Striking a fine balance between fun and historical authenticity, where many of the game’s ships are “authentic down to the rivet”, Wargaming has spent hundreds of hours researching and developing the ships and maps that comprise the oceans of World of Warships.

We recently sat down with Trevor Smith, Wargaming’s Community Manager, to talk about how the company got into the free-to-play online scene, how the team infuses World of Warships’ gameplay with strategy and authenticity, how real-world ships and operations influence the development process of World of Warships, and how Wargaming is preserving history through charity events, such as their current Battleship Texas in-game event. GameSkinny: Wargaming’s been around for a while now – almost 20 years. As a company that has roots in the turn-based and real-time strategy genres, how did the company get into the free-to-play online scene?

GS: World of Tanks released around the same time that the free-to-play genre sort of took off it, didn’t it?

Kislyi has come out and said that he loved the concept of chess and military strategy games, and he thought it would be sweet to make a game of chess but with tanks – and basically make it super impressive and amazing. And with those sort of small ideas and the historical background they had as a culture – with World War II tank battles and that sort of thing – that was where they started, where they went through and a lot of tinkering went on. Then World of Tanks and the free-to-play genre that followed it sort of was born.

GS: Playing off of that, there’s quite a bit of strategy and tactical awareness that goes into playing World of Tanks and World of Warplanes. And that’s also true in World of Warships. However, the speed at which World of Warships plays out is inherently slower because of how true-to-life naval warfare also unfolds. How does Wargaming’s history in strategy subgenres fit into the game’s original and ongoing development processes?

Anecdotally, I didn’t start at Wargaming and then learn about World of Tanks. I was actually playing World of Tanks before joining Wargaming. I had been playing for over a year and had gotten super deep into the community and went from a manufacturing job to working with a video game company. Which is fantastic.

GS: You touched on something there with the map design, I think. What is the process of looking at the maps you currently have and how they’re set up and developing new maps that employ new strategies? What is that development process like?

I think that the development process and making it strategic are a focus of our map design, as well as the different ways we build out new and interesting flavors for ships. I would say that the different types of abilities the ships have inside their own classes – such as a cruiser being sort of a jack of all trades and the Royal Navy cruisers maybe being special because they have the ability to use a smoke generator – makes them have this little tactical flare so that you can use them and support your team in special ways.

So it’s really about how we want to influence the style of gameplay in that specific map. Do we want it to be more aggressive? Do we want it to be a sneakier, stealthier, pokey kind of way? It’s not a snipey type of thing – because the ships that already do that will keep doing that – but for the shorter-range ships that have to go through a lot of water, certain maps can be rough.

And from a historical standpoint, a lot of people ask why we don’t have more historical accuracy in this game, and we always have to refer them to the fact that a majority of naval combat happened in the open ocean. And we have a map that’s just open ocean – and that map is supremely boring to play. So there’s a lot of gameplay aesthetic being put into [World of Warships] as opposed to historical aesthetic.

GS: I was actually going to ask if the team ever took a historical battle and built a map around it. But since most of those battles happened in the open ocean …

GS: And there are a lot of other factors, too, such as aircraft and aircraft carriers, that may not always translate as well into – I won’t say an arcadey deathmatch – but a typical deathmatch scenario.

Now we do have some, like Okinawa, which has that historical feel to it, and it’s loosely based on that section of the Pacific Ocean, but not all of it is conducive to plopping down a square map on a gameplay surface. So we do our best to try and marry both when we say this is going to be pseudo-historic.

GS: So we’ve talked a little bit about historical authenticity already, which can be seen in World of Warships for sure. Obviously, getting it right is a big deal when you’re able to incorporate it. Can you talk a little about the research process behind the ships themselves and how that ties into balancing ships and developing things like Commander Skills?

For the most part, however, our development teams – the guys who make the actual ships – visit different Navy offices and ships (if they exist) and use all of the photos and blueprints they can to knock together a ship that is as accurate as they can possibly make it. A lot of those ships are actually accurate down to the rivet … you have to understand what year you’re picking the ship from and then how you’re going to make it fit into the game with that specific loadout.   

A great example is the U.S.S. Kidd. She’s currently in a very WWII setup, but she was modified by removing some torpedoes and adding AA guns because aircraft were doing terrible things to ships at that point. So in the game, she’s missing a set of torpedo tubes that a Fletcher-class ship should have. So the other Fletchers [in World of Warships] are a little bit more powerful. By removing those torpedoes, we’re able to sort of downclass the U.S.S. Kidd and make it a more acceptable ship in the tier she was put in. So a lot of that goes into balancing and getting ships in the game.

GS: What I like about World of Warships is looking at the ships and saying, ‘These are authentic ships.’ And it’s a testament to your R&D because none of the ships really feel overpowered, especially considering these ships are over different timelines. How long do you playtest ships when balancing them?

GS: How do you go about determining what ships are premium ships?

We then parse feedback through a lot of different people – we read through all of it. We have not just the NA region, but EU, Asia, and RU all doing this testing, and then based upon all that feedback, we might make some small tweaks. But then we put it on the live servers to test it even further, again with the super testers and some of our contributors, the guys who make videos for us, just to see how it performs in a live setting. 

