In spite of the battle questioning the necessity of more tanks in real life, the free game World of Tanks continues to captivate audiences around the globe. It's played in huge numbers in many countries on different continents, with a whopping 75 million registered players.
Even with that success, Belarus developers Wargaming.net aren't done yet: a fleet of improvements will continue to roll out for the tank combat game through the year. They've released a video (with an English voiceover) that shows off, alongside some game footage, the developer diaries they're going to produce throughout 2014 which discuss the updates players will see. The trailer is below, so check it out.
"It will be a truly transformative year for the game," said World of Tanks Producer Mike Zhivets. "Enhancements planned for 2014 touch upon the very core of World of Tanks, and each of them will overhaul the look and feel of the title, inducing the tank combat experience we deliver with a whole new level of realism and immersion."
The updates sound promising and include a new graphics renderer, which will add detail to the vehicle models and environments, and a new physics engine that make tanks interact with (and destroy) the settings and buildings more realistically and responsively. Some of these features are briefly shown in the trailer, and individual bricks flying around when a tank crashes through a wall is pretty awesome.
Also slated for an eventual update are much-requested Historical Battles. These will presumably take players through actual tank conflicts that took place in human history. A new meta-game feature, Fortified Areas, is also supposed to make its way to the game. The developer diaries will explain all of these features as they're released in the future.
World of Tanks has set records for concurrent players on one server (in Russia), and boasts around 1.2 million concurrent players according to its developers. Paid subscribers are obviously different than free players, but even at its peak World of Warcraft only had 12 million players--World of Tanks has, as I said 75 million. How many of those are active is unclear since it's free to sign up for and play, but it's an impressive total.
What should boost their numbers even more is the console version of the game, which just came out this month on Xbox 360. They will play on separate serves from the PC players, but it's a whole new market. World of Tanks is entirely free to download and play now on PC and Xbox 360 (as long as you have an XBL Gold subscription), with optional in-game purchases available.