War Thunder: a free to play air combat MMO

[Marko Dash]

i found this a while ago but only downloaded and tried it out yesterday. so far this looks to be what everyone wants out of World of War Planes and more, it also runs better. it looks like they'll be doing the same thing as wargaming with adding the other parts of the air-sea-land triangle later, but it looks like in this game all three element will share a battlespace. i prefer it over WoWP already because of the better framerate and the inclusion of heavy bombers.

youtube playlist from the mighty jingles, also good for WoT stuff

main war thunder site itself


i'm only at tier 2-3 atm with the same username minus the spacing, anybody else playing?

[xthetenth]

Played a bit. It is better than WoWP right now, but if WoWP doesn't become better than WT I won't feel either is worth playing much although I may play WoWP because I'm stupid good at it and I want the gold for World of Warships.

WT has traditional camera controls for a flight game, which is mouselook. That means if I want to play with a joystick, I need three damn hands to control my plane. The flight model is pretty nice, it looks good, and currently the game mode is much better. However, that camera alone makes it so that getting bounced is pretty much a death sentence, which makes good dogfights an exception rather than the rule as it is in WoWP.

Plus, the stuff around the game is crap. The way of handling crews offers far more change in competence and the entire range can be bought, which smacks of pay to win (as do the premiums, which don't seem to have the serious downsides of WoT and WoWP ones), the economy is terrible in a way that makes high end planes not really worth it because of huge costs, and the balance seems mediocre at best. And last of all, the damn camera simulating pilot motion or whatever makes me sick. Like actually carsick.

[Thunderfire]

How many players are playing WT compared to WoWP or WW2 Online? We had several WoWP Beta Tournaments before christmas. The tournament was fun and I managed to kill all opponents in one of the final matches. WoWP is a nice game for quick action.

[CaptHawkeye]

Are we really putting World War 2 Online and the World Of games in the same league?

I can't believe Cornered Rat Studios is still in business.

[xthetenth]

WT is farther along and it's got a lot of people playing it from the hardcore WoT crowd and the WoWP testers. That's because other than a few flaws I consider crippling it is farther along and more polished.

I'm not really a representative sample though. WoWP just clicks for me. I really like the focus it has on dogfighting and how the mechanics emphasize actually fighting. But I know a decent number of even the top WoWP players play a lot of WT, and a few others (like me) don't play all that often.

[Agent Sorchus]

Hey X, did they ever fix the joystick delay in WoWPs? I tried it a while back but was basically helpless thanks to that little bug.

[xthetenth]

PM'd answer. I'm trying to stay very careful on the NDA for various reasons.

[darthkommandant]

I can finally play this on my old laptop. I got bf110 as my primary plane that I use as a high speed bomb truck. Than I try to shoot down planes once I drop my bombs. Anyone else here play?

[xthetenth]

What do you think of the grind?

I ask because most people I know left after they made the economy so dependent on grinding credits. Also I was hellishly sick of mouse over enemy plane and shoot him when your nose is on him and pray it actually foes something till your wing falls off.

[darthkommandant]

I was playing mostly to get the 110 so the grind wasn't that bad for me and I use a 360 controller for controls. It works pretty well.

[Tolya]

It was a very fast, tacticky game where thinking got you rewards, until the 1.29 came out.

They nerfed most of the weaponry so it's a tedious "rid your enemy with bullets" fest.

But hey, nerds whined about OP.

[Tolya]

Okay, let me elaborate.

Before 1.29, there were some planes that were clearly overpowered. Okay, maybe overpowered isnt the best word - some of the other planes were underpowered and combat didnt seem fair. I spent a great deal of time playing those underpowered planes (US side - mainly because .50 BMG's didnt simulate incendiary ammo) and I didn't really notice the problem, I was able to score in the top of the match almost every time.

Then I moved to Russian planes and later to British. There is one particularly ugly one that I grew to love - the Beaufighter. Turned like a brick, climbed like an elevator. And it had 4x20mm Hispano cannons, which ripped to shreds almost anything. The main gripe most Beau victims had with that plane was that its salvo could rip you to shreds in miliseconds. Hey, these are FUCKING QUAD 20mm cannons, of course they do. Funnily enough, the people whining the loudest in the game were the ones who tried to take me HEAD on.

Also, unreliability of critical hits - you could be shot down by when they only slightly winged you, but they hit a fuel tank or smth and you exploded. Which made the game quick and deadly and stressed the importance of good energy management and knowing your planes strengths and weaknesses. Now? Not so much.

I stopped playing when 1.29 came out and suddenly 20mm cannons didnt do jack shit. When previously I was able to score 17+ kills using the Beau in one fight, I was struggling to get 7-8. And it's not that the game's difficulty was raised - I wouldn't mind that. It's that now it takes so much time to score a kill it actually stops being fun, when you are on someone's tail and are pumping 2 reloads worth of ammo until he goes down. It's just tedious.

