World of Tanks 1.0 goes live today with a whole new graphics engine, reworked maps, and more

Wargaming announced World of Tanks in April 2009 and alpha testing of the Russian version began in September of the same year. The Russian closed beta started at the end of January 2010, and the closed beta of the English version finally arrived in July 2010. While the Russian version was released in August 2010, the English version arrived in Europe and North America on 12 April 2011. Since then, this freemium title was released for Android, iOS, Xbox 360 and Xbox One, as well as for the PlayStation 4 console.

Although it has been around for a long time, World of Tanks did not get any major graphics updates since its introduction. Now, version 1.0 comes with a new graphics engine and much more. Wargaming claims that this is "the biggest update in the history of World of Tanks" and, in addition to the solid visual improvements, the game has been heavily optimized so the minimum system requirements have not changed.

As a side note, I must confess that I played a few matches earlier today, and the game runs great with almost everything on Ultra on my machine with an Intel Core i3-2120 processor, NVIDIA GeForce GTX 750 Ti GPU, and 8 GB of memory. The secret is that I have an old 19-inch monitor with a resolution of only 1,280 x 1,024 pixels, but even this way, World of Tanks 1.0 is definitely a heavily optimized piece of code.

In addition to the replacement of the old BigWorld graphics engine with the new one called enCore, World of Tanks 1.0 comes with a new map and 29 reworked ones that have been around for a while, over 60 unique music tunes, a reworked garage, and many new options that the players will be able to discover themselves.

World of Tanks definitely looks and feels much better than before now, but my personal advice would be to take at least two friends and team up as a platoon, because solo play can be very frustrating. Nothing new under the sun when it comes to massively multiplayer online games, but definitely worth a reminder: no matter how great such a game might be, enjoying it always requires being able to work as a team with those around you.