(As an aside, the Untitled Project over in OOTR - which is actually not untitled any more, but if I told you the title it would give things away - is kind of kicking my ass this last week or two AND standing in the aisle so OWaW, TFLF, and whatnot else can't get past, which is why you haven't seen much of me lately except over here talking about games. I've been trying out a few different diversions as a sort of palate cleansing/creative recharge. Not sure if it's worked, but that's not a matter for this board.)

Anyway. Here we have World of $WEAPON_SYSTEMS' nearest competitor in the free-to-play, pay-to-pwn* giant multiplayer retro-military arena battle game market, which, oddly, is also a product of the former Soviet Union. (Wargaming is a Belarussian company; Gaijin Entertainment, makers of War Thunder, are Russian. Come to think of it, Armored Warfare - though being developed by an American game company - is being published by an outfit with a ".ru" domain name as well. Are the Russians trying for a cultural victory in Sid Meier's Online Gaming Ecosystem?)

The big difference is that where Wargaming's air, sea, and land offerings are separate games with very similar UIs and design sensibilities, War Thunder is all one enormous game, with the potential for player-controlled vehicles of the different modes to interact. As yet, it only has aircraft and tanks, but the logo has a ship in it, so I'm assuming they intend to add something akin to World of Warships to it someday. (Not sure how that's going to interoperate with the air and ground forces on maps that aren't, say, island assaults, but w/e. Academic at the moment.)

At any rate, the elsewhere-mentioned Mighty Jingles has War Thunder content on his YouTube channel as well, enough of which I've watched to get intrigued by the differences between the games. So I downloaded the client and gave it a spin this afternoon.

Now, my sample size is mighty small - I've only played the tank tutorial and a single ground forces Arcade Battle - but I've already noticed a couple of significant differences between War Thunder's tank mode and World of Tanks, the most surprising of which is that I seem to suck a little bit less at it and enjoy it a little bit more. Only a little, but it's surprising all the same, because War Thunder's damage model lends itself to the kind of ending all of my World of Tanks battles to date have had anyway, that being the one-shot kill from you don't even know where.

(There have also been certain parallels between the two - for instance, just as in World of Tanks to date, the team I was on happened to win the game several minutes after I found myself playing no further part in it, which is nice. :)

The tanks seem to be a bit more realistically modeled in War Thunder, even in the "Arcade" mode, than they are in World of Tanks; maybe that's just a function of the fact that the standard third-person camera position is closer to the tank, which makes everything feel a little more immediate, but the way they move and react to terrain seems more like the way tracked vehicles actually handle. (Disclaimer: I've never driven a tank, but I have handled a bulldozer. Which is hell of fun, by the way, until you hang it up on a rock. Which you can also do in War Thunder. At least when I did it to the bulldozer people weren't shooting at me.)

The damage model is more intricate, too - you can get one-shotted by virtually anybody, but at the same time, the range of systems that can be crippled while the vehicle still works is wider than it is in WoT. There are damageable modules in WoT too, but by and large the tanks there seem to operate on the old D&D "doing fine until 0 HP then dead" model. WT tanks don't have hit points, just armor, systems, and crew, and they can can be reduced to dragging themselves along by their fingernails and yet not - quite - dead. It's a different dynamic.

I like both games, and the biggest problem both of them have from my perspective is the same problem (the other players :), so I'll probably keep futzing with both of them in my copious free time for the next little while. It'll be interesting to see which one I get bored with/too pissed off at to continue first. I'll have to try out the WT air tutorial sometime soon, now that I've dug out my old WingMan Extreme 3D for Elite: Dangerous, and let you know how that goes as well.

--G.
*In fairness, I don't know that War Thunder is pay-to-pwn, but it's a Russian online multiplayer game with a "gold" economy and an online store, so really, what else is it going to be? :)
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Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
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