Tuesday, June 7, 2011

New WoW announced at E3

Wargaming.net announced World of Warplanes (WoW) at E3. The description sounds a lot like World of Tanks, just with airplanes instead of tanks.

On the one side this is good news, and not totally unexpected. With World of Tanks Wargaming.net opened up a new chapter in Free2Play games, and it was a big success. The game has outstanding quality and polish for a Free2Play game, and one of the best systems balancing the needs of people who play for free and the needs of the people who can afford to pay I've ever seen. Any game company that believes that they have a recipe for success are bound to try to repeat that success.

On the other side I'm a bit sceptical whether the strengths of the World of Tanks game will still work in the air. World of Tanks is all about terrain, your strategy and tactics depend on the randomly chosen map, and the replayabilty is much increased by Wargaming.net adding new maps regularly. I'm not sure how they could even do different maps in World of Warplanes. Maybe with "bomb the flag" missions? But regardless of how those maps look, the terrain risks of playing no role at all, which would make each combat very much always the same. If you just have 15 planes vs. 15 planes in the air, the permutations of different tactics are limited without the influence of terrain.

Well, as long as it has the same business model as WoT, I'll certainly try the new WoW just to see whether I like it. But personally I would have thought World of Battleships to be a better idea.

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