Pretty unknown? No, not any more thanks to WT.
This is a He 112 in the B-1 variant, YAY
The first thing I had to do is buy me 500 Golden Eagles, a good invest in a bird called He 112 B-1. I really needed to have that plane because it was my main airplane while playing Hereos in the Sky (a more or less unkown MMORPG). AFAIK that other game offered the He 112 B-2 type but who cares (seems I do). This He 112 has a charming look and it's the perfect workhorse for leveling up, e.g. climbing the WT tech tree and spending 3 Euros wasn't that hard with the result of a plane with fast turn speed IMO. Too sad that it's only a Tier 1 plane. It is one of my absolute favorites.
While in World of Warplanes in the beginning you can start with Ar 65 and where WT begins with He 51 as the starter plane, in WOWplanes you can choose between Fw 56, Ar 68 and the He 51. Both games WOWarplanes and WT offer a different variaty of planes, you ain't gonna miss a single plane but this only counts when playing both games at a time. Both have great GFX and accurate modeled aircraft. However the real IL-2 player will miss the realness-factor since WOWarplanes and WT are no simulators. Here is where WT gets a plus point since it offers cockpits and major airplane controls like gears, flaps, elevator trim and what so ever. However, theres a possibility to setup lots things and it seems that since WT is from one of the former IL-2 series developer studios that indicates a masterplan of IL-2-ilizing the whole world on a it's multi plattform game. The all over summary would lead to a casual experience but who knew that this would feel like a dream becoming virtual reality. This ain't no simulation = who cares, it might end up beeing one, no doubt! This time things like camera positions and stuff are really made for the moment and lead to a epic ingame experience. What I really call epic is the OculusRift like feeling when playing WT with a gamepad and pressing the target focus button. Yeah, it's quite easy to handle WT, that's why it's the smarter IL-2 but never tell that to a IL-2 fan, please. Let's just not forget that WOWplanes offers other interesting aspects and that I would play it from time to time again if my PC would not suffer from it. Let's say it has great GFX and my PC not ;) My favorite waste of time will be WT because I really like how they push the game to certain directions, digging their Dev blog and reading patch notes are the first proofs of addiction.
What fascinated me most at WT was the following:
- awesome atmosphere, breathtaking action with lots of control
- the combination of air, ground and sea (sea will be adeed I guess, e.g. the WT logo)
- a contemplative implementation of at least a first bunch of dream planes
- steady development, new planes, tanks and maps all the time
- stunning level of model details (the movie GFX option is great for screenshots)
- your own skins and you can even upload meshes (awesome)
- even my badly half-broken cooler handles the FPS with even good looking results
I would say this has future. I expect modern times jet aircraft to come sooner or later but first more of those historic airplanes, please ;) My first impression of WT is really really good. You will miss all the expert skill and hardware leveling stuff. It's very comfortable to play with not much to do (R & D parts of game are boring but anyway usefull). Usually I would say no way I want to select different engines, hull platings and stuff. But I guess I'm not the only 'virtual collector', means the gameplay is built around the research tech tree and this is a great thing since I can have best equipped stuff without all the struggle that it ment when I was playing other tech tree and equip games. It's a race for the highest tech tree plane and the Tier system is very easy to understand (unlike other games). The dev blog shows that there a five more german planes in development. And those are impressive like the Fw 200 or the He 219 'Uhu'. I wonder if they ever can have the amount of a game called Heroes in the Sky or the legendary IL-2 '46 game. A US military historian once said a funny thing about aircraft developings of WWII, especially in terms of germans: 'Instead of building one plane and making it better and better the germans built dozens of planes'. So the biggest question will be (while even Wikipedia ain't got a full list of aircraft yet, neither I). Will there ever be a entire summary of all aircraft of that time? ...I'm not sure ;)
My two cents, actually three. No, I forgot one, uhm
- theres a big difference when playing with mouse-aiming or with a gamepad. Players tend to call gamepad users n00bs but actually they have a way trickier gameplay to handle. Theres also a difference when playing on a console and on a PC and that difference is clearly visible and within gameplay when comparing PC and console version. This is a call for more respect on us gamepad users, you keyboard-mousers, you ;)
- This game could have more features but they might be added some how, some way, who knows.
- uhm? << to be solved
I will definitively create skins for War Thunder, stay tuned. I have to finish a He 162 for IL-2 first. Today I finished the first He 112 test skin, this means I will offer it here for download when the word 'test' can be replaced. :D
And let me finish this post with this kinda saying comment: 'There are too many airplanes that you wanna fly around with but only a few games to jump inside'. Those would be IL-2, Wowplanes, War Thunder and HitS. At least four things less to worry about. It's depends on you to seek for your favorite planes, WOWplanes has lot's of fancy ones, too and remember, WOWplanes has some WT doesn't has and so on. But it could be that WT will get to be the only game needed in future. Now that will never happen since IL-2 stands alone on it's throne and similar to that WT will take it's time to reach almost perfect state and while good things take time I will continue the game switching even WT will be the first instance from now on.
