Wargaming has launched its latest massively multiplayer online game, World of Warplanes, hoping to see this game reach the heights that World of Tanks has pioneered. The North American launch event was held in the USS Hornet museum in Alameda, California, where members of the press got to see some actual warbirds while enjoying some Big Band music from the 30’s and 40’s, and of course try their hand at World of Warplanes. The event was well-produced, and the software looks equally polished. Will it be enough to create a massive audience The [a]list daily was there to find out.

Wargaming is celebrating its fifteenth anniversary this year, but it’s only in the last three years that the company has experienced massive success. The reason, of course, is the enormous popularity of World of Tanks, the massively multiplayer online game of WWII tank battles that now has over 70 million players registered worldwide. Wargaming has grown right along with World of Tanks, and the company now has over 2200 employees worldwide spread among 16 different locations. About half of those employees are employed in community or customer support roles, showing the importance Wargaming places on its players.

World of Warplanes has been in development for years, and has had an extensive beta period. The first version was literally taking World of Tanks and adding a third dimension. “That didn’t work too well,” said producer Michael Zinchenko. “But it showed us many of the things we would have to work on.” The team worked on creating historically accurate models while the gameplay underwent huge changes. “We tried modeling aircraft performance very realistically, and it was just unplayable,” said senior producer Gareth Luke. So they went back for long months of work, making the game and its controls much easier for players, trying to find the right balance of playability and realism.

The challenges presented by World of Warplanes are immense ones, given the scale of audience that Wargaming wants to achieve. The technical challenges of massive server arrays have been solved with World of Tanks, but the getting the fun factor right is the key element to creating popularity worldwide. The game is quite different that World of Tanks in its feel, since you need to be in constant motion. Just keeping yourself oriented can be difficult, and the complexities of 15 versus 15 dogfights (along with anti-aircraft fire and ground targets) can be daunting.

Still, the potential audience for World of Warplanes should be considered immense. No one would have expected World of Tanks to be particularly popular in North America or China, yet the audience in those countries is considerable. Air combat is much more of a cultural icon in the West than tank combat — think of all the movies dealing with fighter pilots and their mystique, while nary a one dealing with a tank driver. World of Warplanes could be more popular than World of Tanks in many areas, if it’s done right. Remember, air combat simulators were once a major category of PC games, yet in the last decade we’ve seen them mostly vanish. World of Warplanes could tap an audience of frustrated gamers who are looking for air-combat with state-of-the-art visuals.

There’s another major aspect that Wargaming is considering: eSports. Both Luke and Zinchenko acknowledged the company is looking for ways to make World of Warplanes into a popular eSport, but there are many difficulties to overcome. Even when the game is properly tuned and balanced from a player’s perspective, the most successful eSports have to be fun to watch. Air combat is difficult to follow as a spectator, and Wargaming will have to find ways to make the dogfighting visually compelling and understandable to spectators in order to become a popular eSport.

World of Warplanes certainly has depth to appeal to gamers: Over 100 aircraft in the game to start with, and you can fly everything from biplanes of the ’30s to Korean War fighter jets. You can use a mouse and a keyboard, or a joystick if you have one. And with 1 million registered players already, the game starts with a fair-sized community so matches won’t take too long to find.

Wargaming hopes to ramp up World of Warplanes as it continues to work on its next big game, World of Warships. Eventually the three games may cross over in some way, though integrating the different combats probably creates a completely different gaming environment. Still, Wargaming has created their Unified Premium Account where credits you build up or pay for in one game can be used in another. This will make it easier to get World of Tanks fans to give World of Warplanes a shot.

The biggest challenge facing World of Warplanes is living up to the massive success of World of Tanks. Can air combat attract an audience of 70 million or an appreciable fraction thereof We’re going to find out over the next year or two.