DAVID HOLLINGWORTH takes to the high seas in the World of Warships beta
So here I am, cruising through the eastern straight on one of the more challenging maps in World of Warships. It’s a passage that must always be contested, because it’s effectively a path straight into your own territory – where your own heavy and somewhat slower carriers tend to be.
You almost never see battleships here, but fast and agile destroyers love it. They can dash in, and fire off a spread of torpedoes. In the narrows, they can be hard to dodge.
In this instance, I’m in a midweight cruiser, a Cleveland class ship with four turrets mounting three medium calibre guns each. It’s fast and sleek, and can put serious hurt on a destroyer. Except… there are two of them, and another cruiser, and I only have another destroyer from my own side for support. Do I rush in, and hope I can avoid getting caught in a torpedo crossfire? Do I slow down, stand-off, and hope my superior gunnery can even the odds against the smaller ships? Or do I fall back entirely, amongst the line of battleships to the rear?
Regardless, I need to make a decision soon – I’ll be torpedo range about… now!
OPEN FOR BUSINESS
World of Warships recently went from closed beta testing to its open beta phase, and if you’re at all interested in naval warfare in the age of battleships, it’s an almost essential game to play. Its battles are tense affairs, complete with hulking battleships and aircraft carriers capable of ruling the skies – and punishing the surface combatants down below. Of fast destroyers weaving in and out of heavy cannon fire to deliver a well timed torpedo salvo, and of cruisers waiting for their moment to strike and swarm a weakened foe.
Like all of Wargaming’s recent titles, one of things that keeps you coming back to the game is slow pace of upgrading and unlocking new vessels. In the open beta there are only the Japanese and American fleets, but that’s still nearly sixty vessels to explore. You can purchase upgrades for each that increase turret turn rate, or even improve repair times, and you can even mount camouflage on your mighty beasts of the sea. From here into full release, the game will only get better.
Fair warning, though: if you do get into the beta now, be prepared to lose everything that you unlock. That’s what happened during the transition from close to open beta, to level the playing field, and it’ll surely happen when the game officially releases. That said, if you buy a premium ship with bought Gold, you keep that, and veteran players will likely get a special premium ship for their time helping out during testing.
ROCK, PAPER, BATTLESHIP
There’s a very definite element of rock-scissor-paper to the game, with battleships being great at taking out cruisers, cruisers great at taking out destroyers, and destroyers being pretty handy at heavily hurting battleships, but any ship is capable of being effective in a variety of roles. Battleships are the heaviest units, with the biggest guns and the heaviest armour. Destroyers are fast, and their torpedoes are very effective, but the ships are fragile. Cruisers sit in between in nearly every way, and aircraft carriers are like playing a whole other game, something more like an RTS, as you vector your squadrons over a top down map.
The mechanics of the game’s combat are much richer though. Detailed armour mapping makes picking your targets a priority, and you can destroy individual guns, knock out engines, or even cripple a ship’s steering. And, of course, if you cause a penetrating hit to a ship’s magazine… that’s all she wrote.
THE PACE IS THE TRICK
Like many games, World of Warships is a game not just about blowing stuff up, it’s a game about tactical decision-making. But unlike World of Tanks, or many other shooters, the slower pace of World of Warships renders those decisions even more important. If you find yourself in a poor position, getting out of it’s going to take time – momentum is a harsh mistress, and these ships, even the destroyers, do not turn on a dime. The near-constant motion, and the fact that accelerating and decelerating all take precious time, means you not only need to think about your current position, but where it’s going to take you in a few seconds or even minutes.
Get out of position even briefly – say, into range of two or three battleships – and it could very quickly be ‘game over’ in a short amount of time.
What’s been particularly interesting to watch is the way real naval tactics have started to come to the fore in the game, even though it’s now only in open beta (ahead of a release, we’d guess, in a month or so’s time). Carriers send flights of torpedo bombers in search of their enemy counterparts, while darting destroyers rush between lines of battleships and cruisers. Players have quickly learned that sticking together is essential, so even on maps with multiple capture points, fleets tend to stick together. This lets you concentrate fire on targets, and acts as a force multiplayer for anti-aircraft capacity.
All of this, and we’ve not even seen the whole depth of the British, German, and Russian tech trees yet. World of Warships is looking to be a great addition to Wargaming’s free-to-play line-up. It’s certainly a game we’re having trouble staying away from… and I am so close to unlocking my next cruiser!