So i’ve been playing World of Warplanes a lot in the past 3 years, nowhere near as much as WoT, but still long enough to get a Tier 10 and multiple tier 7-8 planes.

And while most people would write me off and tell me to play War Thunder, don’t worry, I play and enjoy WT, not as much as I do WoWp but that’s just me. Literally, I’m one of the few players playing WoWp, which still manages to break 1k players online at once easily for a couple of hours per day.

Anyway, the reason I’m writing this, and the reason I’m writing this here out of all places is: I want people to try the game again, to give it a second chance. For that I need a large audience.

First of all, it had many changes since it has been released and considering no one is playing it, they did a reasonable job at adding content and fixing the game (to an extent).

By convincing enough people to give it a second chance I hope to boost the development and the quality of it as more people can say what they want.

I have gotten a WT player with over 5000 playing hours to play WoWp and, even if we had to figure out a couple of things, like the ideal settings (which I will come back to later in this article) for the controls, he actually enjoyed it to an extent, mainly because he just prefers realistic games, but for someone who enjoys arcade games or even WT arcade, it will certainly be worth it.

Some of the main selling points of the game are by far some of the unique aircraft, which, to be fair, for some people are a no go, but that’s why War Thunder exists, and that’s a good thing.

But generally, WoWp can add aircraft which Gaijin would never add to WT.

Aircraft like that are for example: the Swedish Saab 51, various Swiss heavy fighters, the Danish OV-J-1.

                                                               Saab 51

OV-J-1

One of the many Swiss Heavy fighter projects

Whole new nations are even possible! Here are some examples of possible new ones: Sweden, Finland, Spain, Argentina, Poland, Romania, Yugoslavia, Switzerland, The Netherlands, Czechoslovakia and Australia. And again, they are theoretically possible, but we don’t know if WG will add them, we just made this list based on our research.

Some of the unique aircraft already in the game: ME 262 HG III, the French AD 10C2 or the SE 100.

There are also a lot of possible lines like France and Italy (which have been confirmed to me that they will be the next 2 nations). Other nations that have a good chance in getting added are: Sweden, Switzerland, Czechoslovakia and Poland, which have trees in WoT or are work in progress. Maybe there are more, and if that’s the case I just don’t know about them. We can also see in the future if Wargaming has previously unknown planes in their archives.

Also it has been confirmed to me as well that they are planning to add bombers into the game and that they plan to do some more work on the graphics. And if we can make the community grow we can change the game easier.

Also, yes, I do know that there’s still a lot left to change. But my friend told me that the most important changes they need to do at the moment are: balancing attackers, tweaking the gun damage, upgrading the physics and adding a better shader to the graphics. Other than that it’s really playable, and the better you get, the less you tend to die, the more enjoyable it gets.

In addition, the higher up the tiers you go it also gets more fun. And there are also some lines which are easier to play than others. But one thing I must add is that you’d have to do some changes to the controls to make it playable, the standard settings are terrible and don’t allow you to play the game at its best potential. There are also some nations I would recommend for starters which I will list further down.

As mentioned above, there are some settings which you must change from the standard settings in order to get the controls to work properly.

This is the Settings Menu, on the bottom left you’ll see advanced settings.

The most important setting to uncheck is “Target tracking adjustment” as well as lock camera on either Horizon or Free. The sliders can be adjusted as you please, I recommend to open a training room with a tier 1 bot on the enemy team so you can test out what suits you the most.

(And yes, I’m trying to convince the Devs to make some proper standard settings)

Well this part of the settings is pretty complicated to understand, but when you do, it makes the game handle a lot better.

Basically as the image says: horizontal axis is for the the angle between the cursor and the aircraft direction, for example if you move the cursor only slightly or if you rock the mouse so hard that you make a 180 degree turn, the points on the very left are for the small adjustments while the points on the very right are for the extreme maneuvers.

