One of the big showcases at e3 this year was a game called World of Tanks. If you were lucky enough to attend the show, you couldn't have missed the large promotional tanks placed outside and within the e3 conference halls. They gave a very mighty impression.
World of Tanks is a team-based massively multiplayer online game consisting of more than 90 historically accurate armored tanks from the mid-20th century. It's a free-to-play title which features micro payments for premium items such as medkits, camouflage nets, and improved ammunition. A closed beta commenced in July 8, 2010, and since its release in April this year, World of Tanks has been a rip roaring success. The game has accumulated nearly 3 million registered users, with 2 million of those coming from Russia alone.
Of course, the technology behind this amazing accomplishment is achieved by none other than the locally developed MMO suite of tools, BigWorld tech.
Much has been said about BigWorld's capability to run incredible amounts of concurrent entities in the same space, on the same server. BigWorld demonstrated 900 players roaming around in the same spot in 1999 when at the time, popular online game like Tribes usually had no more than around 50 players. When in 2005, BigWorld demonstrated an impressive 100,000 users on a BigWorld server, the question rapidly changed from "how do we get a huge number of players on at the same spot" to a more design provoking "why"?
In 2011, the World of Tanks may be the answer to that question...
World of Tanks is remarkable because it has the achieved a World Guinness Record for "Most Players Online Simultaneously on One MMO Server". The record was registered in January 2011, with a single Russian server hosting 91,311 World of Tanks players. The developers were obviously delighted with the achievement, but were quick to respond that it was possible to set the bar even higher, thanks to BigWorld tech...
"We are excited to see so many people playing World of Tanks and the new record is an important achievement for us," said Victor Kislyi, CEO of Wargaming.net. "However, with the population of the game growing steadily another week or two would let us report a more impressive record as the current PCCU number surpasses 120,000 players".
The World of Tanks developers have announced at e3 their next project, likely to be running Bigworld Tech, called World of Warplanes.