Despite Gaijin’s free-to-play omni-sim War Thunder beginning out solely as a recreation of World War 2 aerial fight, latest years have seen it take the combat to Wargaming’s rolling competition of tankitude, World of Tanks, providing its personal accessible but semi-realistic tackle armored floor battles.
Sneaking in only a week earlier than World of Tanks’ v1.zero overhaul, War Thunder has refreshed itself with a shiny new graphics engine and a slew of iconic Cold War period tanks to drive, together with that chunky American workhorse; the M1 Abrams.
War Thunder’s Version 1.77 (formally titled ‘Advancing Storm’) seems like probably the most important change the sport has seen shortly. The star of the present here’s a new renderer, which, whereas not fairly providing as night-and-day a change as World of Tanks’ upcoming overhaul guarantees, doesn’t look half dangerous. For these with a midway trendy GPU to flex, the sport now boasts rather more pure lighting, pooling and rippling water and a few properly atmospheric rain results.
Those of you fancy gits who’ve performed lengthy sufficient to succeed in the Cold War period of War Thunder’s tech tree will discover themselves rewarded with the American M1 Abrams, British Challenger, the German Leopard 2k, French AMX-30B2 Brenus (bristling with reactive armor plate to put it aside from ATGM hate) and the Russian T-64B. These are all capable of be earned by common play. In the premium-only nook comes the Magach 3, an Israeli refit of the outdated M48, in addition to the AMX-30, which is definitely only a cheaper, older model of the AMX-30B2, however it does pay out further foreign money, in order for you a fast-track to semi-modern tank tech.
It’s not simply the visuals and roster being up to date. They’ve additionally gone and given the bottom fight facet of the sport a large audio overhaul, with among the greater weapons now producing echoing, reverberating noise worthy of their caliber, particularly within the case of high-explosive rounds. Internal noises have additionally been tremendously improved, so you may hear inside mechanisms locking into place earlier than pictures, and spent brass rattling round afterwards.
While that is clearly a ground-focused replace, there are a smattering of recent planes to fly, together with a pair extra early jet-fighters such because the Russian La-200 and French MD.452. There’s some extra conventional WW2-era planes too, just like the British M.B.5, Japanese Ki-108 and the community-made German He 177 A-5 Greif (pictured above), which isn’t solely a little bit of a mouthful to say but in addition an unlimited slab of murder-metal.
While I’m not aware of Gaijin’s launch schedule for the 12 months, it seems like this could possibly be the final main replace to the sport till they formally combine the still-in-testing naval fight layer into the sport. It’ll be fascinating to see how they deal with balancing encounters containing player-controlled ships, tanks and planes, as all of these shall be a required basis for his or her formidable World War mode, which feels like a mega-scale multiplayer model of their current dynamic marketing campaign system.
War Thunder 1.77 is out now, and the sport is free-to-play. You can seize it direct through its official site, or via Steam. You can even see the full update patch notes here.
