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If games marketing had an Elusive Man figure, Frazer Nash might be

him. “I’m the guy who everyone knows, but

they don’t know why they know,” he joked, as I

asked if he was THE Frazer Nash. In a career spanning more

than 16 years, he’s been one of the principal UK marketing

figures behind games like style="font-style: italic;">Half Life,

Half

Life 2, style="font-style: italic;">Diablo 2,

Warcraft

3, and a horde of sims,

online titles, and other games. Frazer Nash Communications has

frequented my inbox since I began this job 6 years ago, but it was

always as his own PR firm.







I told you that to tell you this: Frazer’s seen a lot of bad

games in his time, so for him to sign on with Wargaming.net full-time,

well, he must see a lot of potential in the upstart company’s

growing list of online military titles. That, and he’s a true

wargaming enthusiast, nothing like a PR shill. After riffing about the

good old days of Avalon Hill and SSI, we sat down to talk href="http://www.tentonhammer.com/taxonomy/term/3228"> style="font-style: italic;">World of Battleships.









World of Battleships Preview





While Wargaming.net’s third style="font-style: italic;">World of

game wasn’t

playable or demoable at this year’s gamescom, Frazer used

concept art to tell the style="font-style: italic;">WoB

story. “These are aspirational

screenshots,” he noted, “but you

know from

following href="http://www.tentonhammer.com/wot"> style="font-style: italic;">World of Tanks

that this is 99.999% the way it will

be.” I couldn’t fault his analysis; the gorgeous

plates we first saw of style="font-style: italic;">WoT

at GDC in March virtually mirrored what we

see in the game and, as a bonus, for a fairly miniscule 6 GB footprint.







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Frazer wasn’t just selling style="font-style: italic;">World of Battleships

with concept

art. He used the images to help explain how different style="font-style: italic;">WoB

will be from

its two predecessors, style="font-style: italic;">World of Tanks

and href="http://www.tentonhammer.com/taxonomy/term/3139"> style="font-style: italic;">World of Warplanes.

“This is your game, this is your view,” he began,

gesturing at the image above. “The destroyers are in

completely the wrong place. Those two should be screening the

battleship, protecting it from aircraft. Off in the distance you see an

aircraft carrier… it’s dead. It may be floating

now, but trust me, it’s dead. It should be on the complete

inside of the formation… alone it’s extremely

vulnerable.”







That, in a nutshell, is the world of difference between style="font-style: italic;">World of Tanks

and World

of Battleships. As Frazer

went on to explain, while style="font-style: italic;">World of

Tanks rewards cooperation,

you can split off into multiple groups or,

once in a while, find success by going solo. In either of the latter

cases, you can often retreat and find another angle. Apart from having

distance and relative speed in place of cover, much the same will be

the case in style="font-style: italic;">World of Warplanes

– as Frazer put it:

“Everyone can be a hero... everyone’s an

ace.” But style="font-style: italic;">World of Battleships

will be grad school for

Wargaming.net students – win together as a single unit, or

die apart.







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Frazer’s comments were revealing in another way too. Yes,

there will be planes, but players won’t be able to control

aircraft directly in style="font-style: italic;">World of Battleships.

“As a carrier, the

only weapon you’ve got is AI planes. You launch the planes,

they go to a particular location, and they’ll either find

something to shoot on the way, or they run out of fuel and head

home. The smaller, fast ships can evade or fight off planes

as they get a fix on the bigger ships, so your battleships can begin to

fire.”







So we begin to see a variation on the tune Wargaming.net has played in

World

of Tanks with great success,

and Frazer confirmed that style="font-style: italic;">WoB

will

stick to the 15 player-per-side format. But instead of the style="font-style: italic;">WoT

formula

- light tanks for scouting, medium tanks for skirmishing, slower heavy

tanks for… well - tanking, and self-propelled guns as the

vulnerable indirect-fire nukers, we have a slightly different dichotomy

in World

of Battleships. Carriers take

the place of SPGs, battleships

take the place of heavy tanks, and then cruisers, frigates, destroyers,

PT boats, and the like will fill out the skirmish, scout, and

anti-aircraft roles. Still, the gameplay will be more than familiar to

current players: “What we say around the studio is that what

you play now, you’ll play in style="font-style: italic;">WoB.”















