Making a tactical action game set at sea isn’t easy. Have you ever seen the sea? It’s boring, just a big flat, blue pond with nothing on it. Which is why developer Wargaming’s had to think carefully about how to liven up their naval warfare MMO World of Warships.
“One of the reasons why the game has taken so long in development is actually balancing that - it’s incredibly complex, because the sea is an open space,” Wargaming’s head of publishing Mike Federov told Strategy Informer in a recent interview.
”Historically World of Tanks has been a game more about action than strategy,” Fedorov explained, ”but using the landscape and the like turned it into something of a tactical game over time. However, with World of Warships, we’re on the sea. There are no obstacles, usually - at least, very little. A big challenge for the team was to make gameplay that would still inherently be a shooter, but be playable on the entirely flat surface of the ocean.”
It’s no wonder then that Wargaming has been taking its sweet time with World of Warships, which was originally announced way back in 2011. So how do you turn the open sea into a tactically interesting environment for players? Coming up with ideas wasn’t an easy process, Federov admitted. “Initially it didn’t turn out brilliantly. As such, we added a lot of tactics into the game, a lot of combination of advantages and disadvantages of the ships in order to make a proper ‘fleet’ - the make-up of the team is a key factor in success in this game.”
As well as battle-fleet formations, Wargaming has added tools like smokescreens to aid your ships in combat. Place the well and you’ll block off avenues of attack for the enemy, but place them poorly and you’ll blind your team and leave them vulnerable. Weather patterns will also affect visibility - an important factor for players to deal with during combat.
World of Warships will launch with around 80 vessels of varying specifications, so choosing the right ship for the task will also be key to victory.
”We put a lot of attention on the historical data and the funny thing is that history does a pretty good job of balancing the ships for us,” explained Fedorov. ”The advantages and disadvantages of certain ships as they were in history - like bigger ships are slower and are very difficult to damage, but can be destroyed with proper torpedoes… it was just like in history. Bigger guns do more damage but take a longer time to aim, and a longer time to reload, like in history.”
World of Warships is still in development, with no release schedule set so far. Initial Beta testing is planned for the first quarter of 2015.
