Hey everyone! Today we’d like to come to you with our perspective on duplicate vehicles. We know this post is fairly long but we’d rather say too much than too little, as we know this has become an important topic for many players.
Duplicate vehicles are vehicles that are added to research trees to help bolster lineups and fill large gaps in a particular nation. An example of this is the inclusion of Indonesia in the Japanese tree, or Hungary in the Italian tree.
There are two main reasons for these additions. The first reason is that a real life country may have a set of interesting vehicles but not enough to form their own independent research tree. The second, and primary reason, is to help improve lineups in a particular nation. Here, we’re killing “two birds with one stone”, as a nation that may have not otherwise made it into the game can be added, while helping to improve an already existing tree. Our aim with these sorts of additions are a means to be as positive as possible; we want a nation to be enjoyable to play with full, varied lineups and fun vehicles.
Below we will explain our decision process for Premium vehicles and Researchable vehicles that are “clones” and explain why we go about adding them.
We would like to cover premium vehicles first, as we know this is a hot topic. Recently, many high-rank premiums have been variants, close equivalents, or cosmetically modified versions of vehicles already present in the game. This is because our current approach with the higher ranks is to try and avoid placing entirely unique or historically important vehicles exclusively as premiums as much as possible. This does not necessarily mean there won’t be unique event, premium and squadron vehicles in the future for the high ranks, as we already have several and will have more in the future. But we do aim to reserve as many as possible as researchable vehicles in the tree.
In general we know that some players would prefer effective and interesting premium vehicles, but at the same time, do not want important or unique vehicles outside of the research tree. On the other hand, if a premium vehicle is a variant that’s already in the game, some players express their disinterest and ask for something more unique instead. This makes premium vehicle additions difficult to manage, but we try to find a suitable solution when deciding to add premium vehicles.
Our current approach at the high ranks is generally to make premium vehicles useful for progression without making them the only way to access a unique capability, weapon system, or a historically significant vehicle.
Now we want to talk about the research trees. We often use export vehicles and other smaller nations to fill gameplay gaps in the trees. Our aim with this is to add variety to lineups, enhancing the gameplay aspect itself, and also to include the vehicle arsenal of smaller nations that often go underappreciated. Although this is a positive, the downside is that the unique feeling of each primary nation can feel diluted.
This is a difficult balance to find. Lineup strength and gameplay variety are important, but so is the identity of each nation and the feeling that a tree offers something distinct.
The reality is however that some nations such as Israel and Japan simply don’t have a large number of unique vehicles left to add. Now, of course we know these nations do have unique vehicles that could come to the game, and many of them are in our plans. We want to keep adding vehicles to every nation for years and years to come, and hypothetically if we could add all of those remaining unique vehicles right now, there would be nothing left for the future, or forever, potentially.
Vehicles that are entirely unique, complicated or vague take much longer to make, sometimes well over a year, or are so obscure that we’re not able to create them with the information available on them at all. Take the Komatsu 105 GSR for example. It’s a very cool Japanese prototype that we’d love to add to the game, but it is simply so obscure that we likely won’t be able to create it due to the lack of details surrounding it.
Another goal of ours is to try and add something for each nation every update, vehicles similar to what we already have allow us to at least add something in the meantime before work on more unique vehicles can be finished, in order to fill gameplay gaps and enhance lineups. For example the M44 for Germany, this vehicle filled a gameplay gap in the tree while we worked on developing and implementing the Hummel, which was just implemented in the Heavy Cavalry major update.
We want to make it clear that when we add a duplicate vehicle to a nation, this vehicle isn’t replacing a unique option that could be added. Instead, it’s an addition to help gameplay lineups and variety “right now”, while more unique vehicles are in development and come in time. For example, the Leopard 1A5BE addition doesn’t negate the AMX-30C2 (which is in our plans for the future), but fills a progression gap right now, so that players can have a better experience playing their nation. Many of you have probably experienced that feeling when you have unlocked your new tank, but are forced to either take a vehicle that is a few Battle Rating steps lower than it into your lineup or are forced to play with just one spawn, simply because there are no options for the lineup in the tree. This exact situation is what we try to minimize happening.
We would like to be open and say that both during development of each major update and after its release, we carefully analyze your feedback and adjust our plan, mainly by community request. We’re very grateful for the constructive feedback and criticism that allow us to make changes to our plans. A recent example is in the recent dev server feedback. Initially we planned the new F-16 premium as a Belgian variant, but as a result of your feedback we went back to the plans to see what we could do to improve it in the timeframe we had. The result was the Dutch F-16AM, a variant not already in the tree, which uses a different radar and the LITENING pod.
As mentioned above, there are always reasons for the way we do things, and we’d openly admit we haven’t done a great job of communicating these reasons in the past. Going forward, our reasoning for a specific vehicle will be clearly explained in the new dev blog format for the vehicle. In this new format, we aim to write our decision process for a vehicle and why it is being added, as there is always a reason. This is something we didn’t really do in the past, so we hope it helps inform you more on our process.
Thank you for all your comments on all platforms. As we said, we greatly appreciate your constructive feedback and criticism, it helps make the game better and adjust our plans when needed. Please continue to let us know what you’d like to see in the game and why, and what you would like to see added in the future. We’re always keeping note.
