Feb 21 2013
War Thunder Blows Battle Pirates Out of the Water
Over the last ten years I haven’t played that many video games on a regular basis. The ones I have played were either for work or were just played occasionally for fun. Facebook’s explosion in recent years has introduced a lot of interesting free-to-play games, but only a few have caught my eye.
For almost a year I played a game called Battle Pirates. It was one of the few games that actually reminded me of my old RTS days. It was more like Age of Empires than any other game I’ve played in recent years. I really enjoyed it.
Unfortunately, as you rank up, the longer it takes for your ships to build and repair. You end up spending minutes playing the game and all night repairing your ships.
It wait times have really sucked the life out of the game for me and I now play less than ten minutes a week, keeping ships building, in a desperate hope that Kixeye, the game’s developer, will see they made a mistake and will correct it. They’ve been aware of the problem for many, many months but have been reluctant to do anything about it. They know they can still make money on the game. Time speed-ups are the principle ways they make money. Whip out your credit cards, boys and girls. People have literally spent thousands of dollars on this game.
Not me. I think I’ve spent about $50 on it. And that won’t even buy you a single completed Dread X (one of the best ships in the game). If you were to complete a full fleet of Dread X’s, you’re talking about a couple hundred bucks. It has truly gotten ridiculous.
So I recently made a change in my gaming habits. After seeing a couple of gameplay videos of War Thunder, I decided to download it and give it a shot. It’s in open beta and free. It has some premium options, but if you want to stick to playing for free, you can, and you will have a LOT of fun doing so.
As of right now, War Thunder is limited to players fighting in aircraft. They are working on adding ground forces (tanks) and naval forces (ships). I don’t have a whole lot of interest in tanks. There are enough tank games out there and I never liked getting into tank battles back in Battlefield 1942. Naval battles could be pretty cool. Air battles are absolutely epic!
You don’t need a top of the line graphics card. This was a concern I had because I just have a GeForce GT 430. I use the medium settings. I can probably play at a higher level, but I figure why bother when the game already looks gorgeous on the medium settings?
One of the reasons I like War Thunder over say Battle Pirates is the platforms each game uses. I haven’t a clue what engine Gaijin Entertainment is using for War Thunder. I just know it’s a million times more stable than Flash, the preferred platform for Kixeye.
Why Kixeye loves Flash so much is beyond me. Battle Pirates is simply too much for Flash to handle. Ask any Battle Pirates veteran about the game and they’ll bring up Flash/Shockwave crashes and countless other graphical issues that have accompanied the game.
As of this publication, I’ve played War Thunder off and on for a week and I have only had one crash. That’s not bad for a game in beta. I don’t know what the problem was. I rebooted and updated my graphics card drivers and I’ve been good so far. Upgrading my drivers should have been the first thing I did before I played the game, so I take some of the responsibility for that.