From Wargaming.net, the same people who brought you World of Tanks and World of Warplanes (the other not-Warcraft WoW), now bring you a sea battle arena game. It’s finally entered sufficiently open closed beta that you can buy your way in, and I promptly did so, because I’m a sucker for WW2 at sea. The preorder bundle buys you one of three one-year-past-release-exclusive premium ships, or all three if you want to spend $70, and 1500 gold.
Of the three World of <armed conveyance> games, it’s my favorite already. It gets at the heart of sea combat of its era—things don’t happen nearly as fast as in World of Tanks, and getting out of position isn’t instant death. Slugging it out with a heavier ship puts me in mind of Neptune’s Inferno, or The Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors. The effects are pretty, and the sound feels punchy.
I do have some complaints. The transplanted capture-the-base mode from WoT feels arbitrary and silly, especially on the open ocean map. The two other modes (one is king of the hill, one is king of the hill with three locations and a point counter; lose points by dying, gain them by killing) are a lot better, since they happen around islands. You can convince yourself that you’re contesting some objective or another, and the colocation of your team’s goals with the other team’s goals fixes the ‘teams both go right’ problem.
I will be. Assuming that it’s still “F2P” when it releases. While I had no problem with spending stupid amounts of money on WoT, that was after I had played it for a while. I’d like to get a feel for the game first.
I’m in there. I like to play the Cleveland and the Yubari/Aoba, because I love being the annoying AA guy, but I think my favourite ship thus far is the St. Louis.
It turns like the actual city of St. Louis, is slow and doesn’t have a great deal of range, but the amount of ordinance it can put out is fantastic. BBs will even frequently focus on you in favour of more valuable targets, simply because of how annoying you can be.
My fondest memory in five or six hours of play is shooting it out with a damaged battleship in my St. Louis and winning. My least fond memory is shooting it out with a damaged St. Louis in my battleship and nearly losing.
I know it won’t happen, but I really wish they’d work on an updated Massive Assault game. I still play Massive Assault Network 2 every once in a while to scratch that beer & pretzels war-game itch.
The problem with Domination mode is that in closed beta there aren’t enough people to make sure you get balanced teams. So, you end up with one team having two more ships than the other, and with three capture points, that makes a huge difference. It should be fixed by the simple expedient of getting more people playing, but it is annoying.
Also, carrier play sucks. It’s staring at the minimap plotting moves for planes and there’s very little sense of anything other than drawing lines on a chart. And, the tier differences between carrier planes are horrendous. A Tier VIII carrier will be in games with a Tier VI or VII, and its fighters will utterly destroy every other plane in the sky. Whee.
Other than that, the actual ship to ship stuff is pretty wicked fun.
I got granted access just before the paid ships. It’s a great game. It’s different than ta and but I can already see that games major problem looming: toxic, stupid player chat and behavior.
Been waiting on this, bought a ship so I can play, even if they are going to wipe our asses before open, but hey, I like these games as I can get a quick fix without having to commit the entire evening.
The cool thing about WoWS is that the ships look wicked cool, and the basic gameplay of guns and torpedoes is quite engaging. The format is a bit stale, as fighting over circles of buoys in the ocean isn’t very compelling; I do wish they’d have invasions, convoys, or the like as missions. But…
…the player base. Right now it’s as bad as the WoT base, and not surprising because it’s drawn from pretty much the same people. Already I’ve been torpedoed by my own players many times, either deliberately or usually out of idiocy, shelled by my own players, usually on purpose, and endured the usual toxic chat referenced above. This player base would be hard pressed to understand much less successfully participate in sophisticated game modes beyond kill the other guy.
L’enfer, c’est les autres. On the .EU server team killing is pretty rare. Childish rage isn’t despite the fact that the game still has a bit of its closed beta veneer of gentlemanness left. “That’s a terribly nice shot old chap, you wrecked me good with that!” quickly is starting to be replaced with " fuck you, you cheater OP bastard piece of shite!"
So fuck em. The ships are madly gorgeous and sound thunderous. Planes zip and swoop and it seems you need to get your think on in order to git gud.
I’ve been playing this game for some weeks now and I am loving it.
Yes, the population mostly sucks. It’s been my concern ever since I heard about this game - WoWS is quite a bit more complicated than WoT and seeing how dumb general population is in tanks makes me wonder if they are even capable of driving ships. My fear is that either the devs will dumb the game down or it will be a really niche game with very low numbers and very light support.
However, I do see some progress over the last month and as I tier up. I haven’t been torpedoed by friendlies for about 2 weeks. :) I see less and less lone wolves bee-lining towards the enemy flag. Getting to B after conquering A or C is still a huge challenge though. :)
My hope is that the game will seem too slow for most of WoT population but will attract lots of old farts like myself.
As for the ships, I really like all of them so far, except for the carriers. Honestly, whether I play a BB I tell myself “This is so cool I should concentrate on BBs”. And then I switch to an IJN destroyer and end up thinking the same thing about them. :) Maybe the IJN cruiser line is the least interesting for me atm although I do love my Yubari.
My current love though is destroyers (both USN and IJN). There is something extremely cool about being able to jump out from around an island and sink a huge seemingly invincible battleship. :)
Yeah, destroyers are great fun. Cruisers are very nice too. BBs are getting better, or will, when they fixed the bugged armor next version. But CVs are in need of serious loving.
There is something viscerally satisfying though about landing a salvo on an enemy ship, that is so much more gratifying than hitting someone in WoT.
