Once you get the feel of a tank’s speed, acceleration, and traverse rate, there is no need to learn anything further and you can handle that tank with absolute confidence. The tanks have fixed turning rates, the slower you’re moving the sharper you turn, but there’s no need to ‘pulse’ the steering or any other particularly irritating quirks. A 40-ton car, okay, but you see where I’m going with this. In WoT, your tank essentially drives like a car with an automatic transmission. This is a core aspect of how any game works, but it gets so little attention. Let’s go a little deeper and look at the details and how they differ.įirst order of business: movement. One is obsessed with providing an “authentic experience” (dubious, we’ll get into this in a minute) and the other with fostering a competitive scene and genuine short-format casual play. We can see, then, that the two games aren’t quite as alike as you might think from a cursory glance. Although the game does track statistics, it does so at a much shallower level and primarily uses them to arrange its leaderboards. Where a WoT player has only one life to influence the match and a critical mistake could mean a loss for their team, WT players generally enjoy a much more relaxed pace, and the safety net provided by respawns can allow for them to remedy their errors in a new life. The battles often run for much longer, and in some modes there are multiple respawns per player. Taking a look at WT’s standard battles shows something quite different, and those differences are immediately clear. A player who stays alive and does damage will win a lot more than one who doesn’t. Wargaming also provide a lot of statistical information to players, and thanks to the battle format, those statistics tend to carry some weight. The average match in WoT is often decided in the opening two to three minutes, and matches that run the timer all the way are few and far between. The rulesets on actual tournament matches are even stricter, with player limits, tier limits, total tier caps, and usually shorter times to complete matches. This is also evidenced by WoT’s standard battle format – a fifteen minute match, with fifteen players per team, and one life per player. I don’t believe WT has anything comparable, but I could be wrong either way, it’s obvious that Wargaming are more into competition than Gaijin are. As well as the existing company, team battle, and clan wars systems, Wargaming recently added “Strongholds” to WoT, which essentially provides a clan-based platform for tournament-style play while also implementing a strategy minigame type deal. The two companies have completely different outlooks on F2P multiplayer gaming, and while Gaijin try to shoehorn people into their game’s “simulator” mode, Wargaming deliberately tailor their own game to provide genuine competitive play, as well as incentives to participate in it. This is where the root of the two games’ differences comes from.

The reason for WoT’s eschewing of authenticity for ease of play is not simply “Gaijin doing realism better” as many seem to claim, but rather a genuine, deliberate design choice on the part of Wargaming to make the game as accessible as possible and as suitable for competitive play as possible. This is a very important distinction and one many people seem all too happy to gloss over. War Thunder (henceforth WT) has always leaned towards realism, or at least, Gaijin’s interpretation of it World of Tanks (henceforth WoT) has always valued smooth gameplay over realism. This is going to be quite lengthy – grab your poison of choice and a snack. Let’s take a look into some of the reasons why, and some of the things each game has going for it.

They’re two completely different games, with completely different objectives. Some things have changed since then in both games, but by and large, the overarching theme is the same: they don’t really compare. This piece was submitted to us by World of Tanks and War Thunder veteran Rossmum.īack in May, I decided to write a piece for my oft-neglected blog about the comparisons between War Thunder and World of Tanks.

Wot vs war thunder