Hello everyone,
I probably don’t have to introduce Jingles, videomaker extraordinaire and Wargaming EU’s finest, along with Quickybaby. Given my attitude towards Wargamine EU, I am sure why you understand while I haven’t written about him earlier, but he made an interesting War Thunder video, that everyone, who wants “more realism” in the game should watch. First the video (the first few minutes are touching another matter, but I will get to that also).
So, watched it? I did, because I think it was very interesting. In my eyes, the entire video said something that a lot of people seem not to understand.
Realism doesn’t equal fun.
I am glad World of Tanks is an unrealistic arcade game, because that allows the developers to balance it much more than if they only “went for maximum balance”. The video touched two important elements I think.
First one is the airplanes and tanks on the same map. You heard Jingles, it was just frustrating. You might say, yea, it was historical, but the thing is, the entire concept is flaw from game point of view. Whenever you have an enemy that can kill you with a huge advantage, it’s always frustrating, no matter that your fighter cover will kill him a minute afterwards. That won’t matter to you, because you are dead and frustrated. A partial solution is to introduce the AA tanks (flakpanzers), but guess what: that’s unhistorical. You see, in real life, the effectivity of AA tanks was not very high. When the Allies had complete air superiority later in the war, the recommended tactic was to load as many tracer AA rounds as possible and starting blasting away in the general direction of the enemy. You won’t hit anything, but the fighters and bombers will stay away, because despite quite low chance of being hit, noone wants to fly into what they percieve as a firestorm of tracer rounds. Obviously the abovementioned real life tactic is not exactly fun for the flakpanzer player, so once again, it’s realism vs fun.
Second is the obvious – camping and oneshots” Jingles mentioned – yes, this is exactly why World of Tanks doesn’t have a “hardcore mode”. In real life, the “campers” usually won – only it wasn’t called “camping”, it was called “an ambush” and turretless tanks such as the StuG were really very, very effective in it. Firing first gives you a tremendous advantage, especially, when you are firing into places you have ranged (as in, you know that bend in the road the enemy tank appeared on is exactly 300 meters away, because you measured it when you prepared the ambush). Needless to say, this was not fun for the guys in the tanks that got ambushed and it’s not going to be fun in any game.
I don’t know. This is not bashing War Thunder per se, more like the concept of hardcore battle mode. Being killed by 1 round drastically reduces the time you actually spend fighting and increases the time you spend travelling to your destination, loading etc. (unproductive time). I really hope they get to balance this properly, because if Wargaming did this, it would be a complete, utter disaster.
