Erik: Any other “World of…” games in the pipeline? World of Ships, perhaps?
Anton: A nice guess! Yes, the third title we are working on is World of Battleships devoted to combat vessels of the 20th century. By the way, the economic and Global Map integration that I’ve described a bit earlier will concern the third title as well.
Erik: Any plans for downloadable content? Will free-to-play pilots be able to keep up?
Anton: Yes, we’re committed to maintaining the game with regular new content, updates and fixes. We’ll introduce new battle arenas, vehicle models and national tech trees. Also, we’ll implement new game modes in future updates. An important point here is that new content (with the only exception of premium vehicles) will be accessible for all players. Premium vehicles will be represented with unusual experimental models and prototypes, trophy and land lease warbirds. None of them will give paying players an edge over non-payers.
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| American Planes “Tech Tree” | German Planes “Tech Tree” | Soviet Planes “Tech Tree” |
| Download the full image (2.71 MB) | Download the full image (1.45 MB) | Download the full image (1.53 MB) |
Erik: Are limited ammo and fuel factors that a player will have to deal with?
Anton: Speaking of fuel, we don’t plan to introduce it as a gaming entity. An average 15 minutes battle will be just too short to add such a feature as fuel capacity.
Ammo is a bit trickier as each vehicle has an authentic number of bombs and shells. At the current stage in-game vehicles come with a three times bigger ammo load than their real-life equivalents, and we haven’t decided on the final ammunition establishment size yet. One thing, we don’t want players to fire thoughtlessly, and many surely will if they have limitless ammo. Another thing is that it will be no fun to run out of ammo in a 20-seconds time, with almost 15 minutes of actual battle ahead.
We need to find sort of a golden mean and are now gathering stats to define an agreeable amount of ammo per battle.
Erik: Will the game be browser based? If so, will performance vary for any of the browsers out there?
Anton: World of Warplanes will be a client game with its own unique interface and a browser based multiplayer add-on, Clan Wars. It’s too early to name the client size, but I recon it will grab somewhat close to 2 GB from your disc space.
Erik: Does connection speed factor into matchmaking (e.g., will someone with a fast broadband connection play against someone with an ISDN speed connection?)
Anton: Nope, we aren’t planning to introduce extra game modes to suit a particular connection speed or ping time.
Actually, your connection speed isn’t the most burning issue: the volume of data exchange during a battle won’t be really big. The ping, on the other hand, will be a truly crucial factor as air combat is highly ping-sensitive. And right now we are busy working out ways to lower ping requirements.
Erik: Where are the World of Warplanes servers geographically located?
Anton: And yet again, the question has to do with ping-sensitivity. Due to this factor, Global Alpha (just like the Closed Alpha a bit earlier) runs on three servers at a time: American, European and Russian.
Erik: The World of Warplanes FAQ mentions that planes from different countries could be fighting on the same team: will there be region specific matches with aircrafts from a specific country fighting over representative terrain such as Germans vs. British over the English Channel?
Anton: Matches won’t be region specific — instead, teams will be formed with regard to the battle level. In other words, a team can’t have both a brittle tier 1 biplane and a fierce top-tier jet, but it might field aircraft from different nations.
Unlike Random battles, historic battles will have clear cut lists of vehicle tiers, nations and battling arenas good for this or that particular conflict: e.g., a team of British planes will confront a team of German aircraft.
Erik: Thank you Anton for taking the time to answer questions for SimHQ readers.
Anton: Thank you for showing interest to our game!
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