We talked about World of Warships (WoW) here a couple years ago I think but it has been a while and now it is on Steam so figured I’d ask.
I played it a few years ago and was fairly decent at it but then stopped for 18 months or so and have picked it up again recently.
I forgot how fun and addicting the game is. Something about fighting with ships I find preferable. Perhaps it is the more sedate (relatively speaking) pace while remaining tense that I like. If you are in a battleship and want to turn around it’s going to take a while and you need to plan ahead.
Make no mistake it can be very intense. It is a special feeling to see six torpedoes coming into your ship and you have 10 seconds to watch your doom creep towards you. You do what you can to minimize the damage and pray you can turn in time to make them miss. On the flip side putting four torps into an enemy ship is very satisfying.
WoW is a free-to-play game which normally I avoid. Basically it costs you nothing to play the game but you can pay for special ships and bonuses and so on. It is not quite pay-to-win but definitely pay to get a leg up.
You can have numerous ships and they range from destroyers (fast, stealthy, die easy) to cruisers to battleships and carriers. There are ships from numerous countries and they are all highly detailed models faithful to their real world counterparts. Also there are some named ships like Yamato or Warspite or Hood you can get.
The game looks fantastic and the sound design is great. You feel it when you explode.
While the game is not a simulation it does do a surprising amount of simulation. Projectiles disperse. Angles they hit the opponent at matter. Caliber versus armor matter and so on. All can be used to make your game more about skill and less about luck. It all adds up such that each ship feels different to play and you will find some more to your preference than others.
That said there is a fair amount of RNG in here but mostly it is tolerable and even preferable (except for ship detonations…a like instakill basically).
If you haven’t checked it out you should. It’s free to try after all so not a lot to lose but some time.
I’ve played WoT a lot and I’ve always been meaning to try this. I installed it through Steam last night.
That’s when I discovered a very important point to the Steam version that they don’t do a good job of explaining: When you run the Steam version for the first time it creates a new Wargaming.net account and binds that to your Steam ID. If you already have a wargaming.net id, there’s no way to switch to use it, you *have *to use the Steam one.
So if you already play WoT or WoWP, you most likely want to install the non-Steam version.
It is fun, once I got past that little snafu. Kind of a very flat WoT where you still have hope even if the other guy spots you first.
I gotta say WoW provides you with loads of those gaming “moments” that stick with you after you have turned off your computer.
For instance last night I was chasing down an enemy carrier. Everyone could see I was after him so everyone who could did their level best to kill me. A tense few minutes of dodging all over while taking pot shots at the carrier and the carrier dodging my torpedoes was pretty intense capped by two plane squadrons trying to torpedo me from different directions and threading the needle weaving between them with none hitting me.
In the end the carrier got away when I got blasted out of the water by a distant battleship hitting my broadside as I lined up my final torpedo attack. Torps missed and the carrier got away.
This sort of thing (in some fashion or another) is not that uncommon if you play a while.
I’d probably spring if it were persistent world, and actually, you know, tried to model the real reasons navies exist in the 1st place (protection of sea lanes & commerce along with aiding invasions, in addition to destroying the ships of the enemy of course). These entire notion of these canned X minute little meaningless skirmishes bore me to tears.
Persistent world for this kind of game sounds really cool but it would be a whole different beast (MMO or single player).
I get what you are saying and everyone has different preferences which is fine. This is meant to be 15(20?) minute skirmishes and does that well.
That said I’d love to see base defense where the battleships need to get within range of an enemy base and bombard it. Clans can have their own bases so could maybe even work that in (causing the clan to lose some resources if their base is pummeled).