Hi everyone! In September last year, World of Warships was officially released.
But the game’s history had started long before.
And in this episode, we will tell you about all the stages of its development and evolution.
Full ahead!
A year has passed since the release of World of Warships,
but the first steps to create the game were made five years ago.
From the very beginning, developers were facing two major tasks.
The original task was to create a combination of extensive historical accuracy
and fierce warship action in one game.
But the further we went, the more these two things began to disagree.
At some point, it became clear that they cannot exist together
and one of the components had to take over.
The battles were too long and boring, as the fighting was conducted from huge distances.
By the way, real battles were not fought at such ranges.
Somewhere closer to Update 1.7, we realized that this couldn't be fixed with small measures.
We tried to reduce the detection range, bring opponents closer to each other,
so that they would make more hits and fight more efficiently, but this didn’t help.
The game was enjoyed by a small group of people, these hardcore gamers,
and evidently it wasn’t designed for a large audience.
So we had to start thinking about a new concept.
The people whom we were inviting for testing gave only positive feedback,
they liked the game they were playing.
But we had this feeling deep down that something was wrong.
And one evening we sat down and decided to rework everything.
The game must be interesting and playable, and only then historically accurate,
as much as it doesn’t interfere with this.
The balance became our cornerstone.
We limited the range of fire, ships began to engage each other at the distances
that were used in real battles.
We took down the camera: instead of hanging somewhere in the sky
it was placed on top of a ship’s gun turret.
Players started feeling as if they were in the middle of a real battle:
here’s your ship, here she is firing, sinking the enemy, or receiving damage.
This was Update 0.2.0, an “arcadized” version of the game as we called it.
In Concept 2.0, we identified the right direction to follow.
But it was a long way before we made a game that could be offered to a large audience.
The key path for the game’s development was found
after the Alpha Test, held in October 2013.
And that’s when hard times started for developers:
they had to recreate the entire game all over again.
It was a difficult year: some of our team members pretty much lived in the office.
People stayed here day and night, they slept, ate, and drank here, at their desks.
All this was done to tackle all the problems within a year.
We had to do the tech tree, commanders, consumables…
As a matter of fact, the game lacked many components,
without which it just couldn’t be understood by players.
I mean common things like the tech tree, the ability to view ship specifications,
upgrades, and other things that can be mounted on a ship.
None of these existed at the moment; we had to
make a plan to start introducing these features.
And only then could we understand when we would be able to present the game to an audience.
This was basically the starting point for future Beta Weekends.
The biggest challenges were the Beta Weekends.
We had a small number of players for the Alpha Test,
and this time crowds of them would be online all at the same time,
the servers had to sustain the load, nothing could fail,
so that users would enjoy everything.
It was scary to make this first run, but it was interesting too.
When everything was launched, and players came to the
servers, and the servers were operating properly,
we also went there to play and see how it was going.
That was really exciting.
The Beta Weekends showed that people
liked the project, they liked the game and wanted to play it.
This meant there would be lots of people in the Beta Test.
This was a bit scary, so we launched the Closed Beta Test first,
where we at least had a way to limit access to the game.
Then we started the Open Beta Test,
where basically anyone could play.
We focused on stabilizing the game’s basic functionality,
making its client and server work reliably and with stable performance,
so that users could play it even with the lowest configurations.
That’s about it. These were the key tasks for the Open Beta Test.
Inside the team, we worked out certain criteria;
and when we met them, we said the game was ready for release.
This was September 2015…
I am very honored to be able to announce
for the first time here, from this stage of Tokyo Game Show,
that World of Warships is now officially released around the world.
Since that moment, naval battles haven’t stopped in the virtual seas and oceans,
and developers had a clear understanding of how to develop the game over the next year.
Right after the release, having received plenty of feedback—
and it was mainly wow effect, everybody liked the game—
we put together a very detailed and, seemingly, correct plan
for the project’s long-term development.
So there was this list of features and their introduction schedule
down to maybe a month.
We had this clear-cut decision: we will do this and that.
But maybe we should’ve been more flexible from the beginning;
and now we’re trying to reshape our work and listen more to players.
We probably lacked this at the beginning.
And now we’re doing our best to listen to what players are saying
and adjust our plans to what they want at the moment.
From the beginning we had this confidence that we were moving in the right direction;
it was some kind of assurance that we were doing everything right
and going straight towards our objectives.
Then, when we got it in the neck, to put it in crude terms,
and were told that we were doing it wrong,
we became confused and needed some time to collect our thoughts and determine,
which features we want to deliver to our users in the near future.
And, more importantly, we started thinking about how to do it faster.
Our development process was organized by iterations, meaning
that while one version was on the server and people played it,
the other was being tested before getting to players,
the third was being developed before going to tests,
the fourth was being planned before entering these stages.
And it worked, but there were huge time gaps between updates.
We planned a month and a half for each update, but
sometimes it took up to three months to make,
because we wanted to release a big and interesting update...
And this required a lot of time for development and testing.
Players didn’t like it at all, they didn’t understand what any changes were,
what developers do, when a certain tech tree appears in the game,
when they improve and fix the things that they promised...
For us it was very uncomfortable, because we were stuck with one update for a long time.
And players were annoyed—they wanted to play and see what we were working on.
We analyzed the whole situation and the players’ feedback
and decided to make updates smaller,
but to release them more often—every three weeks.
They will be smaller than updates we used to make, but they will be released more
often and players will see constant changes in response to their requests.
We changed our approach this winter and now we have separate streams, so to speak.
Some streams—to work on big features for the future;
other streams—to work on current improvements that we
want to deliver to our players as soon as possible...
The main thing that we learned this year, or rather
over the course of the entire development process,
is that our original ideas don’t always correspond to what players want to see.
Players sometimes suggest wonderful ideas, but other
times they repeat the things that we’ve already done
and rejected because of negative feedback.
It’s impossible to resolve all problems in the game.
Anyone who works in the software industry will
tell you that there is no software without errors.
It all depends on which of the critical issues are really present in your product,
in our case, our game.
Feedback from players and their description of issues
help us to resolve the most critical problems to maintain the highest level of quality.
Improvements to the upgrades system, elimination of lag in Port,
development of the commander skills—you’re waiting for these things
and developers are working on them as we speak.
They continue to develop the functionality necessary for PvE.
Reward containers with different bonuses will appear in the game.
Apart from that, we plan to introduce new ship branches soon:
British cruisers and an alternate branch for Japanese destroyers,
as well as a couple of Premium ships—HMS Belfast and Soviet destroyer Leningrad.
There will be new maps as well, Golden Haven and Coast, in particular.
So, you’ll have plenty of opportunities to show your skills in World of Warships.