[xthetenth]

The Beaufighter was horribly OP because gaijin thought it was acceptable to use placeholder flight models for a bunch of planes including it that didn't include such minor things as most of the contributors of drag, so it was stupid fast and could make slashing attacks with total impunity.

An entirely critical damage based damage model is the worst thing because it leads to stuff like being behind a guy pumping belts into his tail when someone makes a pass on you and takes your wing off with one hit. It means that even if you're playing well you can get killed because the RNG hates you to a huge degree and is utterly infuriating. Add in the mouse controls being very easy but quite clunky and the joystick controls being totally unworkable in combat due to the moving crosshairs and horrid camera control, and the only worthwhile control scheme is play mouse and mouse over people and click on them for xp because I am totally a good pilot guys.

[Vendetta]

The fact that the damage model is all criticals makes problems for fighters with smaller weapons as well. The P-51's 6 .50 cal can guarantee leaving a plane unflyable, but that will just mean that the P-51 gets an assist because someone else will pick up the kill on the crippled plane, meaning that the P-51 pilot just gets infinite assists and no actual kills.

Also, the Russian planes have a different flight model to the rest, because they're programmed by different people to all the others, and the two teams don't just not communicate, they're not allowed to communicate because the people working on the Russian planes have access to documents that are still classified, so they're not allowed to discuss what they're working on. The biggest effect of this is that when Russian planes are damaged, well, they just don't care very much, they fly almost as well as when they're not.


And people cry about world of tanks having Russian bias....

[xthetenth]

Hey, world of tanks had Russian bias a few years ago back before it went open beta, that counts, right?

[Tolya]

Oh, so a passing burst could ruin your day? Big surprise, air combat isn't about withstanding a barrage of fire, it's about energy management and smart manouvering to get into a position where an enemy can't shoot you, but you can shoot him. I've spent 50+ hours playing fighters in WT and there were very few instances where I didn't think that me getting shot down was because of my own mistakes, like allowing someone to get onto my tail, or failing to see an enemy who zoomed by and made my Airacobra explode to bits with a single hit from a 20mm cannon. Solution? Don't get shot at.

And just for once, WT mouse controls are perfect for casual gameplay in an arcade flight simey. I can actually feel like there is a pilot sitting inside that cabin that does the tedious "re4l1st1c" stuff, leaving me with tactical decisions, and keeping tabs on what happens around you. I didn't play WT for realism, I have A10 Warthog for that, thank you. I played WT for that excellent blend of arcade and realism. So some planes were overpowered - so what? The whole thing that made WT so much fun was that you need to know what you are up against and what are it's pros and cons. And before I moved to the oh-so OP Soviet and British trees I spent a great deal of time flying US planes. Yes, 6x.50's were quite puny, but they fixed that by making all weapons do zero damage.

So Beau was fast and well armed. Well, it also turned like a brick and once someone actually wanted to shoot you down, you were as good as dead, because it's wings were made of tinfoil. I spent a couple of hours flying solely the Beau, but was seldom shot down by one, because I knew not to take one FUCKING HEAD ON.

But hey, an online arcade combat game that actually forces you to use your brains and wits cant be popular with the majority of people, big surprise. But for a brief moment it was a game which rewarded actual thought and skill instead of mindless grind.

[Stark]

The fact that the damage model is all criticals makes problems for fighters with smaller weapons as well. The P-51's 6 .50 cal can guarantee leaving a plane unflyable, but that will just mean that the P-51 gets an assist because someone else will pick up the kill on the crippled plane, meaning that the P-51 pilot just gets infinite assists and no actual kills.

This really sounds like a scoring problem; after all, air warfare is basically built around fifteen guys claiming every single kill.

Also, the Russian planes have a different flight model to the rest, because they're programmed by different people to all the others, and the two teams don't just not communicate, they're not allowed to communicate because the people working on the Russian planes have access to documents that are still classified, so they're not allowed to discuss what they're working on. The biggest effect of this is that when Russian planes are damaged, well, they just don't care very much, they fly almost as well as when they're not.

Do they also use completely different interpretation of the mindless statistics they 'research' like in World of Tanks too? If they use rolls for hits, what use is all the TEH CLASSIFIED ARMOUR MILLIMETERS anyway? Oh noes, on the Pe-3 some factories mounted SLIGHTLY DIFFERENT ARMOUR FOR NAVIGATOR!!!!!!111111

I mean I know a part of the marketing sell is 'accuracy' (like it is in the fucking fictional Farmville) but come on.

[Vendetta]

This really sounds like a scoring problem; after all, air warfare is basically built around fifteen guys claiming every single kill.

