Lunch with the Developers – Part 2/4

After Part I, our lunch with developers Oleg Gotynyan and Miroslav Baranenko continues. Let’s dive right in!

	Oleg Gotynyan General Manager Persha Studia	Miroslav Baranenko Head of Art
Interviewed by our World of Warplanes Editor Elijah Tabere

In this article we discuss:

• eSports plans
• New planes
• Match Maker
• New maps

eSports is becoming bigger and bigger in World of Tanks with tournaments being held almost all year round. Do you plan to include proprietary options for it as well in World of Warplanes?

OG: Absolutely. However, the development of all eSports-relevant features won’t begin before release of the game. Although we all agree that it is a very important part of what’s to come for World of Warplanes, it’s not on our “Must-have” list for features, without which the game just can’t launch.

MB: That does not mean that we haven’t already started thinking about it. We’re learning from World of Tanks and want the eSports mode for World of Warplanes to be very efficient when it arrives. There will be an Observer Mode for spectating, as well as many other features that will make participating in eSports more accessible for the players.

OG: We just finished work on a new camera architecture last week. This work will benefit the development of the aforementioned Observer Mode. First we’ll tweak the Post-Mortem view, then maybe some improvements to the camera during battles and then we’ll get to the Observer Mode view. However, this is not for before the release.

On the other hand, release day is not too far away by now. People won’t have to wait for it for too long, right?

OG: That’s true. We have a list of things that we want to tackle immediately after release. It’ll all come down to prioritisation. ESports is pretty high up on that list. We all agree that World of Warplanes lends itself very well to eSports. The game is dynamic, fast, has a tactical gameplay and looks visually very appealing for spectators.  

MB: We’ll have to pay a little more attention to balancing when it comes to designing maps for eSports. In competitive environments like this, topography and the layout of ground targets needs to be absolutely fair for both sides. Obviously we can’t just make a sea map with flat ocean below and clear sky above without anything else in it. (laughs) It’s a little more complicated than that, but we’ll figure it out.

Oleg Gotynyan (3rd from the right) and our very own Alberto "Bertiux" Delgado (far right) meet fans at this year's Community Party during gamescom 2013.

Let’s talk about new planes. On stage you’ve already revealed that the German Junkers Ju 87 “Stuka” is going to make an appearance in the game. Can you say when we can expect it?

MB: Yes, we did say that it was coming, but we can’t disclose right now when exactly it will arrive. As you know, we have promised the British planes before release of the game, and with this day coming up soon, right now, we’re mostly concentrating on delivering on this promise.

OG: What we can say is that we have a plan for the coming year and a half for the deployment of new aircraft in the game. We won’t stop after the British. Expect to see expansions of the German tech tree, new classes for the U.S. plane fleet, as well as very interesting new branches of iconic Soviet fighters, just to name a few. Our plans go even way beyond that, but it’s too early to talk about that now. Somewhere along the line the Stuka will make it into the game.

MB: The hardest part about introducing new planes is game designers changing their minds at the very last minute about the features of a certain new aircraft or branch extension. Major updates, which bring a whole group of new planes, need to be planned and worked on long time ahead of their release. When all of a sudden entire aircraft get taken out, or replaced by others, this has ramifications for the entire process. To give you an example, just last June alone we lost around 500-600 working hours when a projected branch extension was revamped. Two German planes got taken out of our plans for an update, which caused us to have to do a lot of new work on the balancing front for the remaining scheduled aircraft.

OG: That doesn’t mean that these planes are lost, of course. Sooner or later, game designers will dig those “laggards” back up and we’ll end up using them in some fashion – whether it’s as Premium planes or maybe even gift aircraft. Last-minute changes happen from time to time in all development processes. Tanks are probably being moved around even more! (laughs)

During our lunch, Miroslav revealed our plans regarding the introduction of new aircraft in the future.

From the forums, we know that the matchmaker keeps being a hot topic. There are proponents of reducing the tier spread, in order to make the matches more even. At the same time, other players feel that this would make battles less diverse and thus less entertaining. Others again see no need for action. They are happy with the current state and say that you can ‘out-play’ pilots of a higher tier plane through experience. What is the position of the development team on this?

OG: We are currently working on a new version of the matchmaker, which is scheduled to arrive soon after release. We know about the concerns that some of our players raise and want to address them. In fact, we already have in the past – even if the results were mixed to say the least. To tell you a true funny story, about a year ago, we had scheduled some changes to the matchmaker, which we couldn’t deploy in time for an upcoming update. We therefore decided to postpone the introduction of this particular modification until the next version. However, because of an oversight, we forgot to remove the mention of this introduction from the already announced patch notes. People thought that this feature had already made it into the game and began giving their feedback on it. 40% of players said the matchmaker improved, 40% said it got significantly worse and only 20% didn’t seem to notice any changes. (laughs) So, even though we obviously continue working on it, you see that the perception of the matchmaker’s efficiency varies a lot from person to person.

