For those who need context, update 0.20 brought in a “new” garage UI for AW. Whoever is currently developing AW (Mail.ru I presume) basically copy-pasted WoT’s garage UI.
Category: Armored Warfare
Armored Warfare: What Went Wrong
Author: Gatortribe (AW Dev)
Preface
As a select few of you may already know, I’ve been a design consultant for Obsidian Entertainment/My.com since the beginning of Early Access (was around for the alpha tests too). Needless to say, I’ve been invested in this game more than just monetarily. I met a lot of wonderful people along the way– my clan mates (KEVIN started out as a group of us design consultants, with Obeyrist, Kilo, and Illusionalsgcty – my officers – helping just as much if not more), those I met later on (XDMR, Urallfish, other EU friends), and of course the Obsidian/My.com guys (Thank you Rich, Josh, and Michael for all you did- your passion for the game was just incredible, and I truly believe that we could have had an amazingly successful game without MailRU being in the way). I hope to keep my ties with most of them, and for those who are without a job, I wish you the best of luck in your future endeavors.
So, why am I writing this?
I’m writing this because I think everyone who stuck around, everyone who held out waiting for the game to be popular, deserves to know what happened. I’m not an actual developer, so I will be missing a few things. I’ve had more than enough people from both Obsidian and My.com vent to me their grievances about nearly everything development-wise. I also don’t care about the NDA I never actually signed (I don’t think anyone was aware of that), I know my AW account will likely be nuked and the only thing that makes me said is the history that will go away with it.
Who To Blame
I’ve read a lot of misinformation that I couldn’t respond to over who was to blame for the game dying. The reality is everyone: MailRU, My.com, and Obsidian, some (MRG) more than others.
Continue reading “Armored Warfare: What Went Wrong”
My.com Adopts Future Work on Armored Warfare (No more Obsidian)
Source: AW Portal
Developer Obsidian Entertainment and global Publisher My.com are announcing impactful changes to the development structure of Armored Warfare. From today on, the future development and update plans will be carried out entirely by My.Com.
The restructured Armored Warfare development team will be delivering on all of the new features and content previously announced.
“At Obsidian, we are grateful to have had the opportunity to work on Armored Warfare over the last four years. We are happy to hand off Armored Warfare to the talented developers at My.com who, we know, will deliver incredible updates and content to Armored Warfare fans across the world. Our focus at Obsidian will turn to currently announced games such as Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire, Tyranny, and Pathfinder: Adventures along with other unannounced projects. We are proud of everything we did on Armored Warfare and want to thank all of our dedicated fans for their involvement and support.“,
said Feargus Urquhart, CEO of Obsidian Entertainment.
“We are grateful for all contributions made by everyone on the Armored Warfare development teams, past and present. The restructured Armored Warfare development team is continuing the current development and update plans and will be dedicated to deliver content to our worldwide players in the most consistent manner.“,
said Yuri Maslikov, Publishing Director of My.com.
Obsidian lay off Armored Warfare staff
Obsidian have been working on my.com’s free to play tank title Armored Warfare but their involvement in the project is being scaled back.
The game has been in beta for a while and today (9 december) they have laid off some Armored Warfare staff ahead of schedule. All staff on the project were expected to stay on until some time in 2017 but publisher my.com has decided to pull the plug now. Parts of the project are now being moved to my.com’s Moscow headquarters.
Obsidian CEO Feargus Urquhart told Gamasutra, “The publisher of Armored Warfare decided to move a portion of the development of the product to their headquarters in Moscow. None of the other products at Obsidian were affected by this. We wish our people the best, and are working with them to find homes with other developers”.
Obsidian will still be working on Armored Warfare but in a lesser capacity.
Why WoT Needs Good Competition
djk1518 made a nice comment:
Competition is good, especially with a company like Wargaming which has next to no competitors left in the market. Without competition, you get s**t like the IS-6 Black, non-default sixth sense, overpriced premium packages, and top-down arty mechanics that practically everyone is dissatisfied with.
Even if you’d never consider playing AW, you should want it to be successful. Competition is good, and a successful AW might push Wargaming to make some of the changes we’ve been clamoring for (Seb: like more Sandbox iterations).
I would like to add something to this comment: basically WG needs to become more aware of its competition in order to sense it as a threat and improve themselves. In the end, it is the players that will profit. What do you think?
Armored Warfare: No More Arty
Early on in our evaluation of Artillery for Balance 2.0 we made the hard decision to remove the class in its current form. The ability to deal indirect damage to an opponent who can neither see or retaliate was a mechanic that just didn’t work well with the rest of Armored Warfare. Even with our successful efforts to reduce the impact Artillery had on the battlefield, it never completely took away the frustration players had with it. Not only was it difficult to balance around, but it had real impacts on our ability to create maps as well. Each map we made, whether in PvP or PvE, had to take into account Arty firing lines. We couldn’t have complex cover or tall mountains and buildings because Artillery wasn’t able to shoot over them. With only a very small percentage of our active playerbase playing Artillery, this made it even harder to justify keeping the class.
Because of these factors, we had a choice; remove Artillery altogether, restrict the class to just PvE or offer the vehicles in a reimagined class form. We decided to go with the third option and have condensed both artillery lines into a single Self Propelled Gun line which offers high damage at the cost of longer aim times and slightly higher reloads. SPG vehicles now have drastically increased mobility to match their real-world capabilities and their Artillery-view has been replaced with a standard zoom reticle. They do retain access to smoke shells, but the illumination support shells have been removed for now. Because of how different the class now plays, we aren’t committing 100% to it sticking around, but we’d like to get player opinions on the changes during the Update 0.19 PTS cycle before deciding whether to keep it or remove the class with the official release of Balance 2.0.
Source: Official Portal
TAP Contest
I was thinking about this since long ago, and because Sgt_Zephyr gave me the code (and the idea), and Erwin came up with ANOTHER code… I shall do it.
This competition will have a symbolic award – 2 AW codes for Type 59, 300.000 Credits and 7 days of Premium time each. (the ones spammed by AW with those are free to send an unwanted code to our mail: [email protected]). Do not be afraid to participate – for the lulz at least
What do you need to do? Just find a good image that we can use as cover for our Facebook page. The winner will have the codes sent on the mail used for commenting on this post.
It will end in 48 hours.
START!
AW jumping the gun
Armored Warfare advertisement banners have appeared in Cyprus, very close to WoT banners. Mail.ru does not release any statement why they chose Cyprus specifically.
https://pp.vk.me/c543103/v543103938/13645/hVC-jluZ8Xk.jpg
https://pp.vk.me/c543103/v543103938/1364f/F6y23WXpBMo.jpg
Addendum:
The mail.ru group have displayed an advertisement on the news ticker of the National Library in Minsk. It is a play on words, the Russian original stating “ВОТ и потренировались. А теперь настоящая техника”, translating to “Training is over. And now for the real armor.”, whereas the sequence “ВОТ” means “WoT” in Latin letters. Mail.ru group stated that no relation to World of Tanks is implied, and the interpretation of the sentece “ВОТ и потренировались” is false, because simply “вот и потренировались” (small, not capitalized) was meant.
Video:
AW: Centauro 120: Guide Tutorial
Kudos to Woras for using my favorite font.