I went to the Overloon war museum in .nl today (its about 30 mins drive from where i live) and had a meet&greet with the wargaming.net guys who came here to take a day off from the hellish sound and fury of gamescom and meet the dutch fans, who came out in great numbers (not!).
First off, they are really friendly guys, honest and open .and obviously very much in love with their game. They are genuinely surprised with the amount of success their game has, and paid for the museum, food and drinks.
Victor (the CEO) told us they are nearly done building a new distributed server architecture for the game. This will allow the three servers to unite and make battles happen on localized servers. So if I am fighting a guy in moscow, the battle will be served on a machine somewhere in between, like Berlin. It reminds me a bit of how EvE works, with a central database for semi static data, and nodes for the more fluid bits of gameplay. With lag playing an important part in WoT, this means the nodes need to be physically distributed.
Because they are nearly done with this big bit of development, the engineers and programmers are about ready to start work on what Victor calls bells and whistles. Better physics. Protection of game files (allowing tracers to return!) And most importantly, more game modes. He talked about his garage battle thing with great enthousiasm. Tiered company battles, historical battles and tiered clan map thinger is also in the works.
The plane and ship games are not being built in the same city as the tank game. The ship team is in St Petersburg, Russia, and the plane team in Kiev, Belorus. They are seperate entities where game development is concerned, Victor only throws money and a couple of ideas at them. The balance of arcade vs realism in the plane game is not nearly set in stone, so he could tell very little about that. Do I need to take off and fight torque while doing that? no. Will my plane be able to stall out and spin? no idea yet.
When the navy game came up, the players present (about 30 men) boo’d and hissed about navyfield. Victor actually took up a defensive stance toward that game, saying it was a major inspiration for World of Tanks. The game is looking very sweet he said, but other than that no substantial info was given.
The last thing Victor talked about was some marketing guff about how they want to build the game(s) into some sort of cult, working with museums, modelling companies and historical magazines and such. It was rather blah-blah’ish and might not work so well as to be worth the money Victor is obviously throwing at it. The fact that a tiger tank fucking sucks in the game might in itself make this plan backfire.
It was impressive to have a close look at a real life IS tank, an actual Panther and other tanks, many with the holes where they got killed still in 'em. A sobering thing to me, to see how the monsters depicted in the game are actually real. as big as a house on the outside, but claustrofobia inducingly cramped and dark on the inside. Rough and heavy with rough edges, built in a hurry in a desperate time. Tanks are freaking awesome.
p.s. the hetzer looks cute irl too by the way!
