Let’s see what we have so far:
- Free to play multiplayer online tank game: World of Tanks
- Free to play multiplayer online driving game: Need for Speed: World
- Free to play multiplayer online fantasy adventure game: Too many to list now
- Free to play multiplayer online superhero game: City of Heroes, Champions Online
If I just had a free to play, multiplayer online combat flight simulator, I might be covered in my free online gaming needs.
World of Warplanes Prepping for Takeoff
Wargaming.net Reveals Details on World of Warplanes Economics
London, UK and San Francisco, CA (15th July, 2011) – Wargaming.net announced today details on economic system for the upcoming flight combat MMO World of Warplanes. The new game recently announced at E3, will have the same economic profile as the highly-acclaimed World of Tanks, with Gold, Credits, and Experience as main currency to gain and spend for continued advancements.
World of Warplanes will feature a global interaction with World of Tanks, which will begin with sharing Gold and Free Experience between the two games for players, who have registered accounts in both of them on a single email. This feature will allow Wargaming.net community to plan their expenses and leave exactly the amount of Gold and Free Experience they want on either of the games.
Wargaming.net CEO Victor Kislyi. States, “We’ve got thousands of players on World of Tanks servers, who have gained a scarily large amount of free experience which they don’t know how to spend. With this sharing option we say to them – hey, here’s our new game, and it’s as brutal and addictive as World of Tanks.”
About World of Warplanes
World of Warplanes is the flight combat MMO action game set in the Golden Age of military aviation. The game continues the armored warfare theme marked in the highly-acclaimed World of Tanks and will throw players into a never-ending tussle for air dominance.
Based purely on aircraft setting, World of Warplanes will allow players to build full-scale careers of virtual pilots offering machines of several key eras, staring from World War I period with “Biplanes” and up to jet fighter prototypes that led the way to modern air forces.
World of Warplanes will feature a wide range of warbirds, each of them unique in their effectiveness and behavior. Virtual pilots will choose from three main warplane classes – single-engine light fighters capable of engaging enemies in close dogfights, twin-engine fighters with their deadly straight attacks, and strafing aircrafts, the fearsome threat for ground targets.
About Wargaming.net®
Wargaming.net® is an award-winning strategy game specialist, incorporated in the UK. Its 220-strong development team is located in Minsk, Belarus. Since 1998, the company has shipped 13 titles, including acclaimed Massive Assault series, Order of War RTS published by Square Enix, and three add-ons for Blitzkrieg II. Wargaming.net’s® Operation Bagration RTS was awarded the Best Strategy Game of 2008 at Russian Game Developers Conference (KRI). At KRI 2009 and 2010 Wargaming.net® was named The Best Developer Company from ex-USSR. At KRI 2011 the company was awarded Industry Prize and World of Tanks® won “Best Game” Award.
Official web site: www.wargaming.net
Well, there is that taken care of. It shares your currency and experience with your World of Tanks account. And it even goes from biplanes to the jet age. Nice.
What else do we need?
A space game? A free to play online multiplayer space game? Do we have a decent one of those yet?
The Ancient Gaming Noob 
I’m sure EVE will go “free to play” soon enough. /runs/
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Battle Star Galactica? Is that one free?
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@Zapatero – I am sure there is a joke to be made there about CCP matching Valve’s TF2 hat based economy with their own monocle based economy.
@HZ – And, more importantly, is it a decent game? I added in that modifier when I realized I could come up with a couple of free to play space games that were… well… not.
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Define “decent”. Check out Black Prophecy.
Great graphics (some lag issues since the big content patch two days ago, but i very much expect them to fix that soon), nice gameplay. Content might still be a bit limited, but they the recent patch just delivered some new story missions again, so they up to now keep their promises of delivering new content every few months.
The game’s not perfect, but it’s quite new (open in Europe since about two months, open in North America since two days) and looks quite promising.
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Black Prophecy just released in the US, F2P space sim, but I know very little about it, so it may not fit the ‘decent game’ modifer.
