Connections is the latest puzzle game from the New York Times. The game tasks you with categorizing a pool of 16 words into four secret (for now) groups by figuring out how the words relate to each other. The puzzle resets every night at midnight and each new puzzle has a varying degree of difficulty. Just like Wordle, you can keep track of your winning streak and compare your scores with friends.
World of Tanks Modern Armor celebrates its 10th anniversary with new tanks, challenges, and more
09.02.2024 - 15:37 / blog.playstation.com
Can you believe it? Ten years of tanks! The game known today as World of Tanks Modern Armor officially made its debut in the console arena on February 12, 2014.
As one of the first free-to-play titles available on consoles, WoTMA (or just “World of Tanks,” as it was known then!) helped lay the foundation for experiences that PlayStation players would enjoy over the next decade. Of course, the game couldn’t have come as far as it has without the support of a thriving community… or without the efforts of a dedicated staff.
In fact, several of our Wargaming staff members who were present for the game’s early days are still part of the team today. Together, they’re taking a look back at the game’s history and a sneak peek at what’s ahead during the year-long event we’re calling Celebrations.
It takes more than a few people to bring a game like World of Tanks to market, but five who made the game what it is today are:
Any of them will tell you that hard work and scrappiness were key to their efforts. Valerie MacCracken, who started at Wargaming in 2011 in a customer support role, drives the point home, saying, “The first North American office was brand new when I joined, and there were only maybe fifteen employees; I recall that on one of my first days, we assembled furniture for the lobby area!”
Physical infrastructure for various offices wasn’t the only challenge; there were technical challenges in developing the game, too. According to Andy Dorizas, who was Lead Artist at Day 1 Studios before it became Wargaming Chicago, “We had to trim things down just to get it to run on early hardware. Art assets had to be shrunk or compressed. Levels had to be simplified… It was a seriously large mountain to climb.”
JJ Bakken, who joined the Chicago studio as an Associate Producer in 2013, adds another issue the team faced: the novelty of what Wargaming was doing! “This was the studio’s first time developing a free-to-play game, and it was early in the days of F2P on console platforms,” he says. “Figuring out a new genre and a new way to connect with game players is always challenging, but exciting at the same time.”
How did they do it? MacCracken says that the process was gradual, “with the alpha, beta, [a] soft launch in certain regions, and then [the] full launch happening, back-to-back.” She also ran what she calls a “super-secret” forum, available only to early testers. “When I saw the passion that the game was creating among our early testers, many of which are still around today, I knew we had something good going.”
Bakken echoes this: “…there is always extra trepidation on launching a live-service game (will the servers perform, etc.), so we were hopeful all our technical efforts would be rewarded. Spoilers: it
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