Hot on the tail of the official release announcement of World of Warplanes, Gaijin Entertainment, developers of rival 20th Century dogfighting arena War Thunder have announced the “forthcoming ground forces Closed Beta.”
War Thunder already features ground units, if only as computer-controlled target objectives, but Ground Forces certainly seems to be driving straight into the world of tanks.
In a strategy designed to encourage War Thunder fighter pilots to actively take to the skies, a series of challenges are to be issued to “identify our most determined and loyal fighters.”
Players are invited to complete these combat missions to earn access to the Ground Forces Closed Beta (and win out-of-game brand items such as t-shirts and watches). “The more you compete, the higher your chances are.”
The first challenge is as follows:
From 13:00 GMT November 13th to 11:00 GMT November 14th (6:00 PST November 13th to 4:00 PST November 14th):
destroy 60 ground units in Arcade battles or
30 ground units in History battles or
30 ground units in Full Real battles.
The Real Battle
As players are locked into battle across multiple arenas in both Gaijin’s and Wargaming.net’s respective titles, it is fascinating to see the interplay between the two development studios. Wargaming.net were first to market with World of Tanks (April 2011) and really defined to F2P template in this game space, but Gaijin’s competent aerial arena, War Thunder (November 2012 open beta ongoing), is serious competition for World of Warplanes (Released November 2013 after 5 months of open beta) and now they are looking to press into the ground-based military arena.
Both the games and the overall vision (an integrated battle involving ground, air and sea units as shown in the trailer above) are very similar, it all comes down to the implementation. The real winner is the consumer.
Shots most definitely fired as the military MMO arena hots up.
