War Thunder Ground Forces: The Good The very first thing you have to mention when it comes to War Thunder is the damage model. The damage model is incredible, you destroy tanks not by reducing their hitpoints to zero, but by destroying the very things in the tanks that make them function.

WAR THUNDER VS WORLD OF TANKS: STATE OF PLAY

This piece was submitted to us by World of Tanks and War Thunder veteran Rossmum.

Back in May, I decided to write a piece for my oft-neglected blog about the comparisons between War Thunder and World of Tanks. Some things have changed since then in both games, but by and large, the overarching theme is the same: they don’t really compare. They’re two completely different games, with completely different objectives. Let’s take a look into some of the reasons why, and some of the things each game has going for it. This is going to be quite lengthy – grab your poison of choice and a snack.

War Thunder (henceforth WT) has always leaned towards realism, or at least, Gaijin’s interpretation of it; World of Tanks (henceforth WoT) has always valued smooth gameplay over realism. This is a very important distinction and one many people seem all too happy to gloss over. The reason for WoT’s eschewing of authenticity for ease of play is not simply “Gaijin doing realism better” as many seem to claim, but rather a genuine, deliberate design choice on the part of Wargaming to make the game as accessible as possible and as suitable for competitive play as possible.

This is where the root of the two games’ differences comes from. The two companies have completely different outlooks on F2P multiplayer gaming, and while Gaijin try to shoehorn people into their game’s “simulator” mode, Wargaming deliberately tailor their own game to provide genuine competitive play, as well as incentives to participate in it. As well as the existing company, team battle, and clan wars systems, Wargaming recently added “Strongholds” to WoT, which essentially provides a clan-based platform for tournament-style play while also implementing a strategy minigame type deal. I don’t believe WT has anything comparable, but I could be wrong; either way, it’s obvious that Wargaming are more into competition than Gaijin are.

This is also evidenced by WoT’s standard battle format – a fifteen minute match, with fifteen players per team, and one life per player. The rulesets on actual tournament matches are even stricter, with player limits, tier limits, total tier caps, and usually shorter times to complete matches. The average match in WoT is often decided in the opening two to three minutes, and matches that run the timer all the way are few and far between. Wargaming also provide a lot of statistical information to players, and thanks to the battle format, those statistics tend to carry some weight. A player who stays alive and does damage will win a lot more than one who doesn’t.

Taking a look at WT’s standard battles shows something quite different, and those differences are immediately clear. The battles often run for much longer, and in some modes there are multiple respawns per player. Where a WoT player has only one life to influence the match and a critical mistake could mean a loss for their team, WT players generally enjoy a much more relaxed pace, and the safety net provided by respawns can allow for them to remedy their errors in a new life. Although the game does track statistics, it does so at a much shallower level and primarily uses them to arrange its leaderboards.

We can see, then, that the two games aren’t quite as alike as you might think from a cursory glance. One is obsessed with providing an “authentic experience” (dubious, we’ll get into this in a minute) and the other with fostering a competitive scene and genuine short-format casual play. Let’s go a little deeper and look at the details and how they differ.

First order of business: movement. This is a core aspect of how any game works, but it gets so little attention. In WoT, your tank essentially drives like a car with an automatic transmission. A 40-ton car, okay, but you see where I’m going with this. The tanks have fixed turning rates, the slower you’re moving the sharper you turn, but there’s no need to ‘pulse’ the steering or any other particularly irritating quirks. Once you get the feel of a tank’s speed, acceleration, and traverse rate, there is no need to learn anything further and you can handle that tank with absolute confidence.

This is important for the game’s design, because it means players can spend less time worrying about their own vehicle’s performance and more about positioning it well and engaging the enemy. The tank will generally do exactly what you ask of it. This kind of system facilitates the furious, swirling brawls that many WoT players are accustomed to, and also allows for some pretty talented drivers to find positions that would realistically be hellishly difficult to get a tank into. In short, the map is there for you to use, and you can “fight the enemy, not your own tank” (a statement Wargaming have made previously when questioned about their system versus Gaijin’s). Although more detailed suspension and engine behaviour has been hinted at in developer diaries, it is as yet unclear how they will affect the game. My money is on “not much”, and I suspect Wargaming simply want to add them as cosmetic features.