Yeah, not the first or only that WT has either. For instance in many games you win the match by bombing ground targets, but bombing ground targets didn't give many points so if you did the thing that directly caused your team to win you got sod all, whereas the guy farming air kills which are all but irrelevant to actually winning got all the points.

They've currently turned the credit economy up to stupid proportions as well, meaning that from even quite early in the game you have almost no chance of being able to afford new planes once you've ranked up enough to unlock them.

Do they also use completely different interpretation of the mindless statistics they 'research' like in World of Tanks too? If they use rolls for hits, what use is all the TEH CLASSIFIED ARMOUR MILLIMETERS anyway? Oh noes, on the Pe-3 some factories mounted SLIGHTLY DIFFERENT ARMOUR FOR NAVIGATOR!!!!!!111111

I mean I know a part of the marketing sell is 'accuracy' (like it is in the fucking fictional Farmville) but come on.

I'm not sure why they have gone into that much detail anyway, excepting that they're using the IL-2 engine and maybe it gets upset if it doesn't get to model every rivet and stictch. There are multiple levels of realism in the flight model which does turn up all the way to propellerhead flight sim nerd as well, but I'm not sure how big the market for that is in the free to play competitive online space. (certainly I hear it's hard to get matchmade into even the middle level of "historical" battles at times because the playerbase isn't big enough, and the high tier planes can be impossible to get a game in for the same reason.)

[xthetenth]

Oh, so a passing burst could ruin your day? Big surprise, air combat isn't about withstanding a barrage of fire, it's about energy management and smart manouvering to get into a position where an enemy can't shoot you, but you can shoot him. I've spent 50+ hours playing fighters in WT and there were very few instances where I didn't think that me getting shot down was because of my own mistakes, like allowing someone to get onto my tail, or failing to see an enemy who zoomed by and made my Airacobra explode to bits with a single hit from a 20mm cannon. Solution? Don't get shot at.

That's all good and well until you pounce on a guy and he just won't die despite getting riddled with a barrage of fire, or when you trade exposure for a half second burst from a plane with a single .50 and a .30 for an easy kill setup and your wing falls off from about three bullets. Any notion of risk/reward is horribly thrown off because neither risk nor reward are actually predictable. But hey, it's re4l1st1c and oh wait you were using that term to be snide despite making an argument in favor of the single worst mechanic in the game because it's re4l1st1c. Arguing in favor of this mechanic belies your claims of being super tactical, because this single mechanic made it far too

And just for once, WT mouse controls are perfect for casual gameplay in an arcade flight simey. I can actually feel like there is a pilot sitting inside that cabin that does the tedious "re4l1st1c" stuff, leaving me with tactical decisions, and keeping tabs on what happens around you. I didn't play WT for realism, I have A10 Warthog for that, thank you. I played WT for that excellent blend of arcade and realism. So some planes were overpowered - so what? The whole thing that made WT so much fun was that you need to know what you are up against and what are it's pros and cons. And before I moved to the oh-so OP Soviet and British trees I spent a great deal of time flying US planes. Yes, 6x.50's were quite puny, but they fixed that by making all weapons do zero damage.

Generally we save words like excellent for control schemes that don't make any vertical maneuvers but the trivial ones (and even some of those like looping) totally impossible to do with precision or accurate control of your plane. Somehow reducing everything to an energy calculation and mousing on the other guy when some planes work best when using those maneuvers (seriously, the work I had to do to do a simple yo-yo without hemorrhaging energy and getting myself killed was ridiculous). Also, you'll note that I'm not even really basing my criticism of the game on imbalanced planes (also, some of those US planes are silly good, and I got a lot of kills with six fifties). What I'm basing it on is the gunfire adding ridiculous amounts of random luck to a game that is theoretically so much about aerial tactics and then adding a control scheme that requires you to make some things really easy and some things ridiculously hard with notionally historic planes as if that won't cause any systemic imbalance.

So Beau was fast and well armed. Well, it also turned like a brick and once someone actually wanted to shoot you down, you were as good as dead, because it's wings were made of tinfoil. I spent a couple of hours flying solely the Beau, but was seldom shot down by one, because I knew not to take one FUCKING HEAD ON.

Yep, I've shot down Beaufighters in an SB-2M multiple times. I wouldn't say it was that fragile though, I've riddled more than a few with a lot of bullets and had them hold together, and even caught a few with a nice bunch of cannon shells before they went. It was also repugnantly OP because it had ridiculous speed no matter what stupid decisions you made and the firepower to make that all you needed. It's really nice to say that all you need to do is not take a Beau head on when it's got so much firepower that even if you break off into a good maneuver he's got enough firepower he might just cheese you anyway if he's not terrible at deflection shots. I've seen multiple mediocre pilots turn into super aces once they hopped in that stupid thing.

