War Thunder, entry by entry

This page sets out what Pioneer Point can state about War Thunder from the publisher's own description, what the sign-up sequence involves, and—at equal length—what this page deliberately does not tell you. It is the entry for one game in a five-game library, written under the same rules as the other four.

This entry is the paid one

Of the five games covered by Pioneer Point, War Thunder is the one behind a commercial arrangement. If you follow the link on this page to the publisher's website, register an account, confirm your email address and sign in to the game, an affiliate program pays a fixed commission to Kalos investing s.r.o., which publishes this site. You pay nothing additional, and no purchase is involved in generating that commission.

Because the arrangement exists, this page is written more conservatively than it would be otherwise, not less. Every factual sentence below comes from the publisher's own description of the game, and where that description stops, this page stops too.

What is confirmed about the game

War Thunder is a multiplayer war simulator that allows battles to be fought using planes, helicopters, tanks and ships. It was created and published by Gaijin Entertainment. It is an online game, which is to say that it is played against other people over a network rather than solely against software opponents.

That is a short paragraph, and the shortness is the point. It is also enough to place the game accurately within the comparison library: four vehicle classes across air, land and sea, published by a studio that also publishes another title in the same library, played online. A reader deciding whether this category suits them at all can make that decision from those three facts.

What four vehicle classes actually implies

Most games in this category commit to one domain. A tank game models armour, penetration and the peculiar geometry of a turret; a naval game models long travel times and shell flight measured in seconds; a flight game models energy, altitude and the fact that being slow is usually fatal. Each of these is a separate body of knowledge, learned separately.

A game offering planes, helicopters, tanks and ships is therefore offering four learning curves rather than one, and this is worth understanding before the first session rather than after it. The practical consequence for a new player is that competence does not transfer. Being capable in a tank tells you nothing useful about a helicopter, and the hours spent on one are not credited to the other. This is a structural feature of combined-arms games generally and it shapes how people use them: many players concentrate on a single class for months and treat the others as occasional variety.

Helicopters deserve a separate mention, because they are the class most often underestimated. A rotary aircraft is not a slow plane. It behaves differently at every speed, it is unforgiving of inattention, and in games that include it alongside fixed-wing aircraft it usually occupies its own part of the progression. Anyone attracted to a game specifically by its helicopters should expect that part of it to be the steepest.

Getting from an interest in the game to a first session involves four distinct steps, and it is useful to know all four in advance, because each one has a decision hiding in it.

Registration on the publisher's website. An account is created on the site rather than inside the game. This is the moment at which any account region or nickname choice is made, and those choices are frequently harder to change later than they are to set correctly now.
Confirmation of the email address. A message is sent to the address supplied and the account is confirmed by acting on it. Use an address you control directly and expect to keep. An account tied to an address you lose access to is an account you will struggle to recover, and this is the single most common cause of permanently lost game accounts across the whole category.
Installation of the game client. The client is downloaded from the publisher and installed. Confirm the publisher's stated system requirements before this step, and check that the drive you are installing to has room for the download, the installed files and the free space the installer needs to work in—three different numbers that are routinely confused.
The tutorial. The first session begins with the tutorial. Play it rather than skipping it. In a game with four vehicle classes and a realism model, the tutorial is where control bindings and basic conventions are established, and skipping it converts the first hour of play into an expensive guessing exercise.

Pioneer Point earns its commission at the end of that sequence: registration, email confirmation and signing in to the game. It is worth being blunt about what that means for you. The commission is triggered by your account existing and being used, not by you spending money, so nothing on this site has any financial reason to push you towards a purchase. It also means that abandoning the process halfway costs this site nothing you need to feel responsible for.

Visit the War Thunder website

Paid link. Paid link, described in full at the top of this page and on the affiliate disclosure page. It opens the publisher's own site, which is the only authoritative source for the game's current terms.

What this page does not tell you

An entry written under strict sourcing rules has gaps, and hiding them would defeat the purpose. The following are questions Pioneer Point cannot answer about War Thunder from the material it is willing to rely on, and it will not guess at any of them.

Price and in-game purchases. This site states nothing about what the game costs, whether it can be installed without payment, what is sold inside it, or any current promotion. The publisher's own site is the place where that is set out and kept current.
Platforms and devices. Which computers or consoles the game runs on is not stated here. Check the official requirements page.
Regional availability and servers. Availability and account terms differ by country, and the game's regional arrangements are not described on this page. If server region matters to you—and for an Australian player it should—establish it at the publisher's site before registering.
Game modes, realism settings and progression. How battles are organised, what difficulty options exist and how vehicles are unlocked are not described here.
Classification. Pioneer Point does not state an Australian classification for this or any game. The Australian Classification Board maintains the record of classification decisions and that is where the question is properly answered.
How it feels to play. This site does not publish play impressions for any game, as set out on the method page.

Checking any of this yourself

The habit worth building is not specific to this game. When a comparison site tells you something about a product, the useful next action is to find the publisher's own statement of the same thing, because the publisher is the party that can be held to it.

For this entry that means opening the official site and locating four things before you register: the system requirements page, the account or support section that describes registration and any multi-factor authentication option, the store or pricing page if you care what is sold inside the game, and the terms that apply to accounts. Ten minutes spent there is worth more than any amount of reading elsewhere, including here.

For the Australian angle specifically, two government sources answer questions no publisher will. The Australian Classification Board publishes classification decisions for games available here. The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission sets out the consumer guarantees that apply to purchases made in Australia, including digital ones.

Category context, clearly labelled as such

Everything in this box is about combined-arms vehicle games as a group. None of it is a claim about War Thunder specifically, and it should not be read as one.

Games that put air and ground units on the same map have a recurring design tension: the two kinds of player experience the match differently. An aircraft covers the map in seconds and sees everything; a ground vehicle moves slowly and sees a hedgerow. Every game in this shape has to answer the resulting balance question somehow, usually through anti-aircraft weapons, spawn costs or restricted air availability, and how a particular game answers it is the thing an experienced player in the category will ask about first.

The second recurring feature is the realism ladder. These games commonly offer several settings that change aiming assistance, the handling model and the information shown on screen. Players often discover that the mode they enjoy is not the one they started in, and that the community around each mode is effectively a different community. If a game frustrates you in its default configuration, checking whether another setting exists is a more productive response than abandoning the genre.

Why a paid entry is written this way

The straightforward thing to do with an affiliate arrangement is to write enthusiastically and hope the reader does not notice the incentive. The problem with that approach is not only that it is dishonest; it is that it produces a page with no information on it, because enthusiasm is not checkable.

The approach taken here is to state the arrangement three times over—at the top of this page, beside the link itself, and in full on the disclosure page—and then to hold the entry to the same sourcing rules as the four unpaid entries. A reader who finishes this page knowing what the game is, what registering involves, and what they still need to check at the publisher's site has got something out of it. That is the standard this site is trying to meet, and the rest of the library is written the same way.