World of Tanks was a bit of a looker for its time back in a day, but it soon lost much of its visual appeal. We pumped up the game’s looks several times by simply tweaking its engine. However, it proved to be a mad race against the technology that was moving a lot faster than we possibly could. The BigWorld engine simply couldn’t keep up with it. By 2014, we realized that reworking all in-game content to deliver better visuals was like shooting ourselves in the foot as it would have caused severe performance issues. We went the other way, and brought client engine development in-house to best tailor it to the game’s needs. It took our graphics programmers three years to bring it to the cutting edge of technology with no adverse effect on performance.

We’re excited to walk you through the improvements that took this long to implement and explain how each new technology redefines the game’s looks.