We study all the statistics from the servers: how it’s doing in terms of damage, in terms of survival rate, all of that sort of thing. The amount of information we have on our ships’ performances is really quite astounding … there are a myriad of changes we can make that affect how good a ship is. And then after we make all those changes and we feel really comfortable with the ship, that’s when it gets released.

GS: Al King has talked about Wargaming’s relationship with tank museums for World of Tanks and that Wargaming’s Lesta Studio in St. Petersburg, Russia, overlooks the Neva river, where historic warships can be found. Can you talk a little about Wargaming’s relationships with maritime museums or community historical societies and how they might tie into World of Warships?

For example, we don’t currently have any Italian battleships in the game as a line, but we have Roma coming out soon [which would be a premium ship]. All of our lines are named after the lead ships. So you have the Cleveland class, the Farragut class, the Fletcher class … those are all ships in their respective lines that you can grind to. Speaking of Fletcher specifically, the U.S.S. Kidd is a ship you can spend some real money on getting, and it’s slightly different than the Fletcher you would [grind] to in the game.

Conversely, there are also ships that totally don’t fit at all, and we distribute them in different ways. The U.S.S. Missouri is an Iowa class, but she’s not different from the Iowa itself, which is a Tier IX ship, and we don’t sell Tier IX premiums. So we decided that we’d give this premium ship away for free, but you would have to grind to it using free experience, which is one of our in-game currencies.  

GS: You talked a little about this already, but backing up just a bit, the battleships, cruisers, aircraft carriers, and frigates in WoWs are all ships from the WWI and WWII eras. Why focus on that period of naval warfare and not, say, the modern era or perhaps the Napoleonic era?

But one thing that we’re working on right now that’s really big is the Battleship Texas Foundation. Battleship Texas is not in good shape. She’s actually sinking – and water has to be pumped out every day. She is the last Dreadnought in the world. So Battleship Texas out in Houston is in a really rough way and needs a lot of help, a lot of monetary and PR help.

So we recently launched our Project Valor Campaign, where we created bundles in our premium shop that ranged from $5 to $30, and 100% of those proceeds went to Battleship Texas. When we first launched the campaign in November, a lot of people from EU, Asia, and RU found out and [wanted to help]. Overall, we raised over $280,000 for Battleship Texas.

Outside of charity work, we make a lot of video series that look at the history of ships and the actions they’ve partaken in. Because Wargaming definitely sees themselves – ourselves – as shepherds of history … those men’s lives and women’s lives deserve to be remembered.       

Conversely, with modern warships, so much is accomplished now by an aircraft carrier or missile boats – there are no operational battleships anymore. Your navy is mostly comprised of aircraft carriers and destroyers. Having big, dramatic hunks-of-steel warships – that’s just not a thing anymore. So being in the modern era, I don’t know if it would really appeal to a lot of different individuals because a lot of your battles are being fought at such great distances.

GS: Over the summer, Wargaming released update 0.6.8 for World of Warships, with much of the content revolving around Operation Dynamo and the harrowing rescue at Dunkirk during the Second World War. What goes into pulling something like that off from an R&D perspective? What differentiates it from other in-game operations, such as Operation Ultimate Frontier, for example?   

GS: America and Japan were the first two nations in World of Warships. How did the development and research teams decide on those two nations? What about their historic fleets led to that focus?

For example, the concept of a minefield was just alien. It only exists in that operation, but it’s something we could use in other operations as well. The little Schnellboots from Germany, those don’t exist in the game. We work with nothing smaller than a destroyer. So having those designed and designing how they interact is very interesting – specifically leading up all the different A.I. questions. It was a tremendous amount of effort to make that new and exciting thing you could turn into a gamified version of Dunkirk, which has a very serious undertone.

How does this differ from other operations? This one differs in that it got a specific collection, a group of items that get added to your player account, which are basically like trophies and achievements you get for completing certain matches. Those collections had historical items from that era – and a lot of historical information attached to them.

It was intricate and deep, but also very good for us. Using those various technologies and those inferences, they influenced a lot of the operations we have now. For the most part, we can take those learnings and systems and copy/paste them into the ones we have, which will make them better.

Plus, the Japanese had the most well-known battleship ever, the Yamato. It was the biggest, baddest battleship … If you were releasing a naval combat game, you would definitely release Yamato as soon as you possibly could.

GS: Can you talk about your upcoming initiative with the Battleship Texas Foundation?

Rounding out Wargaming’s trifecta of historically based MMO titles, World of Warships is poised to continue its domination of the seven seas by providing both maritime enthusiasts and casual players some of the most realistic yet fun naval combat in modern gaming. And through Wargaming’s charity efforts, the company is one of the few in the gaming sphere that’s taking action to preserve some of the most iconic pieces of history the world has ever seen. 

You can pilot some of the most fearsome battleships, cruisers, destroyers, and aircraft carriers of WWI and WWII by checking out World of Warships on Steam or over at Wargaming.net.