War Thunder is up next on our "Things You Would Change About..." feature, the free to play cross platform World War II simulator where players get to fly planes and drive tanks in an action packed strategic realistic battle sim. With constant competition with the Wargaming franchise (World of Tanks, World of Warplanes and World of Warships) the player base is pulled into different directions, and whilst there are many things we like about the more realistic feel of War Thunder, there are a few crucial elements that we feel could do with a revamp.
Low Res Graphics
The ability to turn your graphics quality down shouldn’t give an advantage. When it comes to Ground Combat where players are rolling around in their various armoured vehicles one of the big game changers is concealment and cover, the ability to hide in the bushes and pop out to surprise attack an enemy as you painstakingly lay in wait for the perfect time to ambush. The amount of foliage in an area that players use for concealment can be quite demanding on resources and so often requires high-level settings to render without a problem, what is a problem is that those players whose systems aren’t good enough and have to turn down the graphics to play and get a decent enough FPS to be competitive suddenly gain an advantage as it essentially removes the majority of the foliage that other players are using as cover leaving them (unknowingly) fully exposed with both players seeing something completely different. Whilst we don’t believe players with low-end rigs should necessarily be punished and forced to have higher settings at the expense of their gameplay, we do feel that the developers need to rework just exactly which resources, textures and effects are removed when the game is played at lower settings.
Kill Stealing
Planes that are obviously going to die should be dead sooner. This is more a problem faced by players in the air combat portion of the game, as often as not getting a kill on an enemy plane when up against more competitive players isn’t simply a case of heading straight on and firing, it’s a lot more acrobatic, it’s making multiple passes to take out an enemy with numerous strafes. The problem comes when you’ve done enough damage that it essentially rendered an enemy completely useless to the point where it is simply an act of landing a final blow to their already soon to be destroyed plane, but still needing to make that final pass to finish them off. This leaves enough time for other players to come in and finish the target off for you and stealing the kill (and prestige/rewards that goes with it), whether by accident or as often as not intentionally, creating much contempt and animosity. We say that once a plane has taken an amount of damage to render it almost useless that regardless of who gets the final blows then when/if the plane does get destroyed then it is the player that brought it to that state that gets the kill.
Team Killing
Team killing to solve your grievances is rampant. As with the situation above as often as not a kill steal results in players turning on their own teammates and killing them, whether the stolen kill is simply bad sportsmanship or a misunderstanding, it really doesn’t seem to matter for many people. Combined with the trolls that once in a team who start gunning down all their teammates from the beginning for the lols it can be a pretty big issue and really makes the game unenjoyable. What we would recommend is some form of Stress Level system where if you shoot upon your teammates you take stress damage, representing a pilots real-life panic as they “accidentally” hit their allies in combat, and once you take enough damage then you are out of the game. We’d add in a invulnerability shield of some sorts that when you do take damage off another player your shield pops and you can’t take any more, the reason for this is that we believe there should still be some realism and friendly fire, but with a Stress Level system you will find those same trolls forever trying to get into the way of your fire arc to purposefully give you Stress, and so it should be mitigated.
Map Rotation
Getting stuck on the same maps over and over. It can be pretty tiresome playing a game and getting stuck on the same map five times in a row due to bad map rotation trying to ensure that the dwindling number of players can be gathered together. What we would personally like to see is the same constant rotation of the maps, one after the other, so that everybody is playing on the same map version at that same time, regardless of when you log in and start playing the cycle is ongoing so that players have a chance to keep mixing the game up.
Event Objectives
More than just "kill all the enemy" objectives. The problem with the game, particularly when some players are reaching endgame and have been playing for such long time, is that the game starts to get boring simply flying planes or driving tanks and there’s not enough objective-based missions to participate in in multiplayer mode. What would be great would be some objective-based PVP missions, where simply gaining altitude and taking out the enemy isn’t the only/easiest objective. A variety of escorting missions such as a ground convoy target that players must take out, hell even allow a player to drive some sort of fuel/munitions truck that has no attack capabilities but must reach an objective point whilst enemy planes try to destroy it, or smaller fighter planes escorting a slower larger plane on its run, forcing one team to stick by their defend objective. What about a Normandy Landing where some players must try to fly from one end of the map to the other to make their paratrooper drop whilst other players take on the axis AA guns on the ground? Just something different; just something fun.
Battle Rating
Bad systems skew Battle Rating. Not that everyone cares about their Battle Rating, but plenty of people do and the game does encourage a competitive play style. Whilst there are always pros and cons to how a BR system is worked out, what stats are taken into account, we’re not proposing the calculations of how this value is determined but a few changes that might stop skewing it. Firstly the introduction of some in game Tutorials on how to use your plane correctly (and that is where the major skew typically happens) and some intermediate techniques on survivability and engaging the enemy will stop players simply using a "let's fly head-on at the enemy and try and shoot them" technique, which favours (and therefore skews the BR) the German planes. Similarly Arcade games rarely take place above 1000ft, players often hugging the ground and playing at much lower altitudes instead of spending the time to climb, and at lower altitudes this can give a greater advantage (therefore again skewing the BR) to Russian planes. The problem here is that Arcade mode is one of the most popular modes in the game; so perhaps we should look at the polling new calculations of how BR is determined after all...
These are some of the things that we would change about War Thunder, but what do you think? What would you change about this game? Would you add anything else to the list? We await your opinions! Let us know!!!!!
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