The Trilogy is Complete – World of Warships Goes Live

Wargaming.net’s Land/Sea/Air trio of online action games is now complete.  Today World of Warships takes its place beside World of Warplanes and World of Tanks as a live game, finished in the way that any such game is finished… meaning a team will probably keep working on it for years to come.

It has been a while since we first heard about the game.  I first posted about World of Warships back in August of 2011 when there were trailers for the two “new” games, that and World of Warplanes.

State of affairs back in 2011

Of course, back then it had a different name and seemed to emphasize only the big guns of the battleships that were then part of the title.

Heavy broadsides

I was interested in it back then, when World of Tanks was still new and fresh, though I was wondering how they were going to pull off 20th naval combat.  Combat between battleships of that era, as I mused, was generally an at or over the horizon affair.  The range of the big guns made the idea of laying along side, as in the age of sail, a silly idea.  How was Wargaming.net going to accommodate that without either making a map so huge that nobody see the other side or nerfing the guns to unrealistic short range.

As it happened, Wargaming.net revised the whole idea and the game was rechristened World of Warships and became a naval combined arms with destroyers, cruisers, and carriers joining the fray.

It has been in open-ish beta for a while now, with keys being handed out pretty freely.  I think I secured a code for the game back in the spring without much effort, and I have played a bit over the last few months.

It is a pretty good game, very much in the mold of World of Tanks; easy to get into and easy to play in short bursts when you don’t have hours of free time.  It might even be a little easier to start playing than its land based sibling, and it is certainly much, much easier to start off in than World of Warplanes.  A decent “other” game for somebody playing EVE Online. (There does seem to be some overlap on that front.)

And I expect it will follow the same trajectory as World of Tanks, with new ships being introduced over time and ships being rebalanced as players discover which ship is the best in each class and which are dogs.  And so it ever goes in such games.

With land, sea, and air covered, will Wargaming.net go into space next?