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Personally I wish they would have done a naval game before an air combat simulator. Mixing up with destroyers, submarines, cruisers, and battleships seems like a more varied experience than 3 flavors of fighters. It also would have been pretty unique – multiplayer dogfights have been done before, but I’m not sure if anyone has ever done WWII era naval battles in the style of World of Tanks.
Oh well.
I can’t complain too much, it is, after all, essentially a free add-on to my WoT account.
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I think we need… World of Submarines.
http://weblog.probablynot.com/2011/07/15/give-me-a-ping-vasili/
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@Jason – While subs did start facing off against each other, at least doctrinally, by the 70s, surface combatants are the traditional foe (both as victims and hunters) of subs. Something more like Warsyde’s idea for naval warfare is probably better if you want to go the MMO route.
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Yeah, but then it just becomes I highly graphics driven vehicle shooter.
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@Jason – …and so we get World of Warships. Sounds okay to me.
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World of Woodcraft, based on Wind in the Willows, Watership Down, Duncton Wood and a zillion other anthropomorphic sagas.
World of Witchcraft, if we’re not going to get a Harry potter MMO.
World of Westworld, the cyberpunk western MMO.
World of Lovecraft, because The Secret World’s taking too long.
I’d play any of those…
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@Warsyde- I haven’t tried it so make no promises but mates in my clan say it’s a decent game but was quite expensive for a ‘free’ game. Currently they are offering a free trial. Same idea as WoT with starting small and building up to battleships, etc. At the time they played they said it would cost over $100.00 to get up into the bigger ships. I have no idea how the pricing model works.
http://www.navyfield.com/
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@Bhagpuss – World of Westworld… would that be set before or after Yul Brenner malfunctions? Or would it change? Would the robots sometimes be good and other times try to kill you? (And, totally off topic, but how can FutureWorld be on Netflix streaming and WestWorld isn’t?)
World of Lovecraft… I like that you didn’t jump straight to Cthulu on that, as other, weaker souls might have. Still, this might be tough. Where do you get a non-euclidean 3D rendering engine?
World of SkyNet (or World of Terminators) would be another possibility I think. Or is that Fallen Earth?
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I agree with warships. The quasi 2d map aspect makes for more compelling strategy IMHO.
I’m afraid warplanes will end up like every other multiplayer fighter plane game– reductio ad furball. If it were coming from anyone other than wargaming.net I wouldn’t be paying attention.
I would have thought the rock paper scissors model would have required something more like bombers, fighters, and flak/AA for a good tactical game. Still looking forward to it though.
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All of this talk about F2P gets me thinking about historical trends.
1) We know SWTOR will be subscription. … and many people already know that there will be a HEAVY amount of data mining and marketing associated with SWTOR too… [be sure to anonymous your account folks you’ve been warned]
2) Meme alert – Advertising Age (the trade rag for ad agencies) a month ago had an article saying that Facebook games is what is killing soaps in day time television. [yeah it’s a plant to buff the IPO price of FB but there it is]
Put this all together and we have the possibility of these F2P offerings being the equivalent of the Soaps of the 1950s. Cheap free entertainment for bored housewives/others.
Does this mean that a fremium, premium, subscription game content provider becomes the ABC, HBO, TBS?
I don’t know but the parallels are striking. Zynga makes games like Hollywood made Soaps in the 1950s complete with cheap backgrounds and effects. Why not?
musing… it is interesting that hollywood circa 1950-1960 had an actor escalator start at daytime then to primetime to tv movies to theater movies
Will we see games and game designers follow different paths… and what does the CIV to FB Civ World trend say?
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Here’s one I didn’t think of – and it actually exists!
http://www.worldofants.com/en/
And the very obvious
http://worldofdragons.com/
Looks like no-one thought to copyright “World of…”
I used to read Advertising Age back when I was in Marketing, what seems like several lifetimes ago. Is it still the size of a bedsheet?
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