What Would You Change About… War Thunder?

April 27, 2015 10:02 ( Articles ) 0

 

Up next for our “What Would You Change About…” is the cross platform free to play realistic WW2 simulator War Thunder that allows you to take to the skies in a wide variety of realistic planes or engage in ground and ground to air combat as numerous armoured vehicles. The game is constantly in competition with Wargaming’s “World of …” titles, dividing the player base one way or the other; well here’s a few things we feel could be done to draw a few more over to the ranks of War Thunder.

 

 

Low-Resolution Graphics
Players gain an advantage with low graphics settings. Whilst most people will focus on the air combat, the Ground combat plays a vital role both in a ground versus ground and a ground versus air situation. One of the key elements for ground players is the use of concealment in bushes, grass and all other types of foliage where they can prepare an ambush against unsuspecting enemies, it adds an excellent element of strategy to the game and an added sense of realism which the game often boasts. The problem is that whilst a player on a high graphics setting machine is happily sat in the dense foliage waiting to strike, or ploughing through underbrush with restricted vision, those players who have turned their graphics to the lowest settings actually remove the foliage detail and would be able to see the unsuspecting player as if they were simply out in the open. This is a bit of an odd situation as some players have genuine reasons for lowering the graphics settings due to weaker gaming systems and sacrificing looks over performance/FPS to make the game playable, however you have others doing it simply to try and get an unfair advantage. The devs need to readdress the resources that are removed on lower settings so as to get rid of this game breaking cheat.

Stealing Kills
Planes taking too long to die. Due to the nature of air combat it can sometimes take a little longer to take out an enemy plane, aerial dogfights take skill and precision at higher level competitive gameplay and so once a kill is achieved it is a big victory. The problem comes in when a plane may be pretty much inoperable due to the amount of damage the attacker has dealt, leaving it as a floating disabled target simply waiting to be put out of its misery, but it still takes time to come back around and make another pass to destroy them. In the meantime somebody has swooped in and picked off your target stealing the kill and with it the rewards/points. Cue rage mode. There needs to be a system in place where once a player has dealt crippling amounts of damage to a target, essentially being the one that brought it to its ultimate demise, that they are the ones that reap the rewards if the target is then destroyed and not the person that came in with the killing blow; whether on purpose or by accident.

Team Killing
TKing in the game is pretty common. The above kill stealing situation is pretty common and there are plenty of players that feel with such a grievance, whether made on purpose or by accident, it fully justifies killing their own teammates as recompense. Similarly there are more than enough trolls that will join a team simply to attack their own teammates to annoy them and ruin the game for them/lower their Battle Rating. It’s more than common, it’s pretty rampant at times. We’d like to see a system in place that penalises these attackers, but we are conscious that friendly fire should be something in a realistic simulator game and so don’t want to remove it. What we’d suggest is a Stress system to represent the real-life mental effects of “accidentally” shooting on your own team, that could/would happen in the frenzy of battle. When you attack a teammate your stress level rises like a secondary damage that you inflict on yourself, making players be more cautious or simply taking out intentional team killers. To ensure the trolls aren’t simply trying to get in the way of teammates fire to give them Stress we’d combine this with a “Diligence” shield that when you hit a teammate they can only take so much damage before the attackers “Diligence” triggers and they can no longer deal damage to that ally, representing a pilot’s heightened caution in battle.

Map Rotation System
Playing the same map over and over isn’t fun. You get stuck in map purgatory, trapped on the same map up to 5 times one after the other simply because of a bad rotation system that tries to make sure enough players can be gathered together to play due to a dwindling play base. If the game stayed on the same map cycle for everyone, playing each map one after the other and whenever you log in to join a battle you jump into the cycle on the current map, it would mean players get to experience more maps more often.

Interesting PVP Objectives
“Kill Everyone” gets boring. Once you play the game for a long duration you start to realise that whilst every battle is different, they’re all still kind of the same and you’ve done the same maps hundreds of times, and the objective always seems to be the same “kill all the other team members”. What would like to see is some actual alternate objectives, different games that simply killing everyone isn’t always the quickest way to victory. Convoys and escort missions seem to be the easiest way to do this, forcing one team to stick around a target whether up in the air or escorting some sort of player driven supply truck on the ground, where simply taking out the target successfully leads to victory or, as the target in question, by reaching your location. Here defending teams would have to divide themselves between sticking with the target and sending out scouts looking for ambushes, whilst the attackers look for the perfect opportunity to try and pick away at the escort’s or simply try and head straight for the target. Even something completely different like the Normandy Landings with one team flying planes to an objective zone to drop paratroopers (gaining more points the closer they get to their objective before they have to drop their troops) whilst the other team get to play as the Axis with their AA guns down on the ground. Anything to break up the monotony of standard death match battles would be a bonus.

Battle Rating Calculations
Calculations and poor systems skew the Battle Ratings. Whilst not everyone cares about their personal Battle Rating, there’s more than enough that do that makes this a pretty big issue. Whilst we won’t go into the ins and outs of what type of stats we think should be considered when determining Battle Rating, we will point out some fundamental flaws with the general gameplay and set up that can skew them greatly. For example inexperienced players typically don’t know how to fly some of the more intermediate or advanced planes, so their typical tactics will be to simply fly head-on and try to outgun enemies, this greatly favours the German planes and so simply by incorporating some more developed tutorials in the game to show players how to fly different planes and use different tactics there is less of a skew due to taking advantage of inexperience. Similarly the Arcade mode is one of the most popular, in the game players rarely take the time to head up to high altitudes and simply fly around low-mid range heights for the duration of the match, which unfortunately gives a much stronger advantage to the Russian planes that are built for those types of altitudes, creating a seemingly “Russian Bias”. The rejig of the Battle Rating will allow for a better representation of who the best players are and who has the best performance, unfortunately it does mean a lot of time and effort for developers that we honestly can’t see them putting in at this stage.

 

So that’s what we’d change with War Thunder, but more importantly what do you believe should be changed? What do you think could/should be added to improve the game? What would you add to your own personal wish list? Let us know what you think in the comments below!

 

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