[2023] Following the Roadmap: refining landscape

A lil somethin somethin: You can find the details for this event on the announcement page here.

This is one more step along the War Thunder roadmap and a lot of important steps across many locations of the game. Today, we are going to tell you about the improvements to locations within the game based on your feedback. Fixes of overshots, imbalanced positions, vulnerable respawn zones and other improvements which we promised in our big roadmap that we released in June. We are committed to continual refinement and always welcome your feedback to further improve our maps.

Positions
Let’s start with some good news for those who drive near the “A” point of the map. Vietnam has changed - but how? The swamp has dried up and the road to point “A” has become noticeably faster, with the location itself looking more contrasted to make your eyes feel more comfortable. We have also improved the minimap on this map.

Before:


After:


Eastern Europe now has a lot of new natural shelters and landscape changes, which means moving between capture points will be much more secure. These changes have mainly affected the suburbs — the city is still recognizable to those familiar with it.



El Alamein has been improved: effective positions on the tops of mountains as well as several zones have been corrected that were unavailable in the SB version of the map. And Jungle has been thinned down a bit so that battling on the map doesn’t turn into a tedious round of looking for a moving bush. We have also blocked some known passages outside the playable map zone.



Protecting respawn points
One death isn’t a problem in most of the game modes within the game. Although, this can’t be said about death instantly upon respawn. Of course, if the enemy team honestly pushed through your defense and reached your respawn point - this situation is a bit different. We are correcting obvious positions which can get on the nerves of the enemy, even at the very beginning of the battle.



On Normandy, we have blocked the ability to shoot from respawn to respawn from the edges of the play area. This has been one of the maps where the problem was particularly obvious. A similar problem affected Stalingrad, but on this map it was less obvious. On this map we have also blocked such shots. On Alaska, you used to have to drive up a wooded mountain to reach a similar position. Not anymore - the drive up has been blocked. Maginot has also been criticized by you. We made reliable protection for respawn zones on this location as well! Thank you for the feedback!
Landscape design We are regularly making small tweaks to locations — the most attentive of you may have noticed that your favourite positions after the next update may have changed, such as a moved bush or a tree may have “grown” in a new place. Here are a few more of them, where we’ll show them with screenshots.

There was a house close to the spawn point on Iberian Fortress that, according to our analysis, made for an exceptionally effective position for one team within the match. We've removed the house, so that there is now one less point on the map from which a shell can fly towards you unexpectedly.

Before:


After:


Much more complex changes have taken place on the map Seversk-13 — we have towed away police cars that posed a problem: even after being destroyed, they left behind an invisible collision model which shells hit. And on Jungle, which we told you about in the beginning of this blog, has had some small changes: we also worked on the shade of vegetation and some other visuals.



The most noticeable changes have taken place on Sun City. The architecture of the whole city has changed very noticeably — objects, buildings and the environment as a whole have become more diverse and modern. We have improved some textures and didn’t touch the sun — it continues to shine.


We continue to refine While we've worked diligently to refine and improve the maps based on your feedback, we recognize that in the process, some new bugs or issues may inadvertently arise. We genuinely value and appreciate your continued feedback in identifying these challenges, as it aids in our ongoing commitment to enhance your experience in War Thunder. Feel free to let us know[community.gaijin.net] about any balance issues and bugs you may find on War Thunder maps - we will continue similar work to improve map balance in the future.