Wargaming.net :: PAX Prime 2013
Posted: 8/31/2013 4:46:16 PM
By: WebPimp

 

This year, and I say this because I don’t know the exact date, is the 15^th anniversary of Wargaming.net. They are proud of this and they should be, they have a super popular online game that virtually anyone can play. 70 million subscribers says that is the case. Of course if that is actual paying customers, we don’t know, but considering they just opened up their Austin, TX office to be their sort of central computing hub and they have over 2000 employees, they are not hurting for cash.  After the meet and greet, I was brought into a backroom in which we were fed Red Bull, cookies, water, and other assortments of goodies to be presented with what looks to be very close to the final build of World of Warplanes. Well, we knows it is close because it will be released in its final to the public come September 26 of this year.

In any case it was a beautiful looking piece of software and they are very proud of it. In case you are not aware, you get to fly planes from the various dominant countries from WW I, WW II, and the Korean war with a very major attention to detail. Each plane flies realistically because while the devs did a lot of research into how each plane flew, they also brought in consultants and living veterans to give a helping hand. So while there probably isn’t anyone from WW I still alive to describe what it was like to do battle in a biplane made of what I can only assume was paper and canvas, they have enough aviation experts to give you the proper feel.  Controls on the game are simple and very customizable allowing the user to be able to easily jump into the game, grab a plane from the bottom of the tech tree of available planes, and take to flight. If you’re a flight sim whore and expect your controls to be down to the very specific level of flap extensions, etc, they give you that option as well. Nice, but the goal has always been that anyone can come up and play so the finer details of flying a plane are nice, but not a requirement.

After flying around a bit and ingesting some more baked goods, we were handed the controls of World of Tanks: Xbox 360 edition. You  get the same thing that you would get online via PC in which you can play with 15 people and have a plethora of tanks to choose from in the same era as the World of Warplanes; WW I, WW II, and the Korean War. This time though the UI changed to take advantage of a larger screen the consoles play on instead of the smaller 2ft average screen found in the typical PC gamers house.  The speed of the game with increased to make things a little faster in the game and the progression loop has been made a bit easier so that you aren’t just sitting there at your console doing a pain grind to get to what you want vehicle wise. The developers who custom made the game are the former devs from Day One studios, the same people who created Mech Assault so they know what they are doing when it comes to control wise on a console. The game will be free for play via your Xbox LIVE Gold subscription and if you head on over to worldoftanks.com/xbox you can register for the beta that is taking play right now and get your game on via the arcade.