Tanki Online: "more guns, more modes, more everything"
Tanki Online is slowly growing into a big player in the free-to-play browser game space. It's a tank game, but with an isometric view and handling more similar to that of Micro Machines than World of Tanks (there's a popular trend for players showing off parkour skills with their tanks, which tells you something about how the armoured vehicles move).
The game launched in 2009, and the studio that created the game - Alternativa Platform - are Russian (although the first build of the game was in English). There's now English, Russian and German versions of the game, and a completely separate server system for Chinese players (plus a newly established Brazilian version). All told, there's 40 million registered players; healthy numbers whichever way you look at it.
We recently sat down online with Tanki Online's chief marketing officer, Roman Epishin, who gave us a quick tour of the game and the different turrets players can use to blast at other away with. There's flamethrowers and plasma turrets and guns that spew out ice, all working against other effects, requiring reactive tactics in battle. As it was repeated several times during the presentation, the mantra here is very much "easy to play, hard to master".
Afterwards, during a Q&A, it was explained to us that there would be new guns coming to the game, both the current build and the one coming next year.
"I suppose I can answer in two directions. We have two simultaneous processes right now, the first one involving almost all the programmers in the company, is developing the next version of Tanki Online," Epishin said.
He continued: "It is based on the Unity engine, that is popular nowadays. It will be multi-platform game and we are going to release it next year, maybe in the second or third quarter of the year. And yes, then we'll add more guns... more playing modes, more of everything actually."
"As for this current version... we actually have in our this year plans to add maybe one or two new guns, which actually it means one or two new gameplays, but only in the end of the year. Yes, we are going to do so, because we understand that when we launch the new version of the game, not every player will go there right in the moment. Players are rather conservative, they like the game, that's why we're going to maintain two projects simultaneously - the next one and this one - we'll invest all our developers efforts in the second version, but [this current] version with a couple of new guns will exist also."
For further details, or if you want to give the game a go, you can follow this link and find out more information.
<bild>How the game will look after the switch to the Unity Engine.</bild>
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