Windows Armored Warfare! :)

Armored Warfare- A new tank game, competitor to World of Tanks is on the horizon. It's being made by Obsidian Entertainment, a company based in California. Due to be released in 2014, beta sign ups now at the link above. It will feature modern tanks, but I know little about how much automation these tanks will contain. I have no idea how battles will be structured nor how big the battlefields will be. I believe it's PC only (regarding Mac, for now, for ever? don't know) and a subscription free game, but if you know anything about WoT, you'll know they have ways to suck $ out of you!

I'm signed up for the beta!

Oct 2015 Note: in a 2015 FAQ the developer said they are concentrating on the PC realease, and will evaluate a Mac release at a future date.

Teaser Trailer:

Founder's Packs and early access available May 2015

Described as Free to play with in-game micro transactions similar to World of Tanks.

I've kind of sworn off testing, hmm, but it's tempting.

garnerx said:

I got the email about this too - I'd forgot I signed up for it. But I don't like the idea of paying to beta test a "free"-to-play game, so I don't think I'll do it.

It sounds exactly the same as World of Tanks. I mean, not just the same genre, but identical in every respect, from gameplay to business model.

Same screen layout, 15 players per team, premium tanks for sale, a garage with slots to keep them in, consumables to increase your stats, premium membership to earn more xp, etc...

Seems like they've just cloned WoT and put it in a more modern graphics engine. All the players on the forums seem to be WoT people, too.

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I'll wait, but will try it in retail.

Armored Warfare (Windows) is in open beta. Anyone can establish an account, download, and play for free. I've decided to check it out on a limited basis, especially if there will be a retail wipe. Not sure about that.

Anyone playing? Looking for impressions!

Plutonius said:

Not interested since they will not have native OS X support.

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Tis true

First impression- I've been playing WoT for 2 years and still subcribe and play on a weekly basis. Lately I've been distracted by ARK.

I failed to live up to my self imposed wait until retail. Now that there are no more wipes, I've jumped in. AW is very good, larger maps, tank fidelity and handling is excellent. It feels more real than WOT, which in comparison is feeling a bit on the arcade side. There is also a scale, feel and look of the terrain including vxery realistic settings like the nuclear power plant that makes WoT look primitive in comparison. PS, not a WoT bashing thread. I still enjoy it.

With Obsidian breathing down Wargaming's neck, what changes do you think will be coming to WoT? Someone mentioned they are working on their own PVE.

Huntn said:

Armored Warfare (Windows) is in open beta. Anyone can establish an account, download, and play for free. I've decided to check it out on a limited basis, especially if there will be a retail wipe. Not sure about that.

Anyone playing? Looking for impressions!

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Confirmed: No more wipes.

Second Impression- After playing this for a week, I am sold. I don't plan on abandoning WoT immediately, but AW immediately made WoT look and feel dated. The Crytek Graphic engine is amazing in comparison to the mystery graphics that WoT uses. I googled it, but could not identify anything other than Havok, which I believe is a physics engine. For AW there is a fidelity in the environment and the operation of tanks that is 100x better than what WoT offers. Although I can't say basic gameplay is much different, the differences in tank handling and the environment makes WoT feel more arcade than it used to.

Also, I think there is an operator factor involved, but AW PVP seems to be more difficult and I love the PVE scenarios.

Oct 2015 Note: in a 2015 FAQ the developer said they are concentrating on the PC release, and will evaluate a Mac release at a future date.

garnerx said:

I've decided to give this a go on your recommendation, since I did enjoy World of Tanks enough to play it pretty intensively for a few months.

Looks like it's going to be a while before I get online, though. I haven't seen download speeds like this since I was on dialup. 22 hours remaining.

edit: it's running at 33k per second now. Over 2 days remaining. I will try again another time.
Just before I quit it was at 10 days remaining. Hope the game servers are a bit faster than this!

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Do you have an internet account with slow download speed? Just curious. Yesterday I upgraded the game from standard graphics to the high def graphics (6 GB worth) which effects both tank models and terrain. It had no effect on my PC's performance (see sig) running at 60fps. Standard game is 10GB, High Def 16GB). My 6GB download was 6MB per second and took 24 minutes.

Give a shout when you've tried it.

garnerx said:

It's still going. Managed about 3MB/s at one point, then later went down to 3KB/s. I've downloaded 26%.
Internet speed is fine here, it just seems to be this download manager. It's some kind of torrent thing, as far as I can tell.

Looking forward to playing the game (next week).

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Yeah, it may be torrent... large wide open spaces as compared to WoT.

garnerx said:

Well, I've finally got it down, played some PvE matches.

First impressions: this is excellent. Also: this is World of Tanks.

Graphics are on a completely different level to WoT, yet it runs much better. I used to get some framerate problems in WoT because it apparently only runs on one CPU core and doesn't use multiple graphics cards. Whatever I threw at it, some levels would really chug. You can tell instantly Armored Warfare has a far better engine.

AW feels instantly familiar because they've basically copied *everything* from WoT. The garage layout, the controls, the screen furniture. If I hadn't seen the title screen I could easily believe this was WoT: The Sequel. So there's no period of adjustment required. Just carry on where I left off, except with a smoother, better looking game.

One thing I don't think they've quite got right yet is the feedback when you're scoring hits. WoT has that brilliant grinding metal noise when you shoot out the tracks but here I had to rely on a text pop-up to let me know I'd done it. Ricochets aren't clearly portrayed, either. Too many text notices, whereas WoT gives you clearer information visually and audibly.

I'll definitely continue with it. Here's hoping they don't have mismatched mixed tiers in PvP battles, which was a big part of the reason I quit WoT.

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Glad you like it! Graphic wise, the difference is substantial. You could say night and day.
Here is an excellent video comparing the two games- How Not To Suck At Armored Warfare.

garnerx said:

Interesting video. It really is like World of Tanks except with a lot of the perks that you have to grind for hundreds of hours added as standard. I think it took me something like 600 games to get the sixth sense perk in just one tank, but here everyone gets it from the start, plus a lot more.

I haven't seen any artillery yet but it seems like it would be a bit useless if everyone gets a warning when they're about to get hit.

The PvP games I've played so far don't have the big spread of tiers I used to see in WoT, which is good news for me. I hated joining a match where I had no hope of damaging half of the other team, but that was pretty much 60% of all games in WoT.

I like the base-building thing - add extensions every day to give yourself a small bonus, for free.

Anyway, this has rekindled my enthusiasm for PvP tanks. They've ripped off everything - even the 'rent camo for 30 days' thing (doesn't seems available yet) - but they've made it less grindy, and the higher level equipment doesn't seem like it's going to be hundreds of games away, at least at the tiers I'm currently playing.

How are they going to get an money out of me, though? In WoT the paywall stuff is very compelling, but I haven't spotted it at all here. I spent a lot on WoT without really appreciating how much it was adding up.

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I've got the arty call and sometimes I avoid it and sometimes not.

I would not describe myself as a stellar player, I'm average. I played for 1 week, got sold on the game, and purchased the Emperor Collector Pack which included premium (120 days), 6 million credits, 6000 gold, 5 tanks, and 25% boost for 2 weeks. I've got another week to go (I think), That boost is just for the tanks in the pack. So I had several tanks when I bought the pack, I started out with the 6 million credits, spent 2 million (down to 4m), and now I'm up to 10million. Depending on the tank, it can be a 15K credit came, average game 25-50k, and good game 100-250k.

SandboxGeneral said:

This looks interesting. I may download it later today. Hopefully, it will run well in my Windows VM.

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Have you previously played a tank game? I find them to be very challenging and may have all ready described myself as a mediocre player. I think it would be easy to get discouraged. The challenge is to find the right balance between conservative and agressive play and to figure out the best places on the maps. With random battles, the most frustrating aspects are main battle tanks who decide to snipe from the rear and basically people who don't know their tanks role, and finally when everybody rushes in one direction and leaves a flank open. This happens all the time.

There are cases when the entire team goes in one direction, that they effectively project force and manage to wipe out half the other team from the start, and they end up winning the game. But there are other times when this backfires on you and you end up not wiping out half the other team and end up being flanked and losing the battle. IMO, as a general rule for a MBT, is never to go anywhere completely by yourself.

Aw also has PVE scenarios which are a lot of fun and easier to prevail in, but if I was to critique them, they all unfold basically the same way each time, I mean it is a scenario, but what I don't care for is that enemy tanks can spawn in right next to you which takes away from the realism. This is open beta, so maybe they will fix that.

I'd like to hear how it performs on your hardware. I need to install this on my 2011 MBP to see how it performs under Bootcamp/Windows 7. Going to pick that up from the Apple Store on Monday. A comment was made online that this runs better than WoT so, I have mr fingers crossed, because WoT runs at about 60fps on my MBR.

For new AW players and especially WoT players, I'll point again at the video Might Jingles: How Not To Suck At AW, although you'll probably still suck for possibly a long while, lol. Find the embedded video in post no.15 of this thread.

I'd also recommend these links:

ArmoredTalk.com Guides

ArmoredTalk AW Ammo Guide- more in-depth than WoT mechanics but not too hard to get a handle on.

SandboxGeneral said:

@Huntn

I downloaded it the other day into my VM and attempted to play it and it basically just froze as it tried to process everything. It was a no go.

However, I have previously played WoT on the Xbox 360 a long time ago and had fun with it.

I'm really less than a casual gamer these days. Too much other stuff going on in my life. 15 years ago I was a big online gamer, but things have changed a lot since then.

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No problem. I figured the virtual machine would be iffy.

SandboxGeneral said:

I gave the VM settings another look, it's been a long time, and found the VRAM was set to 250 MB. I upped it to 2 GB and upped the RAM from 5 GB to 8 GB.

I got the game to play and get into a couple of online games, but it was still laggy a little, which was enough to put me at a serious disadvantage.

Playing this in a VM, even with my maxed MBP, isn't viable. I'll need a dedicated PC in order to play games like this where Windows is native on the hardware, and I'm not going to do a Boot Camp install either.

Oh well. It does look like a fun game though.

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Bootcamp might be the answer, but I understand if you don't want to mess with it, although it's pretty easy to install if you have adequate hard drive space. Thinking out loud, I wonder if Bootcamp can go on an external drive?

SandboxGeneral said:

I've done Boot Camp a few times before, but I prefer the VM way of doing things. No idea about doing that externally though.

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Have you noticed any difference is n performance between the two? My impression is native Windows, single operating system (running) wins.