Hands-on Look at World of Warships

August 18, 2014 16:19 ( Articles ) 0

Hands-on Look at World of Warships

 

We got a healthy dose of Wargaming’s time this year. Along with the interview with the CEO, we also met with PR Manager Diana Radestki and got a hands-on look at the latest incarnation of the franchise World of Warships as well as a bit of a heads up with the company and what was currently happening with their games

 

We managed to actually check out the game back in E3 the other month, but we were already informed prior to our GamesCom test that a number of changes had already been made from the E3 feedback that the company had gained. Firstly the camera view now brings players closer to their ship so that they are more involved in the action, a welcomed change especially now that they had also enhanced the damage models in the game as well. Players were able to have more control over their ship’s and also the journey/distance time to reach a battle was drastically reduce meaning that there was less time where players were having to wait before reaching the action packed combat.

World of Warships is by far the most graphically impressive of the three titles under Wargaming’s new image (take into account that they have developed games outside of the “World of …” series), with far more impressive graphics, typical warship models boasting around 200,000 pixels in comparison to their 15,000 pixel tank counterparts. Due to the protracted nature and level of detail it can take up to 6 months to develop one of the larger Warships and so, as would be expected release of ships will be much slower than that of the tanks in World of Tanks. The Alpha graphics we saw are constantly being improved on, so it will be really interesting to see how the game looks at release.

 

For our test (still in Alpha phase) we were put into the middle of a sort of escort mission taking control of one of the medium Japanese battleships (purely so it was easier to control and harder to die), fighting off enemy US ships whilst our convoy tried to reach the base. Movement of your ship is a simple as controlling the WS keys for forward and reverse speed and using AD to steer left and right, players are able to control the camera angle with the mouse, which also aims their targeting reticule and using the left and right mouse buttons to fire off different missile rounds. Combat is something that definitely has a steeper learning curve to it as the battles take place over such long distances players must often fire ahead of a moving ship in the hopes of it sailing into the line of fire at the right time. After around 15 minutes we’d had a healthy dose of combat and managed to sink four ships (not bad for a beginner) and it’s easy to see how players will be able to perfect this game and adapts tactics and strategy when working together with larger fleets.

This was the first time the devs had focused on PvE content but depending on the feedback gained from GamesCom they decided they may be turning the mission we played into a tutorial mode to give players the chance to learn how to control their ships. The game is set to go into closed beta between now and the end of the year, with no concrete date other than it being 2014, but signups will be imminent.



 

Top