Step 1 of 5

Step 1 — What an online vehicle combat game actually is

Before you decide whether to try one of these games, it helps to know what sort of thing you are deciding about. This step describes the category, not a product. By the end of it you should be able to explain, in one sentence, what an online vehicle combat game is and what it asks of you.

The words you will meet

People who already play this kind of game use a small set of words constantly, and almost nobody stops to define them. Here they are once, so the rest of the course can use them without stopping.

Client

The program that runs on your own computer. It draws the picture, reads your keyboard and sends your actions to the game's servers. Installing the game means installing the client.

Server

A computer the publisher runs. It holds your account, decides what happens in a match, and tells every player's client what to show. When people say a game is "online", they mean the client cannot work alone.

Match

One round of play with a start and an end, usually between ten and thirty minutes, with other human players in it.

Tech tree

The map of vehicles a game offers, drawn as branches. You start on the early branches and work outwards. In most of these games the tree is divided by nation and by vehicle type.

Progression

The process of earning the in-game currency and research points that let you move along the tech tree. Progression is the long-term shape of the game.

Grinding

Playing repeatedly for progression rather than for the match itself. The word is not an insult; players use it plainly.

Premium

A paid item or paid account status that changes the rate of progression, or gives access to a particular vehicle, without changing the rules of a match. The detail differs by game and you should read the vendor's own description.

Four things this genre has in common

An online vehicle combat game puts you in control of a single machine — an aircraft, a helicopter, a tank, a warship — inside a shared battle against other players. There are dozens of these games and they differ enormously in detail, but four features turn up in almost all of them.

You control one vehicle at a time. This is not a strategy game where you direct an army from above. You sit in or behind one machine, and when it is destroyed you either wait or take another. The skill being asked of you is handling: aim, throttle, position, patience.

Realism is a setting, not a fact. Most of these games offer several control modes, from a forgiving mode with simplified physics and generous aiming aids, to a strict mode where the vehicle behaves closer to the real machine and the aids are gone. Beginners are expected to start in the forgiving mode. Nobody loses anything by doing so.

The content is enormous and arrives slowly. A mature title of this kind may contain many hundreds of vehicles across several nations. You will see a small fraction in your first month.

It is a service, not a finished object. The game changes. Vehicles are added, values are adjusted, maps are changed, and the client updates itself, sometimes weekly. A game you install today is not the same game in a year. Step 5 deals with living alongside those updates.

Why entry is free, and what that means

Most of the large titles in this genre charge nothing to create an account and nothing to download the client. That is a deliberate business model rather than generosity, and understanding it is the single most useful thing in this step.

The model works like this. A very large number of people are invited in at no cost. Most of them never pay anything, and that is expected. A minority buy something — a paid account status that speeds progression, a particular vehicle, a cosmetic item — and that minority funds the game for everybody. Nothing about this is hidden or improper. But it has two consequences for a new player.

The first is that the game is designed with time and money as alternative currencies. Where a paid option exists to reach something faster, the unpaid path to the same thing is longer by design. This is not a trick; it is the trade being offered, and you are allowed to take the slow side of it indefinitely.

The second consequence is that you will be asked. Store pages, offers and bundles are part of the interface. A new player who has not decided in advance what they are willing to spend is making that decision at the worst possible moment — mid-session, in front of a timed offer. That is why the pre-course checklist asks you to write a yearly figure in Australian dollars on paper before you ever see a store page, and why Step 3 returns to the question in detail.

One caution about free: this course does not tell you that any particular product is free, nor what it costs. Those facts change, and only the vendor can state them accurately. Read the vendor's own site at the moment you are deciding.

Other people are in the match

The other machines in your battle are, for the most part, operated by people. That changes the experience in ways that are easy to underestimate before the first match.

Skill is unevenly distributed, and matchmaking — the system that assembles the two teams — can only do so much. Your first battles will involve players with years of practice. Being destroyed quickly and repeatedly in the first week is the normal experience, not a sign that your computer or your settings are wrong.

