War Thunder Survey: What do People Enjoy About the Game, And What Don't They?

Game Discussion General Discussion
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First of all, greetings, this is the topic that I’ve made on the forums, so please bear with me as I convey my train of thought.

The game is entering it’s 14th year this autumn, along the years there have been ups and downs and there are more than 3500 vehicles that are playable and still countless more ranging from slightly differing variants of the ones that exist within the game to completely unique additions that shall surely grace us in the future, which is all very mind boggling to think about.

The following has been evoked by top tier air getting ever closer to the current peak of technology that we have in the real world and that, really, there are relatively few vehicles left to add in terms of top tier air’s vertical expansion (that being, additions that will warrant simultaneous additions of ,top dogs" and thus increasing the maximum battle rating), which, also given the effort that is being put into modeling them inspires the thought about where that effort may go into when there’s no vertical expansion left to be had (within the realm of reasonable speculations and features that would be meaningful to model)…

By that I believe the implications will be that of massive horizontal growth, by which I mean not only vehicle additions that have been pushed aside due to the apparent priority that the top tier has had before it’s pinnacle or near-pinnacle has been reached (such is ground and it’s own plateau of top tier additions before vertical development was focused on the air tree).

I have a few things that I hope that the developers will consider and add with the arrival of this plateau of technology and features, but there will be a few inevitable things that I’ll mention for the sake of them being mentioned as examples (I’m sure there are topics for most of these examples, I couldn’t find them for the life of me):

  • Further Meteorological condition development and, perhaps even dynamic weather
    The game already looks beautiful, especially with ray tracing, but I cannot help but be put off by the lack of lightning but the sounds of thunder, beautiful towering cumulus clouds, but not the violent updrafts that would come with them, or the downdrafts that would be felt if flying under the mature ones and without a lot of the varieties present in the game that you might see in real life. Sandstorms have already been featured in the mad thunder April fools event or fog that creeps over the battlefield after the battle has started, etc etc etc. Perhaps this is held off as affecting visibility is so critical to gameplay.

-More vehicle functionality and features
Not quite a necessity but a fitting cherry on top of everything already implemented in the models of aircraft, here I’m thinking of the ability to honk horns, turn on lights (be it road, landing gear, strobes or hazards) and searchlights on ships, having the ability to set an ILS up to make an IFR landing, PAPI on airfields to judge glideslopes visually, OLS on aircraft carriers, etc.

-Improvement of current game modes, events and addition of new ones
Improvement of air sim and realistic battles for example, or like the planned ,Aerial warfare" format for the world war mode. Perhaps more time can be given to the implementation of the advanced AI we saw in Nuclear thunder in such improvements to give strike fighters and bombers more relevancy, which I suspect is probably the reason for it’s development.

-More frequent implementations of new nations and possibly new trees
A united Korea tree has been hinted at here and there, I think it may be planned to be implemented after the plateau (Since 5th gens are right around the corner, allegedly) as more efforts can be contributed that way for a quicker implementation of all the unique vehicles that it could come with. Other nations yet to be implemented could also perhaps jump in afterwards or before it due to the reason mentioned above in either configuration (subtree, scattered or nation tree).

To end things off I’d like to ask the person reading this about their thoughts about the future of the game and if they share my thoughts on these examples, my intentions are for this to be food for thought and to spark discussion and maybe the opening of suggestions for these features or popularizing the ones that exist, and thank you for reading.

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They definitely need to find an actual long term solution to limited spawns in Air RB and Ground RB. In my opinion Nuclear Thunder was the perfect replacement for Air RB, now something similar but scaled for Ground RB needs to be made. Too many games ruined by half your team leaving after the first 3-5 minutes of a ground RB match. Every match seems to be determined based on who has an actual line up vs premium 1 tank players.

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Part of a bigger problem that I believe will be addressed with the coming redistribution of efforts, world war mode will probably be the definitive replacement of air rb as the main air mode by the looks of it, other than for those that just prefer the team deathmatch. As for ground rb it could probably come in the way you tell it but my personal belief is that they might do something with Infantry in that format with larger maps and longer matches, I know it would probably be fun too.

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Objective based GRB would be amazing and highly needed. It could play like Rush in Battlefield or a frontline style mode, with defenders vs attackers.

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Nuclear thunder gave us a taste of ARB EC, and I will not forget the taste.
even if gaijin laced it with laxatives to make people pay for the last star of the event

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Tomorrow never comes

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Tomorrow will be the past for the future and will be the future for the past

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They already screwed over the potential Yugoslavia tree by the looks of it so the future for more trees looks fairly grim.
Also looks like an extremely premium-heavy update ngl.

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Plenty of Italian vehicles were in the German tree prior to Italy being added. There were israeli vehicles in the American and British trees. They’re not above tagging and hiding old copies of vehicles in pre-existing trees if a dedicated tree for the nation is added

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Yeah but those were either tech tree or event.
This time it looks like its going to be a premium.
Keep in mind:
WT devs back then =/= WT devs right now

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Most of the Israeli vehicles and a few of the Italians were premium, actually. Shit I’m pretty sure the Rank I premium in the German tree was Italian and had to be replaced with Flegel’s 109.

iirc the Romanian premiums for germany became tech tree vehicles or premiums for Italy too?

