This is a steam review I wrote in which I describe my frustrations with the games recent developments.
As someone who has loved this game for the past 7 years and have over 10000h on record I am very disappointed with war thunders recent developments.
It used to offer unique vehicles regularly in events, the different tech trees had differing playstyles and traits, the battles were complex and impactful. But over the years most of the cool, historical, more tactical maps like the pacific battles, Norway, … were removed from rotation, now every game is just a capture the point or deathmatch, the game time caps were lowered leading to shorter less interesting engagements, encouraging lazy un-fun gameplay, making some slower pace vehicles completely redundant. The tech trees were slop-afied and so filled with copy-paste vehicles that everything feels the same, historical vehicle encounters became the exception and no longer the rule, making way for waves of uninspired boring loops of slop.
More over in recent history a greater and greater portion of vehicles added in each update are premiums locked under laughably high pay walls, the famous F-14D Super Tomcat, BMPT or variant of the Leopard 2 will set you back 80$, an amount for which you could otherwise buy multiple full price high quality games. Furthermore, lots of the older more unique event vehicles such as the IS-7, E-100, PaK Puma, Porsche Tiger, AGS now cost hundreds if not thousands of dollars, offering unfair advantages and one-of-a-kind gameplay experiences to veterans and whales.
Lastly the devs in the past removed multiple indigenously developed and beloved vehicles such as the Flakpanther, Panther II or the R2Y2 series of attack jets, against the community’s wishes for being historically inaccurate and replacing them with already existing copy-paste vehicles from other nations, while at the same time adding even more blatantly made up vehicles especially to the naval mode such as the soviet ships Stalingrad and Sovietsky Soyuz or the never completed modification of the battleship Gneisenau investing hundreds of thousands in to a dead game mode very few play and furthering the games inconsistencies while lowering diversity and replacing it with slop.
To conclude a once great game has slowly descended in to uninspired slop and a blatant cash grab, which I doubt the devs will fix.