War Thunder's new Dagor 5.0 Engine offers audio-visual boost

War Thunder is set to improve from a technical perspective starting today, this thanks to the arrival of Update 1.77 Advancing Storm, which is rolling out across PC and consoles.

Gaijin Entertainment's free-to-play, massively multiplayer action game moves to the new Dagor 5.0 Engine to achieve a photo-realistic representation of landscapes and vehicles. There are also more than 20 new tanks and planes in the game, some of them featured in the screenshots below.

Their in-house engine lets Gaijin introduce new techniques that will see, for example, "roads now having potholes, ruts and may show puddles of slush, water or mud - with the latter depending on the current weather and type of terrain". The team has also been working on audio effects, to implement more layers of sound and add more detail.

Advancing Storm also brings to the game more tanks from the '70s and '80s, with some of them still in service today. To name a few: the U.S. M1 Abrams, British Challenger 1, German Leopard 2K, Soviet T-64B and French AMX-30B2 Brenus. Special mention needs to be made for a new plane landing in the game; the bomber Heinkel He 177 A-5 Greif was created by a player under the Revenue Share Partner Program.

See the full list of changes here or take a look at some of them in the video below.