When rain is drizzling outside
and a cold wind is tearing the last leaves off the trees,
there's nothing better than taking a cozy seat and calmly mining Oil for your clan,
methodically sending your enemies back to Port.
However, at this very moment our world becomes especially vulnerable,
and only you, Captains, can protect it.
Well, it's a very interesting story,
because it allows us to make something very unusual.
Indeed, we can unleash our creativity and do virtually anything.
And no one will punish us for that.
Entering the mode, players find themselves on the other side of the portal,
which they saw in Halloween 2016.
They find themselves in a world with a portal like this,
and Transylvania is coming out of this portal together with the same characters
that were escorting her during the previous Halloween event.
But the same foes, which had been chasing the ship,
followed them through the portal, too.
And the foes are spreading filth— the atmosphere of the evil world,
from which our characters were lucky to escape in Halloween 2016.
In the early stage of the new operation, you'll face our old enemies—Zikasa
But towards the middle of the operation, two superships show up
One of them is the good old Rasputin.
The ship's characteristics are exactly the same as in the 2016 event.
However, the new entity, filth, heals Raputin when he is inside it.
And the healing effect is pretty considerable,
so to destroy Raputin, most of the team should focus fire on him.
The second supership is an enemy aircraft carrier.
Her strength is that she blocks most of the incoming damage when in the filth.
The most difficult part was creating the filth:
we faced a number of technical issues and restrictions when working on it.
Making the filth work was a challenge,
taking into account that it is spreading throughout the entire location.
This may seem to be easy at first sight:
just make the filth like smoke from destroyers and stretch it all over the map.
Indeed, when we tried this, computers were simply dying.
It was a challenging task,
but developers managed to find an easy and elegant solution,
which allowed us to achieve an optimal result without burning computer CPUs.
Though it may sound absurd, the filth turned out splendid.
As for the ships,
we allowed our 3D artists to show their initiative,
because many of them are also eager to make something unusual, something new.
We let them to do something like that, and they took to work with great enthusiasm.
Probably, the key peculiarity of our work on this event
was that we were, in fact, creating new characters.
Usually, we create an object, specifically a ship, based on its drawings.
In this case, that kind of approach didn't work.
We had to make up a story, a character, a concept
and then somehow integrate it with the mechanics and realities of the ship,
in order to get something that would meet your taste and all the conditions.
The main difficulties that we came across while developing the event
were about implementing the visual component in a ship that already exists.
For instance, Kurtz is a reworked Bismarck.
And we had to make this model
in such a way that the ship's key characteristics didn't change.
The new model should be of about the same size and have similar armaments as Bismark.
In other words, the evil that reveals itself in this ship
shouldn't disrupt the game mechanics.
The goal of the new mission is to seal the portal.
Three magic towers are there to help accomplish this mission
by directing their beams at the portal and closing it that way.
Meanwhile, foes are coming out of the portal, and players should contain them by all means.
Sometimes you may even have to enter the filth,
which is quite harmful and damages your ship.
And together you must hold on until the towers seal the portal.
Halloween is a fun event, so we decided to add some interesting consumables,
which we didn't have in the game before.
Of course, this made gameplay a lot more diverse.
For example, the destroyer has a new consumable called Anti-guidance System.
When you trigger it, all the enemies stop firing at you
from their primary armament guns.
The cruiser has a great consumable,
which makes her primary armament guns reload much faster
and converts the damage caused by the ship into HP for herself.
So it can be used to both deal a lot of damage to enemies and to restore your own HP.
The battleship has a wonderful ability to make herself invulnerable for 10 seconds.
When people play this ship for the first time,
the first thing they notice is that her firing range is very short
compared to the original battleship.
But when you get to grips, you realize that you can trigger "invulnerability"
when, let's say, torpedoes are about to hit you and you're unable to dodge them.
So you activate this consumable and, consequently, ignore all the damage.
It turned out great!
In addition, I would recommend that you also use this consumable to ram an enemy—
that's a very effective way to cause heavy damage.
We wanted to have a lot of interactive elements on the map,
where everything is going on.
More effects, more… everything.
We even have destructible objects there.
We wanted to have more and more of that and add all kinds of effects.
Well, that's an event, it has different rules; you can fool around there.
And also test some features and ideas.
It's kind of a boost to implement something new in the game.
Of course, it is very difficult to seal the portal with all three towers saved.
The filth spreads out, foes are attacking from all directions,
and sealing the portal will be a difficult, yet feasible challenge.
The vast imagination of our developers, reinforced with mysticism,
resulted in an eerie, but cute mission,
which will help overcome the autumn blues and bring some happiness.
Halloween is here, and it's waiting for you, the Warrior of Light!
Conquer the filth in World of Warships!