At PAX Australia we had the opportunity to speak with some of the people working on the latest and upcoming Wargaming titles. Wargaming had a huge presence at PAX with competitive matches and commentary throughout. With World of Warships recently releasing and with Master of Orion on the horizon we were keen to find out a little bit more regarding what the future holds for Wargaming:
Our Interviewee’s:
Randall King – Executive Producer at Wargaming Austin, Texas,
Max Chuvalov – World of Tanks Marketing Product Manager at Wargaming
Stephen Wang – General Manager at Wargaming CTG Sydney (BigWorld)
With Master of Orion we were able to see a short piece of gameplay while at E3. How has the development progressed since then? Will we possibly see a 2016 release?
Randall: Since E3 we added a few features, the biggest of which is the random world seed function. In the original games everything was randomised in the background and you would always have a unique game. Now with the random world seed you can relive previous battles or get your friends to try the same battle you just finished. The random generation is a great tool for replayability and will allow for game sharing with friends. Just don’t tell them where Orion is.
Unfortunately we are still in alpha and not yet feature complete and until we are feature complete we won’t be announcing any release dates for Master of Orion. What I can say is that PAX Australia will be the first event where we will be showing the game to the public though so that’s pretty cool.
How has the community taken to World of Tanks on the Xbox 360 and Xbox One? Are the player numbers what you were hoping for?
Max: Actually it overcomes our goals when we were going into the launch for the console releases on the xbox platforms. At the moment World of Tanks is the first title to have cross platform gameplay between the 360 and the Xbox One so players can play together across both consoles and the progress is saved on your account if you switch over to the xbox one version.
We really love where we are with the consoles and that’s why we are progressing over to the sony market with the upcoming PS4 release.
Will we see a release date of World of Tanks on PS4?
Max: So no exact release date has been announced but we can disclose that we are hoping to have our beta released by the end of the year.
I know it’s a long shot but are there any talks in having cross-play between the Playstation and Xbox versions of the game?
Max: As you may already know, platform wise it is very difficult. In a perfect world maybe we could see an opportunity in the future but at the moment no, It’s completely different platforms, ecosystems, etc, etc so right now it’s impossible.
Now that World of Warships has made its fantastic release, will we see it also moving to the console market like World of Tanks?
Max: So at the moment we are completely focused on the post release stage on PC and we like where the game is going. We are focused on filling it with some more content and more features to our players on PC. For sure, if we see that it’s a big success and the potential is there for the different gameplay mode to be adapted to a console/living room experience, we won’t say no for this. For sure we are looking into options for mobile or console options for our game but at the moment we are 100% focused on the PC version and it’s continuing development.
Similarly, we have World of Tanks: Blitz on mobile devices, will we see any developments towards the same experience for World of Warships ?
Max: So right now no, but yes we are considering this experience to be moved to mobile platforms. Recently we have announced our WG Cells which is Wargaming’s dedicated mobile direction. We are looking through many prototypes as well as research and development projects with internal people and external companies. I think that the one of the main directions for Wargaming is mobile, and for sure you will see not only titles connected to the “World of” trilogy but also different titles across multiple genres.
Any plans in the works for more ‘World of’ titles? Are we going to see the likes of ‘World of Soldiers’, ‘World of Spaceships’ or ‘World of Kitties’?
Max: Haha, I think we already have World of Spaceships coming up with Master of Orion being in development, just kidding. I think we are ending the “World of” series with our trilogy right now and we are focusing on many other directions such as third party publishing like our Wargaming labs initiative which is aimed at helping and working with external studios to develop many titles like legendary titles like Master of Orion.
In the future we may look into more “World of” titles but right now the series is a trilogy with our latest game World of Warships and that’s all we have right now for the series.
That’s all the questions we had for this interview. Thanks to the Wargaming team for giving us the interview opportunity and thanks to Randall, Max and Stephen for taking the time out of their day to speak with us.