Greetings, fellow Captains! The New Year update is ready.
Let's get an inside look at the work that made it happen.
A new ship, Prinz Eitel Friedrich,
and the valuable Steel resource are at the core of the update.
Developer Diaries 0.7.12
New Year is a time for gifts.
Sometimes, the gifts are few and you’re left hungry for more.
Sometimes, they are so numerous and easily obtained
that they lose their value.
This time, we’ve managed to strike the right balance,
and Andrey Lysak is here to tell you how to get what you deserve.
How is it possible to present gifts to all players
whilst still treating them according to their merits?
Pay attention to a feature that is already available in the game—
the stars that you can earn every day with any of your ships.
These stars bring an additional amount of XP as a gift.
To enhance these gifts, we've changed them a little:
they can only be earned once during the whole New Year update,
instead of every day.
Ok, let's make everything clear.
To begin with, what will players see instead of the star?
The star remains in its place, we haven’t removed it.
A Snowflake has been added next to it. As it's New Year…
What gift does a Snowflake provide?
A star gives XP, while a Snowflake gives resources,
the most valuable resources for the Arsenal—Steel or Coal—
depending on the ship you’re playing with.
Which ships are suitable for the event?
All of the researchable ships starting from Tier V.
In this update, you can win a battle with a Tier V–VIII ship
and earn a Snowflake that gives Coal, depending upon the ship’s tier.
With Tier IX–X researchable ships, you can get Steel instead of Coal.
As for Premium ships, all tiers can take part.
For Tier II–VII Premium ships, the reward is Coal,
and for Tier VIII–X, you can earn Steel.
It seems that if I have many ships, it means more Snowflakes and gifts, right?
Absolutely right.
How many Snowflakes can I get?
Well, the game features almost 300 ships.
And how many do you have?
I have 273, but Sasha Z1ooo currently outscores me:
he has almost 300…
So it’s unlikely that Sasha Z1ooo
will have enough time to collect all of the Snowflakes then…
Me neither, I think. But I'll do my best!
Let's summarize, so that how it works is clear for everyone.
Players will enter the Port and see the ship carousel.
On some of these ships, there will be a Snowflake.
It’s these ships that they need to go to battle with and…
…win the battle, and earn a Snowflake. In any battle mode.
Then at the Arsenal they can see
how much Coal and Steel they've accumulated.
Right, and grab the gift they like.
Yay, happy New Year!
If you need results, not gifts, then we have a new game event for you—
“In the name of His Highness!”
It’s very similar to the recent Royal Navy event,
so you'll figure it out easily.
However, missions are more difficult now
because there’s a valuable prize at stake:
the new ship Prinz Eitel Friedrich.
Directives also raise the stakes:
each Directive completed will be rewarded with Steel.
Every year, the core of a New Year update is a ship,
such as Duke of York or Admiral Graf Spee.
What’s this year’s ship? It's Prinz Eitel Friedrich.
And what do players need to accomplish this time to get Prinz Eitel Friedrich?
They need to play! That's all.
And they'll have plenty of time during the New Year holidays to do so.
Just enter the game, play, play, play, and you'll get a remarkable ship
in return for completing the four Directives.
You’ll have five weeks for this.
So the mechanics used are well- known to players of the British arc.
Exactly.
The mechanics were developed with the intention of using them regularly.
We've adjusted the style to New Year
and the In the name of His Highness! campaign,
allocated more time for completing it, and upgraded the rewards, of course.
As it's New Year… …a time of miracles!
Now, would you tell us more details about the rewards that players can get?
The main reward is the ship itself, of course.
We also have many other treats in store:
there's a surprise at the end of every Directive and, needless to say,
New Year collection containers dedicated to our beloved Prinz.
How many players will be able to complete the mission
and get the ship do you think?
Most of them, because the campaign is designed
for a wide range of our players.
Missions are not too complicated; there are more of them,
but we've allocated significantly more time for completing them.
Even if you start playing on the fourth week out of five,
you'll still have a chance of completing all five Directives in time.
Traditionally, players will also have a chance to purchase the ship.
Sure…
Because time is money, you know. Right, players can save their time.
If they do this, will they still be able to complete the game event?
Yes, they will.
It will be a little easier for them, but not by much,
because there are a lot of missions anyway.
So, I play for four, maybe five, weeks, obtain the ship and that's it?
No other holiday treats?
We have more of them! We’ve prepared a campaign,
which becomes available once you have Prinz Eitel Friedrich in Port.
The first mission can be completed only on this battleship,
but the rest of them can be completed on any ship.
Not one, but two campaigns will appear in this update.
Firstly, the Mighty Prinz.
While you progress through it, you can obtain five Tier VI ships,
and when you complete it,
you'll receive a permanent camouflage for your Prinz Eitel Friedrich.
The second campaign—Steel Monsters—is conceived for those
who have successfully earned Steel in Ranked and Clan battles,
but want to replenish their stock of this material.
