It started out with our boss coming to us talking about this big new project.
And he said: “We have a chance to work with Wargaming
and we were all pretty excited.”
So it was kind of challenging,
but I really liked that opportunity that opened up for me.
But on the other hand, the team got very concerned.
We had a lot of experience in the racing genre,
in creating large open worlds, and gameplay based on real-world physics,
but we never worked with something like tanks.
Hello everyone! I’m Anton Pankov,
and, together with my colleagues, we’ll tell you about
how we developed the new Grand Battle mode and prepared it for release.
During the work on Grand Battles,
even since the idea of these grand tank battles appeared,
it became clear that we wouldn’t have enough internal resources
to implement it completely by ourselves.
Considering that the number of features we develop has been growing
and they have become more advanced, to meet the spirit and demand of the time,
we started searching for external partners
who could help us with our tasks and our ideas,
who could bring in something new, develop something by themselves,
and turn these ideas into reality in cooperation with our teams.
About two years ago, Sean Lee from Wargaming called me and told me
“Hey guys, you have this extensive experience in creating large open worlds
and gameplay based on real world physics.
Do you want to help us out on World of Tanks?”
From this very moment, the relationship with Wargaming started to evolve
and turned into this amazing partnership we’re so proud of.
So our first interaction with Wargaming was that they said
“Hey we want to do a new game mode.”
And we started doing some ideas, some brainstorming for how this mode could look,
what mechanics could be introduced to World of Tanks
that still make it World of Tanks, but make it a little bit more exciting.
So we were searching for like end-game content,
for the Tier X players to have something new.
Originally, the plan was to develop a huge mode
featuring maps nine times the size of the original maps and sixty players.
And while we were playtesting, we started to notice
“Oh, it’s a substantial game mode with really a lot of features,
and it’s pretty complicated, so let’s start with something simpler first.”
Because we had all these unknowns:
we had the Tier X light tanks coming in, we had the stun mechanic coming in.
So we wanted to do something simpler first, and we said
“Hey let’s integrate these big maps, this many players into Random Battle.”
We called it Grand Battle.
And we wanted it to be like this battle type for Tier X players,
something exciting and worthwhile for them to play,
while still keeping the rules pretty simple and similar to Random Battle.
We could not just do a map and say “Ok that’s a new map for Grand Battle.”
We needed to sit down together with level designers from Wargaming.
They needed to check our map if it’s really good for World of Tanks,
and then they suggested changes, we adapted it, and in the end
we basically got the stamp “Approved by Wargaming”, and then we could ship it.
But first you need to do research. In this case, do playtests. A lot of playtests.
We need to understand first whether the gameplay is OK,
whether it’s enjoyable and brings any new experience or not.
That’s why gameplay tests are conducted. So, we started with this.
In the beginning, we did just a prototype. And we brought together
some people from our team, from Wargaming, just core people.
And we looked at what is fun, what is the base of the mode we want to do.
And then later we brought in more people, made playtests, saw how it went.
And then in the end we said “Ok let’s try for the public.”
At one particular point in development,
which was really close to Sandbox release of Grand Battles,
we found out that for some reason the game didn’t work
on minimum spec machines anymore, which is a big problem,
because you miss out a large amount of the player base.
But our level artists and our tech artists spent quite a lot of time
to improve the overall performance in the map.
By keeping it in line with the overall visual quality for World of Tanks.
We managed to fit into the thresholds of the acceptance test
and we passed this test, so that’s why the map is released.
After the test on Sandbox, we realized that the map was good,
it worked well in this game mode, and continued working on the map,
so we started adding more substance to the mode itself.
We started thinking about whether Personal Missions and Missions should be there,
how statistics should be formed, whether players should receive medals,
and so on and so forth.
We talked a lot, we discussed a lot these Personal Missions and medals,
should you earn them in Grand Battle,
because in general it’s the same mode, but it’s a little bit different.
You have more players, so you have different chances and possibilities.
We talked about this a lot, and we found that yes, you should earn them,
because we think it’s important that players can also progress in our mode,
in Grand Battle, because it’s the same you enter with the same queue,
so players should be able to do them.
Some of the missions will be easier of course, some will be harder,
but I think that’s the fun part for players to find out if they can do them, right?
What I think is also very cool is the ability that you can now
earn Bonds in the mode where you don’t need to be a superhero.
In Ranked Battles, normally you need to be really good to earn bonds,
but in our mode, in Grand Battle,
you can earn them even without being this super guy.
The next stage is supertest. It’s a pre-release stage, when a feature—
any feature—first goes to supertest, then there’s a common test
with several iterations, and finally there’s the release itself.
When the day finally came where we wanted to release it,
so we submitted it to Wargaming and they looked at it and everyone was nervous.
We also had from Wargaming here, then…
on our side to give us support if something goes wrong.
And everyone was really hyped and when we finally submitted it,
everyone felt this relief to have accomplished something really great.
So, right now the Grand Battle is in the beta mode.
So it’s not done yet, but we’re still working on the performance,
we’re still working on the issues that it has. What I can say is that in the future,
performance will improve for this mode and also for Frontline.
So, we’re working on improvements to the engine
and to the performance and also on the stability.
So, I think, in the future it will improve and we can remove this bit of lag
and the mode will be released finally.
Of course we understand that Grand Battles are only the first step,
test of the pen so to speak. And we have a lot of work to do in the future.
But as the Halloween and Grand Battle modes showed,
this successful experience of working with other teams, including western teams,
opens up absolutely new horizons, new opportunities in quantity and quality
of big gameplay features that we can present to players.
This is all done to speed up the process of development,
to work more with the western studios
that have good knowledge of the needs of western players
and have rich experience and portfolios.
So Grand Battle became, like I said, the first steps.
I would like to express special thanks to the Bongfish studio.
The guys really did a lot of work, and the quality of their work inspires respect.
We will continue working together on the development of the Grand Battle mode
and on the further development of the idea of many vehicles on the larger maps.
So it’s a big and important direction for us.
So, from our side, we’re already working on a new map,
which is still in the testing phase of course, we’re testing it right now.
The map will be pretty cool.
I think, afterwards we’re also developing even another map for Grand Battle
and, of course, we’re also working on a Frontline map,
which players already know from the Sandbox.
So, there will be a lot of new content for Grand Battle, of course.
Working with Wargaming, in the beginning everyone was a bit like, “Will this work?”
But we quickly found out that it is really awesome to work with Wargaming
and one thing that we learned or what I heard when I was in Minsk
is that they have this slogan, “One game, one team.”
I think that’s really fitting, because it’s not about Bongfish or Wargaming,
it’s about the team and making something great.
I hope that you all really enjoy our game mode that we created here.
So we’re all huge World of Tanks fans
and we hope that we did something that you like.
The British Splash Damage studio also contributed greatly
by doing the level design part and prototyping this mode,
so we would like to thank them as well.
And, of course, we should mention the Minsk studio,
our main and key studio of the World of Tanks developers.
The guys finalized the whole mode, did final tests, and transferred everything
into our development repositories to make the mode possible.
It was a good example of teamwork and concerted efforts.
The new maps will be added, of course. They will probably be…
I mean they certainly will be the brand new maps
specifically developed for this mode.
We’re also considering the possibility of adapting
some of the Random Battles maps to this mode.
Well, in general, we are technically capable of making the maps bigger,
expanding them, so we will work intensively on it.
We will certainly keep all players posted,
show new features on the Sandbox, common tests, and talk about it.
A lot of preparatory and test work has been done in the last year,
so we will demonstrate the results of this and the next year to the fullest.
And but hopefully this is just a beginning and many more great things are coming.