World of Tanks: Five Years On

Wargaming Interview - Artiom Muraska (World of Tanks Publishing Producer, Europe)

We managed to grab World of Tanks European Publishing Producer, Artiom Muraska, for a brief interview about his role, the PC platform and the upcoming 9.14 update.


bit-tech: Hi Artiom. Can we just get you to give a bit more detail about your role at World of Tanks?

Artiom: I'm publishing producer for World of Tanks EU and I'm responsible for World of Tanks PC products in Europe and all related publishing activities. With the help of my product group in Europe, I'm behind most of the stuff we do. I work closely with the development team and also with European communities. When our development team comes to us asking, 'hey guys, what do you think about this content or this feature?', we get community feedback and share this with the team. It's going back and forth between developers and communities.

bit-tech: How did you come to this role?

Artiom: Previously, I was working for another gaming company, also within the MMO genre, and once I had an opportunity to join Wargaming I gladly accepted.


bit-tech: You deal specifically with the PC platform. Can you go into the advantages and disadvantages of PC for a free-to-play game like World of Tanks compared to consoles or mobile?

Artiom: Honestly, I am so engaged with the PC version. When I started working, I already had like 16,000 battles as a player. Usually when you do something at work you don't want to do it any more during your spare time but that doesn't work with me. I continued playing and now I have I think 26,000. I'm continuing to play the PC version really hard. I do occasionally play Blitz but if I play all the platforms I simply won't have time to rest – the PC version is what I really like. Judging by my gameplay, there are different people who want to play in different ways. When I'm playing PC, I'm doing hardcore gaming but if I want to relax I play Blitz – that's my personal approach.


bit-tech: What about producing and developing the game, what is it about the PC that you love there?

Artiom: I do like our community. For PC, we are able to provide common tests and during those we can actually see what our community is talking about. We're gathering feedback from common tests all the time but during the last 3 months the feedback from our players was really constructive and this is where we can say to our developers, 'hey guys, we need to take a look at this'. This is what I like – we have constant communication between the community and the developers and being in this loop is really awesome.

bit-tech: Part of this event is the five year anniversary for World of Tanks. What has been the biggest change to World of Tanks PC in those five years?

Artiom: For us, the biggest change is related to physics and sound and this improvement is coming in 9.14. But we already had a physics introduction and back in those days that was quite a game changer; it improved the gameplay for lots of players. That was 8.0 in 2012 and a really huge achievement for us.


bit-tech: Could you give some more details about the technical improvements coming in update 9.14?

Artiom: Right now we're improving the physics even more, providing more comfortable control of vehicles so players really feel and have this perception that they are driving something heavy. Then we are addressing current gameplay issues like vehicles getting stuck in certain points of the map, and we're improving manoeuvrability of vehicles, providing more manoeuvres like dodging some shots and being more aggressive when spotting. It's quite a huge improvement.