WG Fest 2019: A Look into the Future

Tank Festival 2020

The current WG Fest is held under the banner of the Tank Festival, and to surprise you, we prepared an entire series of festival events with new mechanics. We want to make Tank Festival a great and long-standing tradition for years to come, since it’s such a joyful occasion. After all, next year marks the 10th anniversary of World of Tanks! A nice round number and a landmark event for all of us.

Of course, you should expect new and exciting treats from us. And you’ll have them, as next year we plan to launch Tank Festival 2020, with even more rewards and special events. Keep your eyes peeled for more details closer to the date!

The Offspring in Your Garage

This year’s WG Fest: Tanker Day is headlined by The Offspring, the legends of the California punk rock scene. Can’t make it to the live show? We’ve got you covered! Starting from September 18, we’ll assemble a virtual stage right in the game Garage, where the band will be performing some of their biggest hits. World of Tanks has never seen anything like it!

And there's more to it. The Offspring can stay in your Garage for good — stay tuned for more details.

The Great Race

Great news for those of you who have long been waiting for the return of this mode! The Great Race has received a considerable revamp, making it even more enjoyable than when it last appeared in 2014.

This time, there will be three tanks to choose from, including the legendary Chaffee from the last edition. The Great Race will also host a five-stage tournament, running from September 23 to October 7, so join a team and prove yourself the real king of the racetrack!

Registrations for the tournament will open on September 18.

New Vehicles/Dual-Gun Tanks

We’re constantly looking for new ways to develop the existing tech trees in our game. We don't have any master plans for the introduction of specific machines yet, but we're pondering some interesting concepts. After all, our aim has always been to introduce tanks that will provide you with fresh and unique gameplay, and add variety to your daily gaming experience.

This is precisely the case with dual-gun vehicles, which are about to enter the closed Supertests. These vehicles will be equipped with two guns, allowing you to shoot both simultaneously and sequentially. We're actively working on the mechanics of these unusual machines, and their concept may change as a result of testing. Keep your eyes peeled for a Developers Diaries video and a dedicated article to be published tomorrow, going into more detail on these unique battle heroes.

Sandbox

During the next iteration of the Sandbox, we plan to test reworked mechanics for dealing damage with HE shells. We're currently testing a system in which the mechanics for dealing damage will be calculated more fairly and become more predictable, both for the player who inflicts it and for the tank hit by a HE shell. All changes from previous Sandbox iterations will be retained. More detailed information on all changes will be published closer to the start of the Sandbox in a dedicated article.

We're going to launch the next iteration this autumn. Everyone is eligible to participate and evaluate the modifications we propose — you just need to download the separate Sandbox client. The changes we're testing are very important to our game, so we would like to once again invite everyone to share their feedback.

Halloween

This year, World of Tanks will celebrate Halloween once again! Get ready to try out an exciting new PvE mode where you will fight evil in a sinister location that changes throughout the course of the battle.

This time, the AI opponents will be smarter and more complex. Bots will have several roles on the battlefield, show individual behaviors, and react differently to your presence. Some enemies will constantly haunt you if you approach them; others will on the contrary try to run away from your tank, luring you deeper into the shadow. You'll also face a particularly powerful Archenemy — unspeakably evil and intimidating.

This year, Ito Masahiro, the art director of the first three Silent Hill games, participated in the development of the Halloween mode, so you can expect the atmosphere and visuals of the event to be better than ever!

The Anonymizer

The anonymizer is a tool that conceals a player's real username in battle. This feature was announced at last year's WG Fest, and is important to our players. The main task of the anonymizer is to maintain a certain level of privacy in game, and the tool we’re currently working on can solve this issue.

We had several ideas of how the anonymizer should work in World of Tanks, but the most fitting concept for players would be that the player should be anonymous only during battles.

How does it work? You select an option in the game settings and activate the anonymizer. The game generates a random username in each battle. It's not a random string of symbols, but a word that more or less makes sense, so other players won't even notice that you have the anonymizer turned on. They will only realize it after the battle when they want to see your battle statistics.

The anonymizer will let many players feel more comfortable in battle. There will be less “social pressure”, and you’ll be able to play your favorite game in peace.

World of Tanks enCore Ray Tracing

We’re continuing to improve Core, the graphics engine for World of Tanks. The updated version of the Core engine includes two important technological features:

Concurrent rendering support.
Support for more soft and realistic shadows on players’ tanks, all thanks to Ray Tracing technology, previously available only in cinema and animation.

With the introduction of our Ray Tracing (RT) technology—developed at Wargaming with close collaboration with Intel — we can recreate the "main actors" of our game in higher quality; their smallest details will give super-realistic shadows when the sun hits them. Ray Tracing further immerses you in an atmosphere of furious tank combat and provides an even more enjoyable gameplay experience.

NOTE: Ray Tracing technology will work on all graphics cards that support DirectX 11 API and higher, but only for not destroyed vehicles. You can enable/disable this function in the game settings. The support for brand-new shadows on tanks will be added in the upcoming updates of World of Tanks, after the tests have been completed.

Session Statistics

When we first launched session statistics, we were already actively working on its second iteration, and are now ready to share our plans with you.

Win percentage, number of vehicles destroyed, survival rate, and number of opponents spotted will all be added to the session statistics to make your experience more enjoyable.

An options button will be also added to configure the feature to your needs. You will be able to change the priority of economic parameters and select what data will be hidden. In fact, you can enable/disable almost all parameters, all while tracking the average experience earned per session.
We also decided to add an option to not reset the stats every day. Now it’s up to the player to decide when their session starts!

The new version of session statistics coming out next year will cover several game modes. Your statistics will be available in a special menu where you can see your efficiency in the Frontline mode, for example. Level, Frontline experience, average rank per session, Personal Reserves, Credits — you can see it all.

Also, this feature will allow you to analyse your battle efficiency in each mode, including:

Damage to main objectives
Base capture points
Damage by consumables
Average blocked damage
And much more.

Finally, we plan to replace the Personal Rating that's shown in the Achievements section with WTR.