But hey, an online arcade combat game that actually forces you to use your brains and wits cant be popular with the majority of people, big surprise. But for a brief moment it was a game which rewarded actual thought and skill instead of mindless grind.

I have no problems using my brains and my wits, I just found that compared to WoWP, War Thunder barely rewarded either because of how silly random the damage model is and how much the controls isolate me from my plane.

Oh, and Vendetta, is roughly 10% the number you hear for the proportion of folks playing full real battles?

[Vendetta]

Oh, and Vendetta, is roughly 10% the number you hear for the proportion of folks playing full real battles?

I don't know about proportion of the playerbase, only a number of the youtube commentators I know of who talk about the game say "basically I cannot get into this gametype/aircraft because too few players at anything but totally peak times".

[Thunderfire]

I have no problems using my brains and my wits, I just found that compared to WoWP, War Thunder barely rewarded either because of how silly random the damage model is and how much the controls isolate me from my plane.

I haven't played WT for a while but the damage model of the current version of WoWP is pretty bad too. WoWP gets closer to WT flight/damage model with every patch and this isn't a good thing is you ask me.

[Tolya]

Are we playing the same game here? Do you play on Arcade or FRB? Before 1.29 I have never seen someone in a fighter taking too many hits. The latest patch nerfed the 20mm cannons, didn't do shit about much else, and some of the planes became much more susceptible to a passing critical shot (flying the 'cobras is suicidal right now). And the .50's still suck, even though they supposedly introduced incendiary ammo. Are you really suggesting that WoWP's exceptionally bad HP based system is a better solution?

With a little help from the keyboard, I have never had a problem performing a manouver like a high yo-yo properly enough and have never been shot down because I bled too much energy. Sure, you won't do a 100% proper sim manouver, but that is beside the point in an arcade match (and I only play arcade). For me, the game gave me immersion and perception of participating in aerial combat because I could concentrate on things that matter, instead of falling prey to the guys who have invested more money than me into a controller setup like in Warbirds.

For me, WT is as "realistic" as an arcade fighter game can be, because it abstracts all the tedious pilot stuff that simboy nerds salivate about and lets you concentrate on actual combat, not mixture management. It also doesn't limit you to cockpit, where you will not see shit without an expensive TrackIR system.

[Vendetta]

Are we playing the same game here? Do you play on Arcade or FRB? Before 1.29 I have never seen someone in a fighter taking too many hits.

I think there's a feedback problem, because WT is a purely simulation based damage model, you can have done enough damage to control surfaces to guarantee a player is going to crash, but the game won't credit anyone until they actually do. The "taking too many hits" problem is more likely because people are pumping shots into an already fucked plane because it hasn't actually "died" yet. Of course, if you don't do that then someone will just come along and ninja the kill

A HP model is totally gamey, but it does give that immediate feedback that you have done something not just gotten a bit of XP for hitting them without seeing whether that hit was irrelevant or shredded their control surfaces and doomed them to a minute of futile attempts to stay in the air.

[Tolya]

I don't think it works that way. I've very rarely seen an instance of ninja'ing someone's else's kill. Hey, when there's a single plane with 10 guys/gals on his tail, the outcome will only satisfy one person, leave 9 disappointed and 1 angry. And those times when I was credited with a kill that should have been someone's elses happened so rarely that I have trouble recalling more than one instance in my entire playtime.

HP based models bore me to death, but they also credit the kill to whoever finished off a tank, so it's a built in ninja kill mechanic, which is just idiotic. Although WoT bored me to death in the beta around 5th tier, maybe they changed it.

Whining that "omg bullets do unreliable damage" is just plain stupid, and wanting a predictable "risk/reward" is perhaps the dumbest thing you can say, because ww2 air combat wassn't resolved using excel spreadsheets, last time I checked.

If anything, they should up the damage off all guns in the game and finally fix the goddamn fifty cals.

Also, if you render the tail elevators inoperable, then you usually get the kill credit. Anything else is just cosmetics - you can fly without the rudder or without the ailerons with a bit of luck, since the arcade flight model lets you retain some control and at least crash-land somewhere and get XP and save repair money.

[xthetenth]

Would you care to state a single advantage to a purely crit based damage system other than your precious "re4l1sm"? Would you mind telling me why a damage model which throws the notion of controlled risk out the window isn't at odds with tactical gameplay where thought is rewarded?

Mocking "re4l1sm" and extolling how tactical a game is and then reacting to a criticism of a mechanic by dismissing tactics because realism isn't very consistent. Also, in practice, in WoWP, nine times out of ten hit points mandate an amount of damage that requires getting in an advantageous position for a sustained burst, so there's less kill stealing, and WoWP rewards primarily for damage because it can so kill stealing isn't much of an issue except for super precious stat padding.