We recently interviewed Wargaming.Net CEO, Victor Kislyi about World of Warplanes, the follow up to World of Tanks that was announced at E3 this year. Warplanes will follow a similar free-to-play format tof WoT, with the same "gold, experience" and "economics," and is set to include planes from "big plane nations" like Russia, Germany, Britain, France, America and Japan.
Kislyi says the team are trying to strike a similar balance to World of Tanks, combining accessible controls with historically accurate World War 2 war machines. This time around, Wargaming.Net are going for a new audience. "It's important to understand, we want to concentrate this game on air combat enthusiasts," said Kislyi. "We want to go to air shows. We want to go to air museums. We want to talk to people who fly those hardcore flight simulations."
Will creating a convincing flight sim be a much harder task than tank warfare? Yes, says Kislyi. "Aeroplanes, everybody knows, you are in 3D, you have to be moving all the time, like a shark, and you have to have 3D vision in your head, unlike tanks. That's quite a challenge."
"An aeroplane is more difficult than a tank to control, obviously. There are much more drivers than pilots on this planet. That's where we put a lot of good people, trying out different controls, different twists in the flight model itself. If you look at the cockpit of any plane, you see a lot of controllers. We don't want people to be having to switch on all of those."
Even though they're courting flight sim fans, accessibility is still a priority for Wargaming.Net. "There's a lot of enthusiasm about warplanes and World War 2 in Russia , Europe and Britain and America, too. So first it has to be a good simulator, not too hardcore so that it takes you thirty minutes to take off, and then you crash land after a successful mission, and not too arcade-ish."
"It has to be historically realistic in terms of models, engines, internal components and relative perameters of different aeroplanes and different nations, of course, it has to be well balanced, but the gameplay, the flight mode, the controls, they have to be somewhere inthe middle in that sweet spot so that normal people can play."
Kislyi also suggests that players will be able to share currency between their games, meaning World of Tanks players will be able to hop over and buy a plane with the gold they've earned blowing up Panzers.
"Let's have mutually acceptable gold, why not?" Kislyi enthuses, "It's just dollars, or pounds, right? If you have the reserve of gold in your World of Tanks account, you're going to want to try Warplanes, why don't you use that money in World of Warplanes? There is nothing against it."
World of Warplanes is still in internal alpha testing at Wargaming.Net, so we're not likely to see a beta just yet. In the same interview Kislyi also suggested that Wargaming.Net are thinking seriously about their long term plans beyond World of Tanks and Warplanes, and want to do World of Battleships , too. We'll have more about the future of World of Tanks and Kislyi's views on the rise of free-to-play games soon.
