- Tank balance is screwed up.
You cant expect things to be perfect, but WT has some pretty bad offenders. Seeing T-50s at work in low BR battles and Pz F2s in low/mid games will give you a taste of this. I haven't had the pleasure to see whats wrong at T4/5, fortunately. There are also some really questionably problems with the way Gaijin decided to balance various vehicles - you might have a vehicle that is far superior to another and gets the same matchmaking, but the shitty version can respawn twice... does that equate to good balance? I don't think so, personally, but you can make your own judgements.
WT has two problems with its maps - they have really weird sizes (most of them are really small until you get the one cripplingly large one) and the way they are designed is terrible. You put all this emphasis on realistic tank warfare, larger maps, etc... and then make it so on half the maps you can expect to see your opponents within 10 seconds of spawning? Why is it that I have firing lanes on strategic positions without even moving from spawn? Why give me a map so large that my derpy tank has no chance of actually hitting anything? Oh, you gave me that map 3 times in a row now because making more maps than I have fingers on one hand is hard work. Agh.
- Combat mechanics lead to bad gameplay.
The whole "you die when your crew is knocked out, you get ammoracked, or your fuel tanks explode" thing is
neat, and certainly a lot more immersive than everyone having HP values... but I'm not really convinced it's any good for the game. First off, it's really frustrating. Its entirely possible for you to get 1-shotted over and over. You might get every one of your vehicles 1-shotted for games on end! Fun. Sure, doing it to your opponents is fun too, but that leads me to some other issues with the combat mechanics.
So, every penetrating hit is a big deal. We've established that, but the other side to that coin is that every tank is hyper-accurate with the only "aimtime" being how the reticule bobs for a second or two after stopping. This extreme accuracy is exaggerated on the small maps that are currently in the game. You can expect a KV-2's stubby little 152mm to snipe you from across the map npnp or for that Hetzer to make a complete 360 and nuke you without any real problems. You have a few pixels showing? No worries, that T-34 will have no problems landing four consecutive shots into them.
These two traits alone don't mean all that much, but the way players are influenced by them
do. Being successful in this game boils down to two things - knowing the best locations to murderize countless opponents from, and being able to game every encounter so that you always get the first shot. Camping is also rampant - not entirely in the traditional sense of camping the base (although it does happen), but in the sense that the right thing to do after clearing an important position is to camp there and kill everyone who comes by, not to use that location to assault further.
- Respawning and Capping systems don't feel right
There is quite a push for "realism" in Warthunder, but respawns/capzones do a lot to undo that. Especially for simulator mode, just spawning and playing capture the flag doesn't feel right at all. There are also some other issues with the systems - the fact people respawn in the same two predetermined locations means that it isn't that rare to see people camping the spawnzones. Talk about an immersion killer? It certainly isn't much fun to get killed the moment your spawn shield timer runs out, either. If they want to fix this, they need to add a spawn "front", not a spawn "zone".
Capping has even worse issues. Sometimes, WT matches can be incredibly short. Like, worse than WoT short - simply because one team rushes the cap zone and the other team loses within a few minutes. This might work in a faster paced game or one where you're only expected to be contributing to the match until your first death, but in WT its really lame. You're just getting started and suddenly the match is over.
Another problem with capzones is that on multi-cap matchups, one player means literally nothing. You
cannot win a game alone, no matter how many tanks you kill or how long you hold onto a capzone. If the rest of your team decides to farm kills (and more power to them, fighting tanks is more fun than sitting in circles), you're not going to be able to do anything about it. Whether you win or lose feels so far out of your hands.
- Is it a simulator? Is it an arcade? Who knows!
One of the problems I have with the premise of Warthunder is that it calls itself a
simulator while being very very much an arcade game. You spawn in a magical zone, then drive forward into incredibly close range tank to tank engagements while incredibly weak early war AI tanks blindly drive into battle like LoL minions. While in battle, one of your basic goals is to drive into magic flags that exhaust blue and red smoke, turn them their color into the color that resembles your faction's, and get rewarded monopoly money to buy upgrades for your vehicle.
...but despite all this, Gaijin acts like it's actually a simulator and restrict themselves on what they add or fix. Because of realism, the balance will always be screwed up. Because of realism, the meta will always be stale. Because of realism, you get stupid mechanics like having to afk for 10 minutes for your crew to repair the vehicle. These things will never be fun, and I wish Gaijin would just embrace the fact it's not much less of an arcade game than WoT and go with it. If you want to be a sim, do it. If you want to be an arcade game, do it. Just don't be both and take the problems of each.
Okay, so there are two really pathetic AA vehicles, one for the Germans and one for the Russians. Except they're shit at shooting down planes and planes can smear them without half a thought because the AA vehicles cant actually hit anything even remotely far out. Not only that, but these AA vehicles can get into games without any air at all - why? I can take the argument that these vehicles are more placeholders than anything else, but why even allow players to use them? It's just a trap for inexperienced players that don't know any better.
- It's a very obvious beta.
Bugs, bugs everywhere. Spawning underground, your tank randomly flipping out, losing control of your treads at random, shells sometimes displaying no hint that they actually were fired, AI tanks driving up 90 degree walls, tank-tank physics being terrible, having no indication of where you'll spawn without memorization, invisible walls destroying your modules when you hit them, unavoidable AI bombers nuking your allies 15 seconds into the match, terrain geometry quality being terrible (you can see the polys!), textures being mega-stretched, and far, far more. Yes, Warthunder is a beta, and betas do get better - but they are still real issues that need to be taken into account.
- Lack of Players, Content, or Community
Its hard to fault the game for this one, but a problem is a problem. The game is new and not that well known. The result is that you have a very small, very new, very bad playerbase. The WT playerbase has created next to no content - want a guide on this specific tank? Nope. Okay... maybe at least a few words on it... an opinion? Nope! Nothing. You'll need to scour reddit and then
maybe you can find out what people think of the KV ZiS 5 vs the KV L-11. Or maybe no one has even bothered to mention them in comparison - who knows.
A very different issue is the lack of content for the game itself. Again, this is a problem with it being new and a beta. There is only a small selection of maps, very few tanks, and many features aren't even complete yet. You can honestly do everything the game currently has to offer in just a couple weeks.
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Topic: War Thunder. Casual Dogfighting MMO. (Read 214368 times)