G’s anyway. I think the only thing you definitely avoid by playng low tier aircraft is the jets. Which is good, because I don’t want to take on a Sabre in a Swordfish.

The long wait queues seem to be a thing of the past now, provided you hang out with the oiks like me in the arcade battles. I accidentally tried to join an historical battle once and then noticed eight minutes had passed and I was still in the lobby. Fortunately in arcade mode I rarely have to wait longer than 25-40 seconds and, better yet, when I hit “Battle” and alt-tab out to another window the in-game music goes silent. Then when I get dumped into a lobby for a game that’s about to start the music starts playing again, giving me a good audio cue that I should alt-tab back in.

I spent a lot of time and a lot of money in my World Of Tanks run - here I can see me doing only one of those things and it doesn’t involve dead Presidents. Staying away from the Japanese tree will help with this, because their low tier aircraft are horrific. Every time I have to go out in that tier 3 flying boat I end up eyeing their tech tree, wondering how many Golden Eagles I’d have to buy to get into something capable of actually flying.

13

I’ve been playing this quite a bit the past week. Admittedly I am only up to to tiers 2-4, but it has been very engaging and have felt viable in every plane and nation I’ve flown. Also I have felt no compulsion to spend any money whatsoever.

Only one thing that has irked me so far is people bitching about “rammers” in chat. You know what, sometime mid-air collisions happen in the game, deal with it people.

14

I love the way people are convinced that a mid-air collision is always 100% someone’s fault. And by someone I mean the other person.

Two airplanes doing 500KMH, piloted by people potentially looking the other way at other targets, happen to collide and it’s “OMG! RAMMER!.” It makes me laugh.

Worse are people who don’t care what’s between them and the red brackets. I’m not too surprised by shoulder shooting, but folks who roll in on a target you’re tailing and then press red button in some hope that their AP rounds go through you into their target are the best.

15

After a long hiatus, I went to fire this up again, but inexplicably my mouse won’t left click any of the buttons on the interface, even though my pointer hovers over and RM highlights menus just fine. My hardware hasn’t changed a bit except for my wireless 360 controller was in there, but if I pull it out it’s still no go. Anyone else have this? The forums are quiet, but I can’t figure out what would have only affected me.

16

Just played and I did not have a problem with recognizing left mouse clicks. The game did just patch to 1.37, might check to see your up to date?

17

I also hopped back in. I’m thinking of hopping right back out since it’s damn near impossible to get a battle with my chosen side, the Nippon Empire. As an example, I logged on last night, and there were 36 US pilots waiting for a match. There were two from the tribe of Yamato. Me, and someone else, forlorn, stuck in a queue. So I went and tried playing the SP dynamic campaign. Chose a “kill the bombers” mission. In PS3 Birds of Steel, Gaijin toned down the IL2 default bomber death ray gunners, so SP “kill the bombers” missions are actually playable. Seems they forgot to do this in WT. One early model Japanese fighter vs. lines of hyper-amped Catalinas = no fun.

So I think I’ll ditch this after my premium month (from the Steam sale) is over and go back to BoS .

18

I agree that BoS is a far more fun game than WT ;-)

19

I saw a couple QT3 folks on this recently and wondered if anyone plays it more than semi-regularly these days?

I go through patches and frequently change my mind between whether I like planes or tanks more. I’m currently on a very low-level tanks kick, going back to my favourite “tank” in the entire game, the Sdkfz 140/1, which has come into the possession of at least one QT3 person recently, as they bought the DLC that includes it.

K4lIJvL.png1920×1080

This thing is flimsy as you like - the armour is mostly there to keep the rain off and then does that poorly because it’s open top. This means you’re also vulnerable to attack from the air and although the HE Tracer rounds are really good at downing aircraft you only get ten before you have to reload, so you better not miss.

The best thing about this is the way the rounds work when you unlock the High Velocity Armoured Piercing rounds. At the ~1.3 battle rating you’re not going to see anything with significant armour and you can put ten of these little HVAP bees into your target where they’ll bounce around the cabin poking lots of holes in the humans inside.

It’s not infrequent to see hit reports that look like this (upper right)

0S2a9qs.png1920×1080

The enemy driver, machinegunner, gunner and commander all taken out with one burst. Frequently you leave behind a perfectly nice looking tank that appears to be pristine. Just don’t look inside.

20

Hey Bis do you have the youtube channel for War Thunder? I just got into the game by accident… mainly from playing it on PS4 decided to play it on PC. Was surprised at how good the graphics are and how fast you can get into the combat even at the low tier (I am still mainly tier 1 and a little tier 2).

And i did just buy that Panzer Pack… mainly because I wanted to get eagles to get a 7 days sub. I played a TON of missions this last weekend. Wish I had took it earlier (would have made double xp) but no biggie. And yes the sdkfz is awesome. When its well placed you can tap tap tap on some tanks and clean up! I usually go into tank battles with 2 evenly BR tanks and one AA. The sdkfz is a great third tank to take into battle~!

Game has alot of depth, and I do see how its enticing to ‘pay to win’. There’s some aspects like BR rating, having to be able to have three vehicles that are evenly matched. I opened up the M3 Lee tank which was a 2.0 rating and the difficulty ramped up HUGE. It upped me into the Tier 2 battles when i was still used to Reserve vehices (pre 1.0) vehicles. Just have to make sure before you play that what you have in your ready inventory affects huge in what battle you cue up in.

Great thing about the game is there is almost no waiting… you can get back to battles immediately or within a minute from your last. There’s no waiting, game has a decent amount of players (plus its cross play with PS4). The game scratches a certain itch… the arcade mode is fast and efficient, but it still has tactical sim depth. If you liked playing the IL2 games (for flight), same devs, it has the same feel and I like how the tanks have more simulated feel than WoT does.

Also big thing I like about the game is the Xray armor penetration slo mo… its like playing a sim with Mortal Kombat fatalities! You can actually see how the damage is done. Only in tanks though.