Update 1.0 for World of Tanks will be available very soon.
And to understand how THIS…
could turn into THIS, we need to look at the past.
And we should start… with orcs.
Everyone wanted to make the “World of Warcraft killer”,
but everyone knew that it couldn’t be done,
because development requires a lot of time and money,
PR is very expensive, and so on.
That’s why we decided to make something similar
but of a smaller scale, and session battles.
So you enter the map,
and you get a certain number of orcs, elves, mages in your team.
That was the idea. We tried to implement it.
It was clear right away that we needed to look for an engine.
There were two popular engines at that time.
There was BigWorld and there was HeroEngine.
We chose BigWorld, and that was the right decision.
Later we realized that we did well and it was the right choice,
because the project changed.
There was a question: “What can you do best?”—
“We make tanks best”— “So let’s continue making tanks”.
Then, Mikhail Zhivets, “Storm”, sent everyone an email
where he wrote that the company wouldn’t proceed with the project
in the fantasy setting due to a number of reasons,
and we would make an MMO about tanks.
Let’s keep the same ideas, but make it about tanks.
That was a different story! Because Wargaming had made tanks before!
We had everything we needed: experience, skill, passion.
However, there was a lack of other things, for example, free hands.
The team was very small.
We could sit down and do a playtest, and then someone would say:
“Hey, why does artillery have such big dispersion?”
And we would say: “Stop!”,
then minimize the game, adjust the XML file, and check again.
Since we didn’t have a specialized designer,
together with SerB,
we would design on the whiteboard in the morning what we wanted to get,
get it programmed, and test what we had in the evening.
Back then, there was the feeling that you had complete control over the project,
you understood where everything was working and how well,
because you worked together.
And indeed. The team was small, but passionate!
There was no time, but there was willingness.
There were no resources, but there was excitement.
And despite all the difficulties, it happened on August 12, 2010.
The game was released!
Now, remembering all this is kind of fun,
but back then, the developers felt differently…
The allure of that time
lied in the fact that we all knew we were running out of money
and had to release something.
This was the main motivator: when money runs out, it’s a deadline.
We were crunching so hard before the release,
so the first thing we did afterwards,
when we knew that we didn’t have to do anything else,
we all went to the Berezina river, into the woods, to have a barbecue.
And Victor gave a speech in the evening, he said: “Guys…”
He used to say all the time: “Eagles!”
“Eagles!”
He said: “Eagles! We got there! We’re doing it!”
And everybody said: “Well, ok, we are, it seems so”
No one had imagined it would be a game with 160 million players.
And you continue going to work.
You have the same office, your floor, your room.
There are several rooms you’re constantly working with:
programmers, designers, artists, other teams,
and so your regular work was continuing.
The graphics weren’t a thing to think about at the time.
They were at quite a good level. Well, just look at this for example.
Or this! Or this! Indescribable beauty!
And to be honest, it wasn’t the graphics that caused problems.
We had a very big problem, and it was quite unexpected.
The thing was that no one expected so many players to be online.
And those servers, those clusters that were purchased,
no one expected they wouldn’t cope with the load. But they started failing.
At that moment, the guys had their first suspicions about the situation.
A feeling that we had created a monster
and something hadn’t gone as planned, but for the better,
appeared when I went to Gamescom for the first time.
I saw that big fair of games and enormous excitement around Tanks.
That was the moment I thought… “Wow!”
I mean no one expected this, not even in their wildest dreams…
Maybe Victor hoped that it would go like this and it would be a hit.
Let’s say, I think it’s really a huge success, completely unexpected.
As soon as September 2010,
more than 10 million battles had already been fought in the game.
And in January 2011, the world record was registered
for “Most players online simultaneously on one MMO server”.
A year after release,
more than 5 million players were registered in the game!
So, what usually happens, when a game becomes popular in terms of gameplay,
popular among players, people start thinking: “Okay, what do we criticize?”
Graphics. At the time, there were no dynamic shadows, no normal sky,
no water surfaces, no flora, no post-effects, no normal lighting.
I mean there was all that, but it was at the level of World of Warcraft.
Bronislav was dealing with a significant upgrade of our engine at that time.
He didn’t like it either, the graphics weren’t good enough.
It was interesting to me. I was doing a big part of the job.
I was so interested in this.
I wanted to see us stepping into the new technological era.
Well, our interests were similar. By working together a lot,
and for a long time, we managed to make everything look decent.
It was the birth of Update 8.0, where we added delayed lighting,
HDR postprocessing, improved lighting, decals of shell hits,
new improved terrain, and water.
So I can say that Update 8.0
was probably the first big technological improvement of the game.
It was a big technological stack
that allowed us to improve the graphics to a great extent.
Most importantly, we added new graphics rendering in Update 8.0.
Weak computers continued to use the old rendering,
but more advanced PCs received the new rendering.
And the game made a big step forward in terms of the graphics.
The picture changed, everyone liked it very much.
In fact, many consider Update 8.0 to be the most successful update in our history.
But not many can remember what the feeling was,
because it was a very long time ago, but that effect,
seeing and playing a game from a new angle, it was quite notable.
