Back in the before times, there was a blogger who was deep into World of Tanks. I don’t remember who it was, but I remember really liking the slower pace and the tactical gameplay. I didn’t (and don’t) much care for or about tanks. World of Planes, when I tried it, was way too fast paced and hard to keep track of the fight.
World of Warships, when it came out, was perfect. It was slow, very tactical, visually exciting, and the developers sometimes had a playful attitude, like when they turned the battlefield into a giant tub, complete with floating duckies.
When I start with an MMO, I usually try to get into a guild (or local equivalent) where I can meet people, learn about the game and really immerse myself in the experience. I didn’t do that with World of Warships. I don’t talk to anyone, I don’t join anything, and because of that I feel free to play or not play as much as I like.
WoWarships is surprisingly traditional, as far as MMOs go. You have your destroyers, fast, lightly armored ships that scout and strike from stealth before vanishing into the mist — your basic rogue. Light cruisers hunt the destroyers and keep the skies clear — your ranger. Heavy cruisers control the pace of the battle — the crowd control. Battleships stay far from the fight and make a big impact from a distance — the nukers. And aircraft carriers keep their air squadrons in the front lines, taunting everything they come across — the tanks.
This isn’t how real navies work. But this is how WoWarships works. Everyone takes on a role, and if you mess up, everybody dies.
In all the years I’ve played, off an on, I’ve only spent money on the game once — for the big pink IJN Myoko variant. I kinda got into the anime that inspired it way back, and since I already sailed a regular Myoko (which is a Japanese heavy cruiser), I thought it would be fun to get a premium, showy version of the ship.
It gets noticed.
Even though I mess up sometime, it’s a fun, relaxing game with quick matches and amazingly detailed ship design.
And someday soon, submarines!
Someone’s sure to point out that my casual attitude is everything that’s wrong with the game. There’s a co-op mode, where it’s a team of humans and maybe some bots against a team entirely of bots; that’s a great place to learn to play against a more forgiving foe.
There’s also the weekly missions, which are about as close as you can get to a PvE raid. They force you to use ships from a particular tier (tiers range from 1 to 10) and have a set of objectives that range from destroying shore installations to protecting allied ships or defending ports. These are challenging, tense fights, and since almost nobody bothers to chat to coordinate the fight, can also be frustrating and sometimes hilarious. Like, when in a new variant of the raid, you had to finish on the SW side of the map instead of the NE side. This is when I was urged to uninstall the game. By that time, most of the team was dead and there was no way we were going to win so hey, did it really matter much where I sunk?
I digress.
World of Warships. The good: carefully rendered ships, fun to sail, short, exciting matches.
The bad: a lot of “pay to win”, especially in the higher tiers. Working up through the tiers with different ship classes and different nationalities is tedious in the extreme. Though WoWarships has plenty of tutorials, you won’t learn how to really play your particular ship without a lot of research, as the game hides a lot of information.
