In World of Warships, Wargaming takes its multiplayer combat game to the high seas
So they sank my carrier. Again and again and again. My teammates, who’d whooped and cheered in chat when they saw the top-end carrier joining their team, scowled emoticons as their battle for survival suddenly became almost impossible. My only excuse is that the turning circle on a Midway-class aircraft carrier is more than I’m used to. I live in London, and the hackney cabs here turn on the spot. Not slowly over the course of 22km, while on fire and being peppered by torpedoes.
I blame Wargaming. It’s no way to demonstrate your product, to give the journalist access to every single overpowered ship in the game. We humans are often weak at heart and of course we’re going to pick the largest thing we can see, especially if everyone else has had to work their fingers to the bone for it. Letting us have access to the Midway or the Yamato is exactly as disastrous as giving a four-year-old rocket boots at the school sports day.
World of Warships is Wargaming’s latest jaunt into multiplayer combat. (I hesitate to call it massively multiplayer, because it’s about as MMO as Dota 2 is – selecting up to 24 players from a massive pool is certainly not the same as playing against an army in PlanetSide.) This time instead of treading the ground in World of Tanks or soaring through the sky in World of Warplanes, we get to sail the ocean waves in the biggest sea-going things of all time (save for icebergs).
Since it launched World of Tanks five years ago, Wargaming has ballooned. It has 4,000 employees in 16 offices, from its headquarters in Nicosia, Cyprus to Paris, San Francisco, Asia, Chicago, Ukraine and the Warships developer, Lesta Studio, in St Petersburg. 2013’s World of Warplanes was well-received, our reviewer Rob Zacny calling it “a fun-for-all dogfighting game that is recognisably in the tradition of Red Baron or Secret Weapons of the Luftwaffe” – although he also criticised the game’s simplicity.
Wargaming.net has even grown away from its core ‘blow up big things’ model, buying out companies like Gaspowered Games (now Wargaming Seattle), and developing other styles of game. As Artur Plociennik, World of Warships’s global publishing producer told me, “We’ve recently announced WG Lab, which helps in-house and third parties develop new games and cool things. Thanks to this initiative, we’re reviving the 4X strategy game Master of Orion, going beyond our standard market of games. It’s a great new direction to be heading in. So, who knows, we have projects planned for the future – we’re focused on great games at their core.”
No surprises here
Despite that, World of Warships is very much in the traditional Wargaming mould. Nothing is surprising about this game if you’ve played the earlier ones, from the tech tree to the way experience works. World of Warships is very much an arcade warship sim. If you’re looking for something at all convincing and realistic, please God go and play Silent Hunter III or Command: Modern Air/Naval Operations.
How is it arcadey? Well, the battles last only 20 minutes at most, rather than the many hours of reality. “No one would really enjoy a battle that lasts for an inordinate amount of time,” says Plociennik. “It’d just get boring and no one would act. We found the 15-minute time frame was the optimum amount for a good battle. This way, you allow for tactics and manoeuvring, but the players also know they have to act quick and think quicker.” The maps aren’t huge either, which is to encourage faster combat, I assume. The three game modes mostly are variations on sinking each other and/or capturing a number of bases on the map.
Shells take a few seconds to traverse the air, rather than a few minutes. “If we wanted to make the game very realistic, we’d probably end up with a simulator where you aim your guns by solving mathematical equations – that’s not much fun. We decided we want to go for a more arcade-like experience, but to make up for it with visual elements, awesome battle music and accurate ship models.”
Finally, you don’t need to worry too much about running into islands, as you tend to just bounce off and stop, rather than grounding or immediately sinking. “We tried that earlier in the game’s development, but we found making a player immobile generally meant the same as killing him and was too punitive for a relatively simple (and easily committed) mistake like steering your ship into map features. We may tweak that system in the future, but
we’re pretty happy with how it works.”
Fish and Ships
The beta has a lot of ships – at least 90 – as well as ten maps and multiple game modes. That’s a lot of content, but not all those ships actually sailed – many of the Japanese ships were experimental models that never left the drawing board. “Variety is the spice of life,” Plociennik says, “so we combine both paper and real vessels. It helps bolster the ranks and also lets us use our knowledge and expertise to become warship engineers – at least in our minds.” At the moment, all the ships are drawn from US and Japanese fleets, with two Russian RMT-only ships available. Those ships take up four main roles: cruisers, destroyers, battleships and carriers.
Cruisers are the mainstay of any fleet and the most agile and versatile of the warships. They can combine deck guns, AA guns galore and even torpedoes. The US cruisers tend to focus more on having heavy guns as opposed to the Japanese cruisers, which almost all have torpedoes in place of some AA guns. This means Japanese cruisers tend to be better at close range, even though they’re a bit more fragile than their size implies. Despite the rapid fire of their guns, going up against a battleship one-on-one is suicide, so it pays to move in a pack as a cruiser.
In contrast, destroyers are much smaller than cruisers, with low hit points and weak armour. So why would you play as them? Especially given that their preferred real-world prey – submarines – are oddly absent from the game. Plociennik: “We don’t have subs because we haven’t figured out how to make them fit into our game concept. Our shells are rather fast and our guns are many, while submarines are generally very slow and have a unilateral mode of engagement. Historically, fleet engagements were also not their role.”
The destroyer’s role in this is a bit like a fast submarine that’s scared of diving – they’re hard-to-spot scouts and torpedo wizards. There’s nothing more dangerous than a flanking destroyer to a carrier. Apart from their torpedoes, American destroyers tend to also pack some solid deck guns with high explosive shells, which are perfect for setting fire to a carrier’s flight deck.
They’re also extremely hard to hit, if played correctly. First, they’re hard to see at all, because of their low detectability. Unless a plane happens to fly nearby, that is, and you’ve forgotten to turn off your auto-firing AA guns. Second, they’re small enough to actually dodge artillery fire and torpedoes with ease. Finally, they’ve got the ability to throw smoke grenades… sort of. They can drop a smokescreen anyway, which can defend them or allies that are in trouble.
The opposite end of the scale is the battleship. Battleships dominate the sea. The range of their main guns is immense, but pointing and shooting isn’t as simple as it sounds. Each gun has to aim for the target individually, meaning your first click is to aim. Once you do, you’ll have a row of reticules slowly drifting along the horizontal plane to your target. Once they’re on it, that means they’re at least facing the right way – but you still need to actually aim, taking account of the enemy’s movement and the distance.
As shown by the sinking of the world’s largest ever battleship, Yamato, by carrier-launched aircraft, battleships in this era were becoming obsolete – the race wasn’t about who could build the largest boat with the biggest guns, as it had been since medieval times, or about submarine warfare like World War I, but about who could deploy their firepower most effectively and quickly – and that was carrier groups.
Up The Midway
A Nimitz-class aircraft carrier weighs about the same as 510 blue whales, it says here in A Child’s Guide to Cetacean-Maritime Comparisons. And about twice as much as the Yamato, at over 100,000 long tons. Of course, not all aircraft carriers are that absolutely massive, but they’re all big old sods. The ones in World of Warships range from the bodged-up Langley, which houses juts two squadrons of aircraft, to the fatty Hakuryu, which can house up to nine squadrons, and still have room for cake.
Playing as a carrier is very different from the other ships. A carrier is basically the world’s biggest coward, with guns that are only designed to scare aircraft off, if it has any at all. In real life, an aircraft carrier would be escorted by cruisers and destroyers in a huge battlegroup, to protect it against other ships and subs; in World of Warships a good team will still fulfil that role, but the carrier needs to stay out of the way and out of line-of-sight.
Indeed, playing as the carrier is more like playing a strategy game, with up to ten units to manage. Unlike the other ships, where you’re playing extremely close to the water, with the carriers you’re often playing at a massive zoom, or on the map screen itself. That’s where the biggest weakness of the carrier comes in – while you’re managing your squadrons, the carrier needs to be sailing somewhere – preferably behind cover, but almost no cover is big enough to hide a carrier against guns that can fire up to 26km.
When you find cover, you can focus on your squadrons. These are critical for taking down the enemy battleships and aircraft. Depending on what squadron selection you’ve made, you’ll normally have fighters, torpedo bombers and normal bombers at your disposal. Each squadron must be launched and re-equipped separately, which can take time and if destroyed they take a while to magically respawn inside the carrier.
Fighters just keep your ships safe and can be assigned to defend them. Dive bombers can attack any ship for middling damage and defend your carrier too. Finally, torpedo bombers need to find a clear patch of water to drop their torpedoes to run up into the enemy ships, but do tremendous damage if they hit. Each ship has planes with different stats, and more to upgrade to, which means certain carrier’s fighters are much better than each other – a particularly hardcore element for a not very realistic sim.
Upgrade to Donkey
When a battle’s done, you can look at your ship in port mode. Here’s where you explore the game’s tech tree, starting out with primitive cruisers like the Erie for the US or Hashidate for Japan. (You can also buy premium ships for large wodges of real money, if you want to skip the grind.) Other factions, like the Germans and British, are expected to have their ships arrive further down the line – but every battle mixes up all sides anyway.
Once you’ve unlocked a ship, you can upgrade it – adding better planes, guns or torpedoes, modifying its focus, and changing which consumable items it takes into battle. Here you can buy premium consumables with doubloons, which are again real-money-based.
You can also edit your ship commander’s skill tree, or move him to another vessel. Each commander can heavily specialise, for example in anti-air combat, allowing you to swap them out when you want to change a ship’s playstyle.
You can see more than just the upgrades in port – you can also inspect the paint job. Most ships have two types of camouflage available: spotty camouflage, which reduces your detectability (ideal for sneaky destroyers), or striped camouflage, which reduces the accuracy of other ships shooting at you and gets better at greater ranges. Camouflage is, however, a consumable, which means you need to keep rebuying it after every match. Sadly the delightful and bizarre ‘dazzle camouflage’ pioneered by the British and used extensively during World War I to conceal ship directions but not ship locations isn’t included – yet.
Nicely, your in-game achievements aren’t just signified by smart aleck pop-ups like so many Steam games, but with the reward of signal flags. For example, for not receiving any damage in battle you receive the India Bravo Terrathree flag set, which flutters tinily from your bridge. The signals also give you significant upgrades, sometimes cheekily. If a lucky shot penetrates your ship and detonates your magazine – blowing it up instantly – at least you get rewarded with the Detonation achievement, which gives you the Juliet Charlie flag. This was originally used to signal to the fleet that there was ‘no chance of explosion’ and here gives you total protection against magazine detonations, at least until you run out of the ten flags the achievement gives you and you have to buy some more. You can fly up to four flags at once on a carrier and eight on any other ship.
What problems might World of Warships face? Well, one might argue that the 50x50km maps are too small for a vessel with a turning circle of 22km. A carrier would never want to be within gun range of a battleship at any time, but sailing in the opposite direction isn’t exactly an option here. Also, queue times on the beta were unreliable, despite there being over 20,000 players at any time – I suspect that this is an artefact of the high tier ships I was using not having many players at that level yet.
By my last fight, I’d twigged how to use carriers. I’d moved onto the mammoth Japanese carrier – the Hakuryu – which comes with a full nine wings of aircraft. I kept my carrier moving behind our lines (despite the best attempts of the autopilot to sail me into islands), used my single fighter squadron to scout for the enemy’s destroyers, and my eight bomber squadrons wherever I could pick off single enemy ships. I was rewarded in the end with 28 direct hits on enemy ships, no damage suffered and a single enemy battleship sunk. In fact, even though we’d lost far more ships than the enemy, we managed a draw – fending them off on two flanks for an entire 20-minute battle. That felt like an achievement.