MB: The new version will be better at taking into account the level of all players joining in a flight. Other factors will be taken into consideration as well, which should lead to an overall improvement of the game balance. We will also work on reducing the time that the matchmaker takes to assemble the teams. With more players comes a greater need for a quick and efficient system that will allow everybody to have fun.

Check out some views from two of our latest maps 'Fjords' and 'Eastern Front'!

Miroslav, you’re often asked here at gamescom how long the team takes to design an aircraft from its first conception until final arrival in the game. However, nobody ever seems to ask about how long it takes to create a map. From experience we can tell that there’s one or two maps coming out about every 2-3 versions. Is it accurate to say that the creation of one map takes on average about this span of time?

MB: Every map we produce requires on average 800 working hours. Usually, we’re looking at a development time of about two months per map. Normally, we have two maps in production at the same time. Depending on the situation, we then decide if we publish both, or keep one of the two for a rework with a later release.

Earlier onstage, you revealed that you were working on city maps. Does that mean we’ll see a new city map in the game soon?

MB: I was talking in general terms. we’re working on city maps among others. Although it’s too early to give away concrete details yet, we can say is that there will be a city map that’s inspired by a city in Western Europe.

OG: At the moment, when developing new maps, we try to work with different altitude levels. For example, a very cool map, which we’re preparing for after release right now, manages to incorporate multiple “battle arenas” that are separated from each other through different altitude plateaus. Players will be battling in between these different levels, of which every single one is going to feature a unique feeling.

You will get to see a sort-of first version of this gameplay on the “Fjords” map, which is going to be released in the next update. The new map with the different altitude plateaus is going to take the same concept to an even greater level. It should be a lot of fun.

MB: In terms of map production, we just recently restructured the teams that are responsible for it. If you look at the latest maps that we released, like “Asian Border” and “Plateau”, you can already see an improvement in terms of quality of the work they produce. Both of these maps look visually stunning, and offer new and exciting gameplay through clever use of environmental factors such as cloud levels, ground topography and target layout.

However, we’re not only chasing great heights. Since many air battles actually happened over rather simple terrain, “flat” maps are in production too. Our goal is it to make every map fun, regardless of its relief.

Can you talk about how you want to achieve this?

MB: Mountains are a key gameplay element in our game. People have to fly around them, reach new heights by going above them, or use them for cover in dogfights. None of these elements exist on a flat map. However, we try to find a way to introduce what we call ‘virtual heights’.

OG: On one particular city map, which we’ve been working on for multiple months now, we use fog, clouds and heavy anti-aircraft fire to create zones that act like mountains. That means that through extensive use of these elements, we can create different conditions in various areas of the map that will force the player to gain altitude, fly around or completely avoid entrance into a specific sector. This is a very unusual concept, which we haven’t tried before. So we’re not entirely convinced of how this will work out in the end. Maybe it will make it into the regular map pool, maybe it will appear later in a new game mode. We’ll see.

It seems that every time we introduce a new map, it’s a high-tier map of huge size. Will people who fly lower tiers also get to see new maybe smaller maps in the future?

OG: Five of our coming maps will be either for mid-tier or high-tier planes with appropriate distances and sizes. After the introduction of those, we’ll shift back to creating new maps for the lower tiers. It’s definitely planned. We were lacking high-tier maps for a long time when people had to fly on ‘Pacific’ even with Tier X planes. Once this has been dealt with, we’ll be able to concentrate on smaller size maps as well.

Not too long ago we published the stats of our Closed Beta, which revealed that most people played on Tier IV-V planes. This means that many only flew on “National Park” and “Pacific” most of the time. Wouldn’t it have been better to give those guys a little more diversity?

OG: Definitely! You can’t even imagine how much we agree with our players. After a while, we just couldn’t see these maps anymore! (laughs) Launching the game and landing on “Pacific” again for the millionth time was a challenge for us as well! However, we first had to nail down our map creation process and technology. That’s why we couldn’t immediately put all our resources in just the addition of new content. A lot of time was spent on reworking the already existing maps in terms of balance and visual overhauls. When you make improvements to your rendering engine, you need to rework the old maps too to adjust for it, right? So we did just that and spent a lot of time in the process whenever our technology evolved. “Harbour” alone was redesigned, retextured and repainted so many times, that now we could have added five new maps in the same timeframe.

We completely share the opinion if our Closed Beta testers about how bad it was, having only “Pacific” available for your flights. It was a difficult time for all of us. At least the players had the option not to play the map when they couldn’t see it anymore. We didn’t have that luxury, since we had to keep on developing it. (laughs) Now that we’ve established our tools, we’re working hard to add to the map pool as quickly as we can.

Join us next time when we tackle subjects such as historical accuracy, the game’s Free-2-Win aspect and possible plans for a tablet version.

See you soon in Part III, Pilots!