PAX Australia 2014 is done and dusted now, and some of the big winners of the convention were not just the major console players, like Microsoft or Nintendo, but the community-driven booths. Not an hour went by when there wasn’t a massive crowd around the League of Legends booth, which itself was a massive sight to behold, but also gaining a steady stream of onlookers and players was the Wargaming booth, showcasing competitions, contests and giveaways to fans of their online hit, World of Tanks. The company also had two new titles on display, World of Tanks Blitz (recently released for iOS) and World of Warships, an all new MMO featuring battleships on the high seas. We sat down with Max Chuvalov, PR & Marketing Product Manager of Wargaming, to talk about the new games on display, and Wargaming’s success in Australia.

Rocket Chainsaw: Wargaming has found considerable success inside Australia, can you tell us about how the community has grown and responded to the games?

Max Chuvalov: So far, so good. We have seen that the community in Australia is one of the largest communities in Asia, so they are more active on the forums with their feedback on all our games, and Warships as well. We have around 200 players from Australia on our Alpha version and they speak loudly with their feedback and we are glad to have it because we need to improve our games.

The biggest change we have seen here in Australia was the connection to our Singapore server. It was always having problems with latency, high pings… But we are very glad that yesterday we launched our special directly from Australia to Singapore server with Telstra telecom. So, we have been working on that for a few months already and yesterday, exactly for PAX, we already launched it and the ping dropped from 180 to 120 and we have only started optimisation so it will be even better.

RC: In the past couple of years, the eSports community seems to have embraced World of Tanks as well, with its own Mindfreak league and Autumn Series. How does the development of a game into an eSports title come about, is it mainly due to the fans, or do the developers encourage/help as well?

MC: For sure, it’s all from the community. You cannot just create a game and call it ‘eSports’ from scratch, because it’s the community decides. It happened naturally with World of Tanks, so there are several games which are developed specially for eSports purposes like DOTA or Counterstrike or something like that, but World of Tanks it was developed as an MMO without any idea of eSports, but when you get 70 million players or 50 million players, something like that, and all of them are speaking loudly to play competitively, “Give us tournaments and higher levels”, for sure we started to seek them out for eSports.

So, it was very good and successful for World of Tanks for us, unfortunately we did not have lots of functionality like good server mod, or proper free cam view or server replace but it’s all in work right now, and for our upcoming titles like World of Warships, we will have all this functionality ready much faster than we had for World of Tanks.

RC: Tell us about World of Warships, how is the game coming along and what can we expect?

MC: The game is growing very fast, according to the upgrades it has. Right now it’s in Alpha, a work in progress, and all the massive Beta stages like closed Beta test, open Beta test and release as well, are planed for 2015. So, right now we have about 6,000 players in our Alpha test and during the Alpha we have multiple updates of the game based on the feedback from the community. According to their gameplay, we are filling it with more content right now.

We have plans like two nations, Japan and America, for the release with 75 ships. We have multiple maps and very good gameplay, which is basically like rock-paper-scissors, and aircraft carriers forming a support class, which is a totally different kind of gameplay to the other ships, like real-time strategy.

RC: World of Tanks Blitz has been met with success on iOS, how difficult was it to craft a game specific to mobile devices?

MC: So, we used here the same approach as we did with console when porting our games, we created them from scratch. They’re using their own engines. Because it’s a new experience for players, when you’re playing for example with your gamepad in the living room, it’s a different experience to the desktop with a keyboard, and the same with mobile. So, first off, we needed to research and we noticed that the sessions needed to be shorter with mobile devices, and we needed to scale our maps to make them smaller, and make our teams 7 vs 7 instead of 15 vs 15. Then, we took out all the artillery because the maps were too small, the class just won’t fit in there, and the biggest challenge was to make the controls, because it’s the most challenging part for big games like ours, with 3D action on mobile. We had a big focus test, we had probably four or five different prototypes for our controls, and based on the feedback we chose one and then we went with it. Based on default, it’s very comfortable but it’s fully customisable. If you go to settings, you can scale the size of each button you have and place it all over the screen where it’s comfortable for you. So, this is very good and very intuitive for our players. It was a big challenge and we are very glad that we coped with it.

RC: Can we expect to see mobile versions of other properties, like Warplanes and eventually Warships?

MC: Let us release the PC version first and then we will see! Right now, it’s a very good experience for us as World of Tanks Blitz, starting from June 26, we already have more than 8 million installs on iOS, and now we’re entering Android market, so we’re using the same approach as on our big projects, updating constantly with new content and new features, and hopefully new gaming modes in the future. So, it’s not just a game we release for two or three months, or half a year, it’s a game for years to go, and we will improve graphics, physics and everything. So, it gives lots of experience to us because it’s the first mobile game we have and, for sure, if we see that prototypes are looking very good for World of Warships for example, we will go forward.

RC: Thank you for your time!

World of Tanks Blitz is currently available for iOS devices, while World of Warships is expected to enter Beta and final release next year, in 2015.