GamesBeat: What do you feel you have to do with them? We want to see carriers become equal, on the same level of popularity with other classes, not just a very minor niche that’s decrease over time. If you don’t have a carrier you’ll probably lose, because on the competitive level, if you face a team with a carrier, a highly skilled player can destroy an entire team. At the same time, in high-level competitive play, carriers become a must. For example, on tier 10, it’s very hard to see any carriers playing at all. Over time you see how the game evolves and what happens with the populations of certain classes, or what happens in battles when certain scenarios unfold.Īfter three years, we’ve noticed that unfortunately, the design concepts around carriers and the way they’re used by our players–at the lower part of the learning curve, the population of carriers is becoming very low. But eventually the truth is only revealed over time. You can analyze a lot of feedback, unstructured feedback coming from players, and you can analyze data, looking into the dry numbers. You never know what will work or what doesn’t work. Nikolaev: It’s something that’s very hard to predict. GamesBeat: And now you’re also fixing the carrier gameplay. They’ll find a way to work together and protect each other from submarines. We think that if this concept is implemented well, it should be fun for all players. They need to protect you from the classes that counter you. As long as you know your weaknesses, and you know that there might be submarines going after you, you need to cooperate and play as a team with your teammates. Any ship should be able to fight any other ship. Nikolaev: We think the balance should be in a form such that any ship should be universal. All the battleship folks are going to get their nice ships sunk from below. GamesBeat: You knew, though, that this would shake things up. So we decided we wanted to go down this road. New content, new ship lines, are driving a lot of the engagement and new battles. At this point we decided that if we don’t introduce submarines, if we don’t come up with a creative solution to the problem of fun and diverse gameplay, we’ll just run out of content. We have 170 ships researchable for free, and we have more than 100 premium ships. At the moment, we already have all the major nations represented, with most of the iconic, legendary ships. But eventually we realized that we’d otherwise run out of content, run out of historical ships.
The first conclusion was that we didn’t think that it was necessary. GamesBeat: How long have you been thinking about submarines, as opposed to executing on the concept, getting it in the game?Īlexandr Sasha Nikolaev: We’ve been discussing submarines since the beginning.
Here’s an edited transcript of our interview. I interviewed him on Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco, with the wind blowing at us and the USS Pampanito (a WWII-ear submarine) in the background. Nikolaev said all is being done in the name of keeping the game realistic, balanced, and fun. That’s going to spin some heads around, but it could make the carriers more accessible. It will now switch from a top-down view of air combat with multiple squadrons, and shift to a third-person view of a single squadron of planes that the carrier captain controls. With the carriers, Wargaming found that not enough players were playing aircraft carriers across all tiers of combat. Then they will collect feedback from fans and introduce submarines and a revamp of carriers in 2019. They will tease the subs with the debut of Captain Nemo’s Nautilus for the Halloween update. Alexander Nikolaev, the publishing director for North America at the World of Warships group at Wargaming, explained why the developers are taking a big risk with the introduction of submarines.
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