WoT rattrace, Caliber development and new games: what was told behind closed doors at the Wargaming Fest: Tank Day

Wargaming is one of the few gaming companies in the post-Soviet space that does not just stay on

afloat, and still manages to constantly indulge innew experiments. The huge revenues from World of Warships and World of Tanks allow her to organize large-scale events of almost national scale and implement far-reaching projects. The Wargaming Fest, which was held in Minsk on September 15, marked a new round in the history of the gaming giant. The editors also attended the closed press conference gg. Below you will learn about the most important upcoming events.innovations in key projects of the company, you will learn about what games are under development and all this from the first lips of developers and managers. Preparing tea, cookies for battle, we plunge into the Wargaming universe.

Holiday atmosphere

Almost at any press conferenceJournalists are tormented by boring information about the success of the company, its importance for the world and other advertising rubbish. This news will be of interest only to some investors and other business elites, who all the same know everything from their sources. So we will not dwell on this part of the presentation for a long time. We only note that the Wargaming Fest in Minsk really feels like a red day on the calendar, a national holiday like e-sports championships in South Korea. Crowds of people in headsets and tank balls in their hands, a lot of various contests and stylized classic games (for example, tic-tac-toe, where tank hedgehogs instead of crosses, and aiming nets instead of zeroes). All this perfectly correlates with mass sporting events and the neo-Stalinist brutalist architecture of Minsk. In a word - atmospheric. In total, WG Fest was visited by a record 250,000 people, the headliners of the festival were The Offspring, Beasts, Vopli Vidoplyasova and Krambambulya.

Food for thought comes from Wargaming statistics.regarding their players. Oddly enough, despite the fact that the World of Tanks community is considered quite toxic (although this is true for all post-Soviet players), most of them think positively, enjoy the game and, of course, like to win. Directly, the pumping process is of interest to 35% of the players, the tactical component is 34%, and those for whom the main guarantee of pleasure is the battle itself was 30%

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New major publisher

Finally we got to the most delicious -directly the games themselves. And here Wargaming has Napoleonic plans. Remember the Wargaming Game Center? The application hanging on the background caused a reaction among gamers, akin to an allergic one, despite the optimization and provided amenities. However, the company did not abandon the initiative to launch a multi-product launcher. On the contrary, the final version of the application will be similar to Blizzard Battle.net. Only games of Wargaming and its partners will be presented in it. You may notice that the company begins to engage in publishing activities more and more, raising gamedev in Russia, Belarus and Ukraine. Previously, indie developers had to either limit themselves to their funds or look for Western investors.

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The result of this collaboration was two newproject, which will soon appear in the Wargaming Game Center. The first is the real-time strategy of Steel Division 2, the second is the Partisans tactical strategy. The developers of the latter is the indie studio Alter Games. Her team consists of 15 people: former employees of Allods Team (Allods series), Nival Interactive (Blitzkrieg series and Heroes of Might and Magic V), as well as Skyriver Studios (Mechanoids series). The history of Partizan will take us to the Pskov region of 1941, where we have to learn the life of the people's avengers, survive on enemy territory, arrange sabotage and with the help of ingenuity, destroy the superior enemy forces. The game combines the elements of a real-time tactical strategy, management and global strategy when planning the entire partisan campaign. Each character under the control of the player will have his own character, a tree of pumping abilities and preferences in choosing weapons. In general, the Partisan gameplay resembles a cross between Man of War (Behind Enemy Lines) and Darkest Dungeon (elements of planning, the ability to leave a mission). Below you can see a demonstration from the developers themselves.

Caliber

I took the lion's share of the press conferencepresentation of the multi-player action "Caliber". The speaker was the publishing director of the development team Kirill Stadnik. Unfortunately, since the game is at the stage of closed beta testing, we were not told about any gameplay features. Instead, attention was paid to the details of the development process itself.