Meanwhile, Gaijin went for a more ‘realistic’ approach. Gaijin’s attempts at realistic tank controls seem to amount to some kind of horribly janky clutch-and-brake system, which would be accurate for most of the lower tier German tanks and virtually all of the Soviet tanks had they actually done a better job of it. The problem is that the steering is finicky, with poor feedback, and it doesn’t always work. For example, if you want to turn my Panzer III from a stop, it will jolt around and turn painfully slowly. It should quite happily rotate around the stopped track. The moment you try to reverse and turn, though, it oversteers.

This is a common pattern – there’s understeer and oversteer and precious little between. It’s one thing to try and simulate a primitive steering system that requires some experience to operate well (shallow turns at higher speeds do require pulsing of the steering controls, as they do on real-life tanks with this system), but it’s another entirely for it to not even function as it should. Whether this is a deliberate design decision by Gaijin or yet another manifestation of their NOT FINAL™ physics system is unknown, but it hasn’t been changed in the slightest for the four or so months I’ve been playing the Ground Forces aspect of the game.

In addition to the strange steering, you do actually have to deal with gear changes in WT, even in the arcade battles which people are most liable to compare to WoT. It goes without saying that both of these factors impact the most on speedy light and medium tanks, and all but prohibit the kind of glorious chaos you’ll see in WoT. In WT, you’re more likely to see tanks clumsily wandering about the map, stopping to take shots and skating wildly any time they try to steer at high speed (their tracks are made of ice, apparently). You can circle larger tanks in some vehicles, but it’s difficult to do so without crashing into either your target or something else nearby, and keeping your gun on something while you move is extremely difficult. Firing on the move goes from difficult to nigh impossible with the more ‘realistic’ battle modes, of course, and turret traverse speed becomes a major headache for some tanks.

This fosters slow, generally static gameplay. Flanking manoeuvres in WT generally amount to faster tanks zipping into a good position and then firing from there, as opposed to howling through a flank firing as they go. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing; while WoT takes a lot more on-the-fly mathematical prowess to be good at, the ability to position well is extremely important in WT’s more difficult modes (in arcade it doesn’t matter so much, thanks to respawns).

With that said, let’s look at the differences in shooting mechanics, too. WoT, being a more competitively-oriented, easily-accessible game, uses the classic system of hitpoints, DPM, alpha strike, and RNG that most gamers are used to. The attributes of each tank are distilled into numbers, and those numbers don’t change but for the RNG, and so a skilled player who can play and do arithmetic at the same time can use that to their advantage. Knowing exactly how many hits you can tank from an opponent before you kill him is a huge tool. Players who aren’t so good with this kind of thing clearly suffer, and many of them moved to WT just to get away from it. That’s fine – not everyone likes WoT’s more abstract combat – and as someone who grew up on sims I need some variety as well.

WT features much more obtuse shooting mechanics. A shot might penetrate clean through a tank without doing a single thing to it, because the ‘health’ of the tank is decided by its subsystems, not an arbitrary amount of hitpoints. To knock a tank out, you need to actually damage the squishy bits inside. This gives an obvious advantage to larger, more powerful shells. This system usually works alright, but I have encountered a few eyebrow-raising moments where a bottom-tier light tank has taken upwards of eight penetrating shots to knock out from a much larger vehicle.

Worse yet, shot feedback in WT is truly terrible. It’s common, at least with my roughly 250ms ping, to see AP shells hit the dirt in front of me and yet mysteriously wreck my tank. This has never happened to me in WoT. Your own shots, too, seem to hit things the game doesn’t think they’re hitting. I suspect a lot of WT runs clientside, which is bad news from both a high latency and an anti-cheating standpoint. I’ve seen tanks drive right through wall segments without knocking them down, which suggests at the very least that some physics objects are clientside. This has implications for situational awareness as well, with downed trees and fences being a common way of figuring out unspotted enemy positions in WoT.