And then we made… well, not exactly,
we had to make our mistake, a mistake we repeated several times after this:
we didn’t rework all the content.
At the time, it was a huge scope of work. I think, we reworked about 10 maps.
Other maps were roughly converted
so that they could work with the new lighting.
Yes, they started looking a bit better, but not significantly.
This was our main problem.
Then we were reworking the remaining maps during the year.
After Update 8.0, every second version
(we had two types of versions: functional and content),
every content version contained a pack of maps.
In Update 8.10, all maps were fully completed.
Most interestingly, the maps that were released most recently
were much better than those released in Update 8.0.
Although there weren’t many changes in terms of applied technologies.
This demonstrates how our art specialists
were finally able to master those technologies
and fully understand how to use them. So, the later maps
looked far better than the first maps that were released in Update 8.0.
Simultaneously, we were improving the engine.
In Update 8.10, we had some improvements, better post processing,
god rays, lighting that was now used in the linear space.
We were also able to perform color grading,
which allowed us to use richer colors for maps.
We got rid of the elf-like colors.
In Update 8.10, we could see significant improvements compared to Update 8.0.
However, it still seemed to be not enough by far.
The breakthrough in graphics in Update 8.0 was substantial,
but not sufficient. Almost immediately,
the developers started to look for other ways to make the visuals even better.
To put it simply: “What else can we do”?
What can we do? We can create HD vehicles.
The top management agreed: “Why not!”
We set to work, we launched the prototyping process.
Update 8.10 hadn’t been released yet,
and we had already started to create prototypes of HD vehicles.
At some point, we realized
that simply creating more pixels and polygons wasn’t enough.
We needed our vehicles to look like actual vehicles.
We needed the metal to look like real metal.
Vitaliy Lashkov and I were wondering: “Why do our vehicles look so bad?”
The models themselves. What did they lack?
The specular reflection was bad.
We wanted specular reflection in shadow. We wanted improved shadows.
We were trying to solve every problem separately, one by one.
But suddenly, an idea came to our minds,
and we realized that Physically Based Rendering was what we needed.
There was only one way to get a metal surface to look real:
it should reflect everything, not just the sun.
This approach allowed us to solve all problems at once,
simultaneously, not one by one.
We created an initial prototype. It was functional enough:
metal was shining, cold and dense, reflecting the sky…
Plenty of bugs, memory leaks, tracks shine from under the tank,
a lot of other problems.
But the R&D team and programmers calmed us down:
“It’s ok, guys. You just give us tanks.
We’ll fix everything by the time of release.”
We screwed up again, because we didn’t take into consideration
the time required for our artists to learn the new technologies.
We spent about three months on getting to understand
how it all worked and how to create vehicles.
It’s like in the Matrix, where you first see columns of characters,
among which you can eventually see the woman in the red dress.
Because, while you’re working with it, you can’t see what will become of it.
Finally, when everything is finished and uploaded to the engine—well!
Adding physically correct lighting into the game was an excellent solution.
Metal, wood, paint, stone— all this now looked natural.
The vehicles don’t look like plastic anymore.
And… this was incredibly… hard.
When we moved to Update 8.0 and reworked the content,
it pales in comparison with the difficulties we faced
when moving from 8.0 to 9.0.
That’s why we worked on the first tanks for 7 months or more.
So, we managed to prepare the tanks for the release.
And one Garage.
I can’t say those vehicles were our best work.
It became clear quite soon, because we reworked them completely,
because they were outdated in comparison with what we released in 9.6.
It was like the curve:
at first, our tanks were much worse than the environment in 8.0;
in 9.0, the environment was much worse than the vehicles.
Then we started thinking about how we level this situation.
In addition to the existing technologies that we implemented in 9.0,
we needed something
that could significantly improve the look of the environment.
Some time later, it became clear to everyone
that the old maps we dragged into Physically Based Rendering
by using every trick in the book, and the old content,
it all looked outdated anyway.
For maybe a year and a half, we were adding small improvements to the engine:
improved post effects, revised lighting,
we even fixed the bugs that we simply missed—
we fixed all these things
and helped the artists improve the content and speed up its creation.
That was when the first prototypes appeared, where we tried to make…
…basically, HD versions of the maps.
It wasn’t a prototype. It was a video of a prototype.
I mean we had no prototype.
We had a picture of it. It was the Abbey map.
I think we called it an integrated map back then,
we had all the available BigWorld technologies on it,
all the beauty was turned on for it.
The objects were made specifically for this map,
and it looked simply awesome,
incomparably more awesome than what we had at the time.
And everyone said: “Yeah, it looks great. But why is the FPS so low?”
There were memory leaks,
and no hardware at that time could cope with 15x15 battles on the map.
It was more like a demo version, a video.
So we decided that it was time to focus our efforts
on rewriting the engine completely to make it modern,
to use modern technologies,
and keep in mind that our target audience remained the same.
This is the moment that can be considered the start of HD map development.
This is where what would become Update 1.0 in the future started.
And we will tell you about this in the next episode.
One of the best days at work
was the day that we finally decided we would make HD tanks.
It was a turning point
when we realized that you couldn’t make graphics in World of Tanks
better overall by tuning, for example, just one shader.
We should produce good content.