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When making certain decisions, the team“Caliber” is primarily guided by the rule “one in the field is not a warrior”, that is, everything rests on the command component. Each operative has his own set of abilities, equipment and weapons, and this set cannot be changed. As Cyril himself admitted in a personal conversation, such a decision was made with an eye on the Blizzard shooter - Overwatch. It is also worthwhile to understand that “Caliber” is not a special forces simulator, as it is often called. This is a tactical action aimed at a mass audience, rather arcade in its mechanics. At the same time, the developers have been studying for a long time the details of the equipment of a particular soldier and even communicate with weapon manufacturers. All this is done to give the game maximum visual authenticity, to avoid various stereotypes, the “cranberry” or “Hollywood” image of the fighters, but realism is not an end in itself.

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“Creating a model in Caliber is not justto sit and draw, in the first place is to sit and study. This is to communicate with weapons manufacturers or fighters of real special forces. Only after this preparatory work, which can last several months, is a model of the operative, weapons and the corresponding animation created ”- Kirill Stadnik, Publishing Director of the Caliber team

So every time someone accuses developers of unrealistic games, remember: somewhere far away game designers break keyboards in a fit of rage.

Among other things, in the project they want to implementthose special forces that rarely appear in games and are unlikely to appear at all. To prove his words, at the end of the presentation, Wargaming presented models of the Belarusian special forces. My question about the introduction of Ukrainian fighters into the game, Cyril answered ambiguously. On the one hand, this is a huge market, and on the other, these are possible consequences due to the political situation. It is also not clear which special units to implement: those formed after the collapse of the USSR will not be interesting, but there is too little information about modern ones.

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By the way, in the future, "Caliber" will affect not onlymodernity. There are various events in the ideas dedicated to the conflicts of the 20th century, for example, the war in Afghanistan. But this is still in the far box, first you need to make the base of the game.

What about Tanchiki

At the end of the conference, Wargaming speakers finallytalked about their main brainchild - World of Tanks. Starting September 18th, WG Fest will be transferred to the virtual space, along with numerous events and innovations. The beginning of the event will mark the performance of The Offspring in every hangar, where the musicians will settle until October 7th. By the way, when they were animated, Motion capture technology was used. Later, the players will have the opportunity to leave the legendary group at home forever, although it is not yet reported in what form: whether it will be just another crew or something more interesting is unknown.

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World of Tanks kicks off in late Septemberthe long-awaited “Tank Race” mode, which the players really liked in 2014. Since then, the developers have finalized both the race track and the mode itself. As usual, for successful races, players will receive a variety of prizes, including unique camouflage and gold.

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With the end of the Wargaming Fest, players will meet moreone surprise: ray tracing technology will be available soon in World of Tanks! More specifically, Ray Traced Shadows. It will be possible to test the technology in October using the World of Tanks ecCore RT program. The new feature was developed jointly with Intel, and the best part is that it does not require an RTX family video card. Below is a demo with RT turned on and off. In dynamics, the difference will be more noticeable.

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In addition, the company continuesexperiment with the development of artificial intelligence. The capabilities of the bots were first demonstrated during the "Last Frontier" mode. Since then, Wargaming has improved the behavior of the AI as a whole, although it weakened it directly in the battle itself, as for many players the bots were too complicated. In the future, we will see more PvE modes dedicated to various historical events. The largest will take place on the anniversary of the end of World War II.

Other innovations in World of Tanks have long beenknown: on the test server the strength points of low-level armored vehicles were recalculated, work is also underway to rebalance various shells, especially with regard to landmines, the effect of which will become more predictable.

In the dry residue

Wargaming held the largestfestival in its history. About 250,000 people from 28 countries of the world gathered in the Victory Park in Minsk, another 2.6 million joined the holiday online. Wargaming begins to act more often as a publisher for indie developers. An excellent example is the announced strategies of Steel Division 2 and Partisans, which in spirit fit perfectly into the Wargaming Game Center. Also, great attention is paid to supporting the 1C Game Studios Caliber multiplayer tactical action. And at the same time, the development of the company's main project, World of Tanks, is underway, in which much will change in the coming months. Support for ray tracing will appear, survival characteristics and types of shells will change, the mechanics of paired guns are already being tested.

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Wargaming Fest 2019 revealed that the selectedBelarusian giant development strategy works. Such festivals can contribute to the development of tourism, attract additional investment and, as has been repeatedly stated, become a full-fledged national holiday. If this goes on, Wargaming will become a successful publisher, such as Electronic Arts and Ubisoft, only for the post-Soviet space.