For obvious reasons, being on the receiving end of fire in WT is much, much more unpleasant than it is in WoT. Modules are easily damaged, and they take a long time to repair – if they can be repaired at all. After only one or two hits, it’s likely your tank is more or less combat ineffective. There are no repair kits or medkits here, so you need to live with that damage. Of course, in WoT, driving a crippled tank is no fun at all, but it’s still not quite as brutal.

Another reason a lot of people swore they would leave WoT the moment WT added Ground Forces was the former game’s spotting system. To newer or more casual players, it’s an arcane web of bullshit that exists to give everyone except them the advantage. Any hackusations thrown around in-game generally originate squarely from a lack of understanding of how the spotting and camouflage systems work. Although the documentation is sketchy and contradicts itself at times, the information is available, and by now a lot of the veteran players have the system more or less worked out. This doesn’t help a casual who doesn’t want to put the effort of finding this information in, though, and so WT is seen as the preferable game. Realistic games wouldn’t have spotting systems, right? If the tank is there, you’d be able to see it, and the only camo would be actual visual camouflage.

Wrong.

Just like WoT, WT has its own spotting system. It has always had it. Air crews have always had a skill called “keen vision”. Sure enough, Ground Forces has one too. The skills are there to see. The implementation is actually somehow more obtuse than WoT – I recently had a tank drive behind a rock and disappear utterly before he was even halfway concealed by it. I had to drive fully around the rock before I could see him, even though the front three feet of his tank had been jutting out the whole time. The game doesn’t just remove markers for ‘unspotted’ enemies like the air game does; it actually makes the tank invisible, just like in WoT. Given the choice, I know which system seems to work better out of the two games.

The reason spotting systems work the way they do isn’t to give more experienced players an advantage, or to try and extract money from you to buy things to offset them. It’s a simple and very effective anticheat measure. Since the client is not being told there is a tank there by the server, no amount of clientside wizardry can show an otherwise unspotted tank. Before you go and complain too loudly about these systems, think whether you’d prefer invisible tanks, or tanks that can see you all the time, from any distance, behind any obstacle. Ask a Counter-Strike player if you’d like to know how infuriating that gets.

Finally, art. While WoT has been playing catch-up graphically for its entire lifespan, WT is a pretty game. Aop 104a dvr drivers for mac pro. The difference noted before – which still exists – is that WT is graphics for the sake of graphics. From the standpoint of authenticity, WoT actually wins by a good margin – to the point where they consult historians when modeling a tank in order to wear its paint where the crew’s boots would scrape it off, or where equipment would rub against it. WoT’s new HD models are a definite winner over WT’s, and even the old models make up for their lack of graphical sophistication with a good dose of authenticity.

In closing, the two are very dissimilar games. They have completely different priorities. As such, it seems unlikely that either will “kill” the other, or even really impact the existing player base. People will migrate between the two according to their own personal tastes; many will probably play both. WoT is a serious competitive game, but also more accommodating to true casuals due to its format and easily learned classical gaming mechanics, while WT is aimed more at people looking for immersion, which is certainly something it can provide better. WoT prioritises solid mechanics over graphics, while WT looks very nice but is still plainly unfinished and quite janky at times. The real winner in the battle between World of Tanks and War Thunder is the player, as the two tank games will compete with each other, improve, and grow.

Rossmum is a long-time World of Tanks and War Thunder player. He regularly posts battle recaps and commentaries at his YouTube account.

Let your voice be heard! Submit your own article to Imperium News here!
Would you like to join the Imperium News staff? Find out how!