It's also suitable for those
who have only just learned about this resource and want to figure it out.
We understand that Steel is a valuable
and, most importantly, status-related resource in the game.
That's why this New Year campaign is a bit of an exception.
To give you a taste of it,
let's ask developers to give us some details about this.
The Steel Giants campaign is dedicated to the beginning of the 20th century,
with Steel as the main resource that players can earn for completing it.
This campaign will be sold in our Premium Shop.
It's a new experience for us, trying these mechanics for the first time.
Apart from Steel, this campaign will reward players with camouflages,
signals, Premium Account time, Santa's Gifts, and other valuable things.
As you complete missions and Directives, and progress through the campaign,
you’ll receive special New Year containers,
which can drop elements of the Belle Époque collection.
This collection is so unusual that we'll need to talk to a historian first,
before asking our artists a couple of questions.
Sergey, I'm happy to introduce you to our players
as the man who contributed to the development
of basically every element in the new update.
I mean, you participated in the creation of the general theme,
put your heart and soul into the collection, and also wrote texts
for two campaigns to provide the historical background for them.
For example, I know that in the case of the Steel Giants campaign
you even managed to hide a joke there? Let's tell our players about it.
Well, it's not a joke, actually, it's the truth.
I decided to depart from the fact that the campaign itself,
and the update that it sits within,
are tied to battleship Prinz Eitel Friedrich,
and that this ship's construction was never completed.
Accordingly, this ship and many others like her were scrapped for steel.
And what do you know, Steel is the main reward for the campaign!
Yes, and that's exactly what I wrote in the accompanying text for this campaign.
So, now every player who completes a mission from the campaign
and receives Steel for it,
knows that it's the same steel from those unfinished ships…
Those ships that never saw the sea in reality,
but have appeared in our game and sail our virtual seas.
Let's talk about game decorations and the collection.
Well, just like the entire concept of the update,
it revolves around the age of artillery, armor, and steam.
Moreover, the update will be released just before the New Year holidays,
shifting a little from a militaristic and hostile atmosphere,
to the age when ships had exclusively representative functions, so to speak.
They were adorned with rich decorations,
and were named after kings, emperors, princes, and so on.
Because of this, the collection is made up of elements
such as royal emblems, pictures stylized to fit that time,
and old postcards— well, something like old postcards—
with the most, let's say, elderly ships present in our game.
As I understand it, you based the collection on the Art Nouveau style
and reflected this in the decorations, first of all.
We needed to show the figureheads of ships.
Figureheads are small when compared to an entire ship,
so it's difficult to fit them somehow
and make them independent objects at the same time.
Then we remembered that we'd already taken ships apart in the past
and decided not to stop there. Rostrum was our main reference.
It's basically the sawed-off bow of a ship that you can see on rostral columns.
Usually, a flame burns inside it.
Here, we made a kind of rostrum, put it in the water,
and adorned it with that decoration.
We spent quite a long time creating the water fragment itself—
we drew inspiration from the glass sculptures of one artist from New Zealand.
Our material artists sweated over this very cool material for a very long time;
by the way, it has the same color as your hair.
However, it was very difficult composition-wise.
We asked all of the experts from our studio
for help in making this strange thing beautiful, tasty, and eye-catching.
We’ve reached the end of this episode,
so let's talk about the new Warships Premium Account.
We are happy to announce the new feature this year
and hope to realize the full potential
of having a Premium Account specialized for one game in future.
In this new update, we introduce a brand- new feature—Warships Premium Account.
Why we need it, if we have the common Wargaming Premium Account?
It’s pretty simple. We wanted to do it
because with the current Premium Account, the Wargaming Premium Account,
we’re a bit limited in terms of what we can do with it,
how we can utilize it, and how we can balance it,
because that Premium Account affects more than one game.
It’s not just us, it’s World of Tanks and World of Warplanes as well.
So, whenever we did something
like give away Premium time as a reward or had a big sale,
we would see that players from other games would come and claim that reward
and then go back to the game that they originally played,
because it transfers, it applies to all the games.
So, by doing this, by introducing Warships Premium,
we will be able to have more control over that feature
and be able to use it more effectively.
Give it to players more often as a reward.
Have more sales potentially with higher discounts as well,
without affecting other products.
But, what it give to our players? More value or just equal to the old one?
So, not everything is equal.
We wanted to make sure that despite giving up the bonus
of being able to play multiple games with Premium Account,
we have some value for players on top of that.
So, we made sure that the Warships Premium Account in World of Warships
gives you better bonuses, as it will give you 65% of XP gain
rather than 50% given from the Wargaming Premium Account.
Other than that, everything is the same.
So, you get 50% more credits and the price is exactly the same.
We don't want to make this video too long,
but that's not all we’ve prepared for you.
Get ready to accept gifts, spend time with your family and friends,
and get back to our game and our channel. See you!