The vertical Axis is the type of the turn and what it basically means, the further down they are the more the plane continues rolling in the direction you pointed at, which makes turn fights a little easier if you have the far right point fully down. If the left point is on the very bottom you can make small adjustments to the cursor without the whole aircraft rolling in, it will then fly with the rudder and elevator for the small adjustments. I would not recommend putting everything to the bottom, I recommend to put the lines around the upper third of the grid and as mentioned above, get into a training room with a bot to adjust your settings.

Another setting that’s recommended for evasive maneuvers is the rudder controls, they normally aren’t assigned and you can easily put them on Q and E. Pretty much everything can be changed.

Other changes I recommend for a more fluid gameplay is to deactivate camera effects and disable the free cinematic camera, which when enabled, locks your free camera to your aircraft, making it very hard to look around.

Blockhaj: All you need to do is experiment with the controls a little to make it as similar to War Thunder as possible and you will be able to rack at least 2-4 kills per game if you are an average War Thunder player. Beside the keyboard settings, set mouse to 100%, then go to advanced and use these settings:

So now for the recommended aircraft lines: I recommend going down the BF 109 line as they have good armament, good speed, and reasonable maneuverability. They’re pretty easy to play. Also good for starters is the Soviet La-15 line, for more experienced players I recommend the Japanese KI-162 or the F-86A Sabre line.

Heavy fighters for Germany tend to have the biggest dps while the Americans are pretty average with a good rate of climb. The British heavy fighters are very powerful as well.

Also I insist that you try to play the game until you reach tier 4 or 5, as low tiers can be pretty bad. (not so much with the germans but other nations have pretty bad armament at low tiers.

I really hope that I can get some players to give WoWp a second chance for now. I’ll let you know in the future for any major changes if you prefer to wait a bit.

To finish, I’ll let my WT friend say his opinion:

Blockhaj: I have, like everyone else in War Thunder, played Arcade. Like a lot of players I have left it for Realistic since War Thunder does a better job as a realistic game than an arcade game. In War Thunder Arcade everything is unhistorical and unrealistic, like an arcade game should be. But what it misses are all the weird plane designs that you see in other games like IL-2 1946 and my childhood favorite, Crimson Skies. When they announced that Wargaming, the creators of World of Tanks were going to develop a similar game but with planes, I really hoped it would be like War Thunder Arcade, but with all the weird plane designs Ii knew we were never going to see in WT. Now I must say I do not support paper planes in WT since I play it for the realism/semi historical accuracy. I do prefer prototypes before reskinned vehicles under new names but paper vehicles are a no no. But I do still appreciate paper designs and the “what if” scenarios. So I jumped on the hype train and tested WoWP, and to my surprise, it was garbage. Like most people I started hating on the game even though it was in beta. Several years later I met Mizutayio who said that he had been playing WoWP for all these years. At first I thought he was joking, I then thought he was mad. Then I realized he was a semi fanboy 😉 But he told me that they had fixed a lot of the problems with the game during the past years and asked if I wanted to give it a try. So I did, and at first it didn’t look too impressive. The graphics were bad and the controls were horrible and made the game unplayable. After a few changes I was able to change the controls so it mimicked the War Thunder ones, and after that the game became sort of fun. I acquired some mid tier premium planes to get the feel of the real game and it’s actually pretty fun. Now there are still problems with the game but I must say that I would rather play this game than playing Arcade in War Thunder again. Both games/game modes have their pros and cons but in my opinion WoWP is more fun and it actually has some future potential, unlike War Thunder Arcade which hasn’t changed since the 20 tier system. Now if you want to play this game and not ragequit, let the attackers be and you will have a great time.

Mizutayio: Also one last thing: by doing the tutorial you can get 200 gold for just investing 15 minutes of your time.

In addition, WoWp has a lot of events where you can print exp, which can be converted to free exp and spent on WoT. (also works the other way around, you can spend some free exp from WoT to unlock a tier 4 or 5 plane in WoWp)

Here are some neat videos showing some gameplay of aircraft that aren’t tier 1,2 or 3: