Kablam! How Wargaming tuned World of Tanks Blitz for mobile gamers (interview)

Above: World of Tanks augmented reality game at Wargaming’s party.

Image Credit: Dean Takahashi

Carroll: The skill is really in not getting blown up. You can drive out there and stop your tank and aim dead-on at an opponent, but in that time, most likely all of your opponents are going to shoot you. The skill comes in being able to keep moving, find cover, and get those shots on your enemies in between. There’s a lot of strategy involved. If you just drive down the street, you’re probably going to get blown up.

GamesBeat: How much progression is there in the game right now? How long might it take to get the whole garage of tanks?

Carroll: We have all 10 tiers from our PC tech tree in the mobile game. As players gain experience and play the game, they get credits and XP that they can spend to advance up that tech tree. One of our big mantras here is that the game is free to play, but it’s not about paying to win. A user can go in and buy a premium tank, a really high-end tank, but competing with that against a tank on a similar tier where the user has leveled up through experience and gameplay, those two tanks will be on par with each other. The premium tanks give a player who doesn’t have the time to level up the ability to still play competitively. The idea of coming in, playing the game, getting experience getting better, that’s where the fun is.

GamesBeat: What will players notice about the level of realism in your tanks and landscapes?

Carroll: The tanks themselves, we spend a tremendous amount of time making those as realistic as possible. We work with a lot of military experts to make sure that the components and different details of the tanks are accurate. Beyond that, the terrain and a lot of the buildings are destructible. We work with Speedtree to create a lot of realistic foliage. It’s not photorealistic yet, but it’s definitely on par with the PC version.

We’re seeing, with a lot of the mobile devices right now, their graphics capabilities are coming in line with high-end PCs. We’re able to make these games very graphically intensive. Compared to other games out there on the market, we compete with any other triple-A developers as far as the level of artwork.

Above: World of Tanks Blitz poster

Image Credit: Dean Takahashi

GamesBeat: If you had a PC player with a mouse, an Xbox player with a controller, and a mobile player with a touch screen, what would come out of that competition?

Carroll: The PC player would win, I think. We’ve tested that out in the past. That’s part of the reason our Xbox title doesn’t play against the PC game. There’s just a lot more fine tuning and quick twitching you can do with the mouse. PC players are a bit more accurate than what we see with a controller or a tablet. We segment them out so there’s not that level of advantage.

GamesBeat: Do you think some people would play with those controllers that have been developed to attach to mobile devices?

Carroll: We’ll have support for that coming down the road, yeah.

GamesBeat: Would that create an advantage for players who have that level of control?

Carroll: A touch-screen player who’s good with the interface is probably going to be as good as somebody with a controller. I don’t think there’s a huge advantage to having a controller. Again, it’s about how the user wants to play the game.

GamesBeat: I figure it’s good to finally have the game out. Have people been particularly impatient with you?

Carroll: I wouldn’t say they’ve been impatient. They ask about it a lot. They want to know when it’s coming out. For us, it was just a matter of, when the game was ready we were going to launch it. We have a great relationship with Apple. They’ve given us some great attention today. We were picked as editor’s choice for the week. It’s been two years in the making, and we feel it’s finally ready. There’s always new stuff to add. We probably have a year worth of content in the road map right now. We’ll be iterating and adding new tanks and new stuff as we go. And we’ll have Android to show soon.