Belarus is the tank capital of the world: how the World of Tanks game is being turned into a legend

In Russia, it is customary to look at Belarus condescendingly, as a distant relative from the province. Although we should learn a lot from this country. Starting from patriotic education and agriculture and ending with the attitude of the state to private business.

For ten years now, almost heavenly conditions have been created in the republic for organizations working in the IT field. The most famous project that has sprung up on this basis is the Wargaming company, a manufacturer of computer games. You've definitely heard about their flagship World of Tanks. The other day, the players rolled out a grand graphics update, and we had the opportunity to descend into the office, where a global hit is being developed.

Wargaming occupies the largest building of those that could be seen in Minsk. The city, by the way, is strikingly neat by March standards. Not a single black-and-gray snowdrift, although the climate does not seem to be very different from ours.

Under the ceiling in the foyer hangs a plastic fighter with a strange name for a fighter "Glamorous Glen III" (Glamorous Glen III). It is glamorous, apparently, with its colorful propeller and the one that hangs in the lobby. There is also a small tank and an iron throne in a tank reading. The rest of the office, which employs about two thousand people, is focused on functionality, not design.

On the upper, 16th floor, the men responsible for the sound design of the game are sitting. They sit, I must say, in a lordly manner. Everyone has their own office, three monitors, a whole squad of speakers, a synthesizer and surrounded by all this — the creator. The only thing missing is the iron throne from the first floor.

For a fresh patch, the soundtrack was completely rewritten, focusing on ethnic motifs. In which region of the world battles take place on this or that map — such music was created. We plunged into culture, found recordings of street musicians' performances, listened to local folk groups. Europe and North America were covered by their own efforts, but they did not dare to take a swing at the mysterious music of China and Korea. For such cards, compositions were written and performed by local musicians.

Sounds for the game are also not downloaded from the Internet. "I remember how I had to make a shot of the most powerful tank," says sound designer Andrius Klimka. — I had to listen to him two hundred times a day, and it was pointless to do it quietly. When I went home, my colleagues didn't even talk to me: they understood that my hearing had temporarily failed."

However, the main thing in the 1.0 update is, of course, the introduction of a new graphics engine. The previous one no longer allowed to achieve the realism that modern games flaunt. Well, now the artists have come off in full. Literally everything has been reworked, from huge mountains and fields stretching far beyond the limits of the playing space, to blades of grass waving from shots.

A talking picture appeared in the level-art department. While one local pro explained to us at length the subtleties of edge geometry, his colleague at the next computer was poring over a single stone all this time. So small, no one will notice him during the fight. Thanks to such painstaking work, a graphic breakthrough became possible, which you can evaluate from these screenshots. On the first — a piece of the location, as it was before the patch was released, on the second — it is now.

A special song is the tanks themselves, they are created by a separate studio. Each car receives a drawing from historical consultants. They mostly work with archives, and if the necessary materials are not there, they go to armored museums. After receiving the drawing, the artist-designer plunges into building a virtual model for an average of two months. Here again, realism and attention to detail are important, up to the definition of those places where the paint on board the tank should be more worn.

Finally, we were invited to a room resembling a rapid response center of the Ministry of Emergency Situations: the whole wall is hung with monitors. This is a game testing lab. From time to time, ordinary players are invited to the next office, put sophisticated biometric research equipment on them and monitor how people's reactions to the events taking place in battle change. Such tests are needed so that developers understand in which direction to move, how to make World of Tanks even more attractive to the widest audience.

The audience of the game has long exceeded 100 million users, and judging by the efforts being made to develop the project, this is far from the limit. The example of World of Tanks proves that not only industry giants from the USA and Western Europe can make a high-quality product that is in demand all over the world. We ourselves have moustaches, we just need to build the process competently and enlist the support of the state.