Related Articles

The biggest and most obvious distinction between the two games has to do with the types of vehicles available to the player.War Thunder began as a flight combat simulator and tanks were added in a later patch.War Thunder also has combined arms — tanks and planes fight in the same battlefield!World of Tanks has always been about just tanks from release. If you want planes in World of Tanks, you’ll have to play the aptly named World of Warplanes.World of Tanks may only do tanks, but it does them very, very well.There are hundreds of different tanks to choose from, each handles differently from the others.Although it might not technically be as realistic as War Thunder, the diversity of tanks and play styles allow for a battle to play out in a hundred thousand different ways.Certainly, some vehicles are stronger than others, but every loss feels like it could have been turned around with better positioning or smarter timing. War Thunder’s tanks are slow, but every artillery round that finds its mark is guaranteed to do real damage.The tanks in World of Tanks, though feel like corvettes in comparison. They’re quick to change directions and easy to maneuver.Tanks also have “armor” in World of Tanks, which act as the vehicle equivalent of health points. Instead of rounds being essentially 1-hit kills, like in War Thunder, you have to chip your opponent’s armor down to zero if you want to take them out.In War Thunder, wherever your barrel is pointing is where your round is launched. There’s accurate drop-off due to gravity that makes aiming intuitive and easy to understand, though actually hitting your target is incredibly difficult.

World of Tanks doesn’t have this kind of predictable accuracy. To encourage close-range combat, the HUD has a circle around your crosshair that indicates where your round might go. The longer you aim, the smaller the circle becomes, but there’s no way for you to be 100% certain of where your shot will go.So if you’re a fan of tough but rewarding sim gameplay, War Thunder is your go to. If you want a skill-based tank fighter where skill isn’t as likely to be outshined by sheer luck, World of Tanks is the game for you. There was a time when War Thunder was clearly the better looking game, but several graphic overhauls over the years have allowed World of Tanks to give War Thunder a run for its money.The real difference lies in the visual style.The game that comes out on top in this discussion is the one that appeals to your personal preference.World of Tanks, in fitting with its more arcade-like action, is slightly more cartoonish in its designs and animations.For War Thunder, it’s the tiny details that really help build immersion. Things like the way mud sticks to your tank as the battle progresses — and you can wash it off by wading into a river!

War Thunder’s maps are necessarily much larger because they must account for the speed of airplanes.The map sizes have been a topic of much discussion in the War Thunder community.Tank players have complained that the focus on aerial combat has left them with a subpar experience.The large map sizes mean face-to-face combat is much less likely and tank battles become like sniping duels where the combatants fire at one another from distance.To cater to their tank players, War Thunder’s developers have also added smaller Ground Forces maps. These are tank only affairs, so you’re losing out on the thrill and danger of a potential aerial fly-by. War Thunder lets you jump into the cockpit of a fighter or tank and start blasting enemies left and right.The different plane and tank models are only marginally different, and the one you choose to take into a firefight is the one you’re most comfortable with.It doesn’t matter how poorly you do, zipping around in a fighter jet or rolling around in a tank is always fun.This contrasts greatly with the World of Tanks progression model.The lower tiers where new players begin is a nightmare. The power curve is unforgiving and the difference in skill between advanced and new players is significant.New players will find themselves being destroyed again and again by better players for dozens of matches in a row. Being a Closed Beta tester for World of Tanks, I prefer War Thunder over World of Tanks.

Giajin does far more for its play base that Wargaming has. Going through the promises that were broken over and over again with no word from Wargaming or having to find it burred in the forums, or a third party report is not a good way to conduct a company. Good example is where is that rebuilt Maus they promised?

Or the destructible environment? Or what about when they punished anyone who complained about Warpack? The illegal mod that many top clans used to gain unfair advantages.As far as World of Tanks graphics giving War Thunder a challenge, not sure how that is true. The tanks in World of Tanks have an odd almost lead or pewter sheen making them toy like.

War Thunder having added the new effects, changing weather and time of day, as well as better shading has given it a clear edge over World of Tanks.The last points I want to make out is the broken design of World of Tanks. Spotting, as everyone who plays it knows, has been broken for years, with the Devs chasing a broken patch from back in closed beta instead of rolling it back and starting over. The map design and sizes do not work for having the light, medium, and heavy tanks fill their true roles. These allow players that focus purely on stats to refuse to actually help their team instead by time and clean up as many kills as they can before the team loses. That focus on stats has also created a very toxic community they have been trying to clean up for nearly a decade.