If you stop and think about it, but not think about it so hard that you’re compelled to research an answer, how do large scale airborne battles even work? Without a HUD, how can you tell who’s winning and when it’s time to go home? And once you’ve shot down all the enemy planes, then what? You’re just flying around feeling smug. The rules are so undefined. It’s almost as if war is futile. Well, in developing World of Warplanes’ default game mode, Wargaming.net came up against a similar conundrum: what’s the most interesting way to pitch planes into mortal combat? The studio’s latest developer diary chronicles one scrapped attempt to convert World of Tanks’ capture the base mode into the aerial medium, before they discuss the game mode they finally settled on: Superiority, which is all about shooting up the enemy’s stuff until they call it a day. Check it out below.
Producers Tatiana Zelenkevich and Anton Sitnikau, alongside creative manager Eugene Smozhevsky, candidly explain how simply flying over bases to capture them felt “boring and awkward”, especially given the speeds at which planes zip past control points. Superiority is more interesting however, featuring two teams of 15 players destroying ground targets to accumulate control points. Gather 100% of these ground resources, or destroy all 15 opposing planes, and you win the round. Also discussed is the inclusion of a game mode called Escort, in which one team defends a group of AI-controlled bombers from an attacking team. I like to think of bombers as the friendly whales of the sky, gentle metal sky-giants who need protecting. Escort is the game mode for me.
World of Warplanes will also introduce a training mode, which mixes a series flight control exercises with some AI skirmishes. So you’ve no excuse to cartwheel your plane into a mountain shouting “how does plane work” over VOIP.