There is usually text chat, and often voice. Most of it is unremarkable. Some of it is not, and every game of this size has a reporting and muting system because it needs one. Learn where the mute control is in your first session rather than your tenth. For general guidance on online interaction, harassment and reporting in games, Australia's online safety regulator publishes material at esafety.gov.au.

Accounts in these games have value, which makes them a target. Scam approaches aimed at game accounts — fake prize messages, fake trading offers, links to login pages that are not the real one — are common enough that the National Anti-Scam Centre describes the general pattern at scamwatch.gov.au. Step 3 covers account protection properly. For now, the useful habit is simply this: nobody legitimate asks for your password, ever.

The client lives on your hard drive

This is not a game you play in a browser tab. You download an installer, it downloads the rest, and the result is a folder on your disk that is large by the standards of anything else you have installed. Tens of gigabytes is ordinary for this genre.

That size has three practical effects. It takes a long time to download on a typical home connection, often hours. It consumes a measurable share of a monthly data allowance if you have one. And it keeps growing, because updates add more than they remove.

The client also runs your graphics hardware hard. A machine that is perfectly comfortable with spreadsheets and video may be unable to draw a busy battle smoothly, and the symptom is not an error message — it is a picture that stutters. Step 2 is entirely about measuring this before you commit the download.

Progression, and the time it asks for

The reason these games keep people for years is progression: every match brings the next vehicle closer, and the next vehicle is visible on the tech tree from the beginning. It is a well-made loop and it is worth noticing that it is a loop.

For a new player, two consequences follow. First, the early vehicles are deliberately simple, and the game is at its most forgiving for the first handful of hours. Second, the pace slows. The distance between one vehicle and the next grows as you move out along the tree, which is where the paid acceleration options become relevant and where the word grinding starts being used.

One example of the genre

War Thunder is one widely played title in this category, and it is the one named throughout this course because the link to it is what pays for the site. The affiliate network that operates our link describes it as a multiplayer war simulator from Gaijin Entertainment in which battles are fought using planes, helicopters, tanks and ships, playable on desktop computers under Windows, macOS and Linux. Beyond that description, this course makes no claims about it; where the vendor does not state something, we leave the gap visible.

Mute Spectrum has no connection to the publisher, is not an official or authorised source, and has not been endorsed by anyone. If you want the product's own description, system requirements and current prices, those live on the vendor's site and nowhere else.

Visit the War Thunder websitePaid affiliate link. A commission is paid to MEBAT Distribution s.r.o. if you register and confirm an account through it. Your price is unaffected and Step 1 is complete whether or not you open it.

The worked example, continued

The household in the course example is invented, has no name, and reports no results from any product. At the end of Step 1 it has done one thing only: decided that the genre sounds worth an evening, and written down two facts it learned here — that the download will be tens of gigabytes, and that the game will keep asking it to spend.

Before you move on

You should now be able to say that an online vehicle combat game is a large client on your own disk, connecting to a publisher's servers, in which you control one machine at a time against other people, funded by a minority of players who buy optional items and acceleration. If you can say that, Step 2 will make sense.

Step 1 checklist

Work through these at your own pace. The boxes are printed for a pen; nothing on this site records a tick.

1. Write one sentence, in your own words, describing what this kind of game is. If you cannot, re-read the four common features above.
2. Say out loud which you want from a game: a short session twice a week, or a long-term goal. Both are fine; they lead to different decisions later.
3. Accept in advance that your first week of matches will go badly, and that this is ordinary.
4. Note the two numbers that will matter in Step 2: free disk space, and whatever your internet plan's monthly data allowance is.
5. Decide whether anyone else in your household needs to be part of the decision, and if so, tell them now.
6. Confirm that you have not yet written down a spending figure. If not, do it before Step 3.
7. Check that the computer you intend to use is a desktop or laptop, since that is the platform this course covers.
8. Find the eSafety Commissioner site and note that it exists, so you know where guidance on online conduct lives before you need it.