First Time In – World of Warplanes

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World of Warplanes

The first time fully patched

And since the NDA is now lifted – the beta was World of Warplanes.    After playing War Thunder I really wanted to see how this worked, and I seem to have gotten the chance to do so.

I downloaded the installer and it did the standard couple of hour update cycle.     Installed, the game is 4 gigs which compares favorably with World of Tanks (at 23 gigs after subtracting 3.5 because of mods).

I quickly browsed the official website for some additional information about the game before I start.    Nope, nothing spectacular seemed readily available before starting the game, so it was time to click the button and play a battle.

The garage looked like I expected it to – very similar to the Tanks game.

No surprises here

Gold, Silver, and free XP is noted at the top right.     My Free XP is at zero, since the game hasn’t gone live, but should pool the Tanks/Planes numbers together at go live.    About the only thing missing are crew members.

After quickly playing around with the paint schemes I changed my German plane’s colors.

I thought I should just go with the German plane, so I clicked into the tech tree to take a quick look, and noticed a graphic glitch right away – left and right sides of the screen are cut off.

Wait, how many hit points do I have?

Changing my resolution from the default up to 1280×1024 fixed that, and I was done messing around with the interface.   It’s all very familiar to anyone who’s played tanks.    Now, how about the battles ?

And I’m flying on El Halluf

The controls seem familiar, especially having played War Thunder.    Move your mouse around and try and get your aircraft in position to shoot something.

I must have had the worst first battle.    I believe I destroyed a friendly ground target chasing an enemy, then collided with a friendly and we were both wrecked.    My team carried the day, and I earned zero XP (expected) and 1500 silver.    You also earn 50 gold for each victory per day – presumably, that’s a beta only thing.

Second battle went much better – just barely.    I got into the middle of the enemy who shot me up really good and set me on fire.     Not knowing what else to do, I went into an immediate dive in the hopes it would put out the fire.   It did go out – for whatever reason – and I was left with 2hp.    Concentrating on mostly avoiding shots and not colliding with anything, I ended the battle alive and with 2 ground targets destroyed.

It was an enjoyable half hour messing with the game.    It seems solid.   I solidified my impressions with some more sessions prior to April 4th, in another post to come.