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3 event merkavas, one premium magach for US and 1 CR.42 for starter prem and hungarian 109 prem for mid tiers with a load of low tier prop fighters for tech tree.
Not a whole lot of premium material tbh ( and it all got hidden yea but that’s beside the point really)
None were super high tier there either but back then it was easily obvious what was gonna happen with the upcoming nations. We’re kinda blind on this one since their “plans” tend to change for every idk moon cycle or something

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And a proper one too, I can’t wait to see it again.

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I’m all in on nothing in terms of Yugoslavia not being properly implemented, premiums be damned, it may just turn out like the Strv 81 with ATGMs in the British tech tree, this may end up being the same kind of deal. Or at least that’s what I hope it is.

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Gaijin will still add guided subsonic missiles and bombs to other nations while USSR will still be allowed to have supersonic ones.

LDIRCM will still as op as it is rn.

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This is IF and only IF there are no equivalents available, sort of like how Sweden has to rely on tested helicopters as it’s current highest rank, because it has no others to offer. I trust the LDIRCM may be addressed but only in regards to it’s physical coverage of helis, but it will be just as op as it is when it has gimbal.

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If I may, I would like to add to this the pool of things to be improved. The implementation of submarines for naval batles (I strongly believe that adding things like the infamous U-Boats would bring ALOT more players to the naval side of war thunder (granted if they make it a premium I will slime them)). Along with making new gamemodes for naval and having a major rework of the maps to add more coverage and make snipping into eachother’s spawn alot harder. Then again adding subs in the regular NRB as it is now would be gamebreaking so they should only be playable in a gamemode like Silent Thunder or something else.

I would also like to add upon your point about the bombers and strike aircraft in the game. I have recently started trying to grind out the F-117 in GRB. But when I tried to take it out into air RB with some friends, we discovered that we had to take off from the airfield or have the same spawn as everyone else. Reminder, the F-117 has no way of deffending itself, no guns, no missiles, bad maneuverability and subsonic. But this extends to many other bombers, the Tu95M, the B52-H and the B-66. because they lack the feature that they are supposed to have, Radar-guided/led defensive armament.

Lastly, banning copy-paste vehicles, limiting the amount of premiums that cand rop per update to 2, using art used by actual companies and hiring more devs to work on the game would be the bare minimum.

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'd like to see a rank system in War Thunder—even if it’s just a SQB with voice chat. It would be nice to see something new in the dying mode.

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Naval as a whole I feel will be the next line of focus for development as it has been picking up after the aiming redo, and I feel it shall do so even more after the aforementioned vertical plateau of the air tech trees. This will naturally include submarines at one point or another and they might finally figure out how to make shooting into eachother’s spawns on every naval map be impractical, the straightforward answer to that question would be just to either make the map such a scale that the guns are simply out of range or to add gigantic obstacles so that the ballistic trajectory of the shells simply cannot surpass them.
Furthermore I’d also expect a whole rework of the br system for the ships there and the aircraft.

As for your point about the bomber spawns and the lack of radar-guided defensive armament, this naturally goes hand-in-hand with the vertical plateau, it’s an inevitability and only a question of when this is implemented and when they’ll make sure the F-117 gets it’s bomber airspawn.

Regarding copy-paste vehicles I can’t say banning them is the best way to go about it since Gaijin also uses them to fill holes in tech trees, which makes the trees more playable so we can’t discount that they’re a pragmatic solution to a niche that can’t be easily filled. What my solution to this be is keeping the copy-paste vehicles in BUT once the variant of the vehicle is researched in one tree, it shall become discounted in the others in terms of sl, rp and modules under the condition that it has been spaded in the other tech tree, which I feel is completely fair in that circumstance. As for premiums, it’s undeniable that surges of those come, after all, Gaijin is a company and it has to make it’s money somehow, and if you ask me, I’d rather have copy-paste premiums rather than original vehicles locked behind a paywall. Keep in mind, this isn’t a simple issue for anyone to solve, and currently they’re kind of walking the line between outrage of one group and another. As for the AI controversy, this I assume would be a one-time slip up because no one wants their company to be known for AI in their products, as the general public holds the perception of the same being low-quality (I subscribe to that line of thinking), and finally for their developers, they’ll undeniably have a certain portion of their staff be less engaged with development on multiple fronts as they had them now, within the near future, resources will probably be more concentrated on QOL, tertiary and secondary features so whilst expansion of the team may be possible, I find it to be unlikely, and money will probably go towards servers or something like that in my opinion.

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With all the resources being poured into esports tournaments, I think something like that internally could be prototyped and poured into the main game, but with it you’d probably see a lot more moderation efforts being poured in simultaneously.

1 Like