Dust off your FiloFax™ and flip through to the tab you’ve marked ‘BOAT GAMES’. Run your finger down that page until you reach ‘Battleships, World of…’ and strike it through. Rub it out, because World of Battleships has renamed itself World of Warships, bringing it more in line with the naming convention set by its sister titles World of Warplanes and World of erm, Tanks. The game itself remains unchanged, and we should all allow ourselves one week’s grace period in which we may use the old and new titles interchangeably until our tired old brains get used to the new syllables.
Wargaming’s CEO Victor Kislyi attempts toexplainthe name change: “The company is gearing up, and so are its titles. In addition to more accurately reflecting the game’s core essence, World of Warships will correspond more closely to the framework of our Wargaming universe.”
Last month, all three of Wargaming’s titles united under the Wargaming.net banner, becoming a unified platform across which players could trade resources. That doesn’t quite explain why Wargaming havechanged the name, though. I suppose Warships sounds more inclusive than Battleships. Battles are those things you can lose while still winning the war – they are to wars what fun-size Mars bars are to Mars bars.
World of Warships, then, suggests an online naval action shooter with broader scope than the comparatively narrow-mindedWorld of Battleships. Whatever it’s called, it looks wonderful andjoins its World of… siblings in 2013.