At its core, World of Tanks is an action game. Whether it’s Wargaming selling the gameplay, or players trying to convince their friends to take the World of Tanks phenomenon for a spin, the pitch revolves around tense stand-offs and explosive action. The gameplay is the core of World of Tanks, for sure, but there’s a lot to be said about the insane attention to detail that Wargaming has insisted on to wrap that gameplay core in a historically accurate offering.

At first glance, there’s a strange disconnect between Wargaming’s insistence on historical accuracy and the accessible nature of World of Tanks’ core gameplay. After all, an emphasis on realism tends to lend itself to a simulated experience. And yet, for World of Tanks, it really works: a splicing of historian-approved authenticity appeases hardcore history aficionados, while the perfected gameplay formula of ‘easy to learn, challenging to master’ entices everyday gamers to play the game and rewards with tactical depth scores of hours down the track-damaged path.

Wargaming has military specialists on staff in Europe, Japan and the United States to ensure each individual tank that’s brought into World of Tanks is as faithfully recreated as possible. It’s the job of these specialists to liaise with museums and private collectors to access either surviving tanks or extensive arrays of documents, photographs and blueprints for ancient tanks that are now, for lack of a better word, extinct.

Even the original game took time to perfect © [unknown]

Tanks that have real-life reference points are easier for Wargaming to compare to its digital models for purposes of accurate recreation. For the prototype tanks that were never made, extinct tanks with no real-life models, or those with limited information, Wargaming fills in the blanks where necessary, but still holds itself to high standards of approval. The digitisation process takes around seven weeks from concept art to final approval model, then that digital tank is sent off for historical checks, which are, we were told, meticulous to the point of counting bolts.

Digitising the tanks is only half the battle. To help sell the tank fantasy – particularly when dealing with the Xbox 360 , Xbox One and PlayStation 4 versions of World of Tanks (the PS4 version launched on January 20), which are more likely to be played on large TVs – Wargaming sends out teams to rig real-life tanks with recording equipment and capture the iconic sounds of the tanks. This includes obvious sounds such as engine, tracks and the main guns, but the teams also isolate sound recording to the point of capturing the noises of features such as the individual ammunition canisters that are strapped to the tank exteriors.

As admirable as this is, practicality dictates that while the tanks look the business, the sound library is procedurally generated per tank because of the impracticalities of individualised sound effects for each tank variant. That said, the same Wargaming attention to detail shines through in terms of the solution to that problem.

Console builds also take authenticity seriously © Wargaming

Tanks are classified in terms of factors such as fuel type, engine displacement and configurations, as well as the all-important main gun, then sounds are procedurally assigned based on variables including diesel versus petrol, track width and length, as well as front-wheel versus rear-wheel drive from a pool of different recording sessions with 25 historical tanks.

Wargaming takes its tank accuracy so seriously that it’s helped to fund the restoration and reconstruction of so-called endangered historical tanks. This includes the recreation of at least one incredibly rare tank, the monstrous German Panzer VIII Maus, which is the only one in the world. It also extends to the restoration of the Australian Sentinel tank. There are only four remaining Sentinels around the globe, and the rare tank was also added to the roster of in-game tanks late last year.