I’d guessed that submarines might fill the SPG role, but

Frazer squashed my style="font-style: italic;">Silent Hunter-loving

aspirations. “There will be no submarines in style="font-style: italic;">World of Battleships.

You know and I know and every gamer knows what will happen when players

go beyond random battles and begin to put together their own rosters.

Everyone will get into a submarine, one poor bastard will get into a

boat, the boat will die a horrible death and everyone else will have no

one to shoot at. It just makes the game unbalanced, unplayable, and not

friendly… If you have a sniper sitting in a tree, killing

everyone off, and no one knows where he is, that’s not fun.

And that’s the submarine.”







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It’s a livable compromise – how much less fun would

World

of Tanks be if we had to

worry about tank-killing airplanes like the Soviet Il-2 –

but, still, I won’t give up hope. To geek out a sec, given

that Germany’s U-boats had a 72% casualty rate during WWII,

they’re hardly the indomitable powerhouse, historically, that

they might seem. Submarines could still be an interesting expansion

possibility if Wargaming.net artificially limits their number to one or

two per side and bakes in a fair yet realistic amount of vulnerability

and challenge.







World of Warplanes First Look





For a select few at gamescom 2011, Wargaming.net demoed their upcoming

successor to style="font-style: italic;">WoT,

World

of Warplanes. Clicking past

the Cyrillic text,

Frazer logged into the game, explaining the premise to me as he went

along. “Planes date from the 1930s and its slow biplanes,

right up through the 1950s. It’ll include the Korean War-era

planes and early jet planes, or as they were commonly referred to,

tractors in the sky,” Frazer joked, alluding to the fact that

early jet plans couldn’t turn well while keeping their wings

attached and tended to plow through bomber formations in

straight furrows. “It’s the sexy period of combat

aviation, before guided weapons, stealth, and so on.”







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So what can players expect not to see in style="font-style: italic;">World of Warplanes?

Takeoffs

and landings, for one. “You will start in the air,

you’ll never start on the ground… that’s

a sin.” Other elements of the game are more familiar:

“It’s 15 vs. 15, and while there isn’t

cover like in style="font-style: italic;">World of Tanks

per se, you’ve got clouds and

the blinding sun… At launch, you’ll have 60

planes: American, Russian, and German, followed by the English and

Japanese, and maybe a half dozen maps. But just like style="font-style: italic;">World of Tanks,

in

a matter of weeks you’ll maybe get more planes and more maps

for free.”







In the demo, the UI looked fairly familiar – the same

reticule used in style="font-style: italic;">World of Tanks,

for example, but one feature really

stuck out as new and exciting. When firing on an opponent, a small

damage cam pops up to show you where you’re hitting your

target. The damagecam isn’t just useful to fine tune your

aim, it adds a nice visceral touch to longer range engagements.







Frazer, who looked to be piloting a F4U Corsair, splashed a German Bf

109 before drawing the attention of something with Soviet-looking and

bulbous (as a kid I failed the Civil Air Patrol plane identification

course). As with the other Wargaming.net games, Frazer could have

spectated or opted to climb into a second plane to fight in a different

battle, but instead he debriefed me on the game format.







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Though takeoffs and landings won’t be a part of the game,

bases will. Frazer noted that bases have anti-aircraft defenses to

protect against lone wolves breaking away from the pack to have a run

at the base. That implies that bases will have a certain

number of hitpoints that opposing planes will have to winnow away, but

the amount of AAA, HP amount, and the difficulty of hitting the base

wasn’t covered by the demo.







World

of Warplanes will also have

more mission types than

it’s predecessor. Frazer hinted at one mission type where

AI-controlled bombers proceed on a straight line to the enemy base and

it’s up to players to escort (or attack the enemy bombers).

Regardless of the mission type, players will always have two ways to

win, destroy all enemy planes, or destroy the enemy base before the

enemy destroys yours.







2012 should be as an exciting year for Wargaming.net fans as 2011 was

with the North American debut of style="font-style: italic;">World of Tanks.

Stay tuned to Ten Ton

Hammer for continuing coverage, and our thanks to Frazer Nash for an

inside look at Wargaming.net’s next two titles.





