2023 Roadmap for WWII Online

[jwilly]

It's unfortunate that WWIIOL can't be both realistic and commercially successful.

[jon8798]

Real realism doesn't work, that's why it's a game. Everyone's right that tank crew shouldn't be able to hear infantry (and infantry shouldn't run through bushes, and rain should make mud etc) but the reality is that you didn't attack towns with 8 or 9 people. I live in Turkey, when I log in on a Saturday night I get excited if I see 7 other people on an AO with me. People can bang on about combined arms and working together as much as they want, but with so few people online you can't really demand that 50-60% of your combat power does guarding the one tank you have in case of a single dude with a RPAT sneaking along a bush line.

Let tanks hear a little bit better, let them repair tracks. We ain't got hundreds of people playing at combined arms or first and second line engineering support. Make the game fun, within reason, and focus on getting to UE5 when we might get enough players to make the other arguments relevant (then you can tinker with it again). 

I dunno man, I only drop in occasionally but have been playing since 2009 and seen so many players that have insisted X, Y or Z was the thing that would bring all the old players rushing back. But we've seen new infantry classes, new vehicles, artillery, supply in every frontline town... all of which were demanded as the magic bullet that would turn things around by some group or other but here we still are, struggling with lowpop and arguing about gameplay changes and new toys.

 

[GrAnit]

Given that one player crews a tank, a piece of artillery, a ship, a bomber or a machine gun, it is built into the game one player substitutes for many.  Why is it so hard to accept when some reasonable extensions of this concept is introduced? 

[tater]

11 hours ago, jwilly said:

It's unfortunate that WWIIOL can't be both realistic and commercially successful.

We don't of course know this, since nothing about the game has ever been realistic. Realism is a continuum, BTW, it's not all or nothing, but IMHO all changes have been to make the game less realistic.

 

2 hours ago, GrAnit said:

Given that one player crews a tank, a piece of artillery, a ship, a bomber or a machine gun, it is built into the game one player substitutes for many.  Why is it so hard to accept when some reasonable extensions of this concept is introduced? 

This is funny, since I think the reasonable extension would be for players to each control a like capability. At least within some broad range.

So a player spawning a tank is playing ~4-5 men, if the tanks were improved to have their flex guns on top, they might have 3 MGs, and the main gun. Seems like allowing a single player to spawn an entire squad of infantry doesn't even match the tank's mass of metal thrown per minute, but I'd find that an acceptable extension. Or if the ATGs spawned in with their full crew playable (and not cartoon cutouts stuck to a single spot/role.

Ships are harder, since even the small German DD is 330 crew, but the naval game is a hot mess anyway.

[jwilly]

32 minutes ago, tater said:

We don't of course know this, since nothing about the game has ever been realistic.

I think some effort has been made over the years to achieve realistic immersion in combat actions. I don't think that's an accident or a mistake. I think the customer segment that's interested in WWII shooters, wants realistic immersion.

But, with some regularity, CRS seems to decide that their customers don't want that.

Putting development effort into an ability to repair a tracked tank in a combat zone...? Not realistic. Not in any way. 

Increasing the ability of the crew of a buttoned-up tank to hear footfalls outside...? Bizarro-unrealistic. 

But those are just items from the recent Roadmap. The game has quite a list of specific unrealisms, accumulated over the years. A few of them are due to client-server limitations or development resources, so they're excusable...but they should be acknowledgd as workarounds. And most were intentional unforced errors, intended to be permanent...not workarounds. 

There doesn't seem to be a list of such workarounds, to be corrected as soon as the development process allows. If there were such a list, it'd make sense to mention it when items that logically would be on that list inevitably are again complained about. But that doesn't happen.