The latest game mechanic is on its way. Get an exclusive peek at the development of flamethrowers with a glance behind the scenes from BAM1500!

You saw them teased in the Flames of War announcement. You’ve waited to see them in action. Now, they’re almost here.

Flamethrower tanks will officially debut in World of Tanks Modern Armor on Tuesday, August 15th!

The flamethrower mechanic will work best at close range and will be available only on select World War II tanks. The first Tech Tree tank that will be updated with the flamethrower mechanic is one that was historically built with a flame gun in mind: the Czechoslovakian Tier VIII TVP VTU Koncept Medium Tank.

We’ll have a game guide published on August 15th explaining how that vehicle and other flamethrower tanks will work (heads up: you’ll also have a brand-new Premium flamethrower tank available very soon).

For now, we have a special exclusive for you: an inside look at how flamethrowers were developed for the game, from none other than our Lead Game Designer and Friday stream co-host extraordinaire, BAM1500.

Check out BAM’s flamethrower dev diary below!

Flamethrower Development History

We started thinking about the flamethrower mechanic shortly after the Centennial Mark I anniversary event we ran back in 2016. This, of course, was an event mode that pitted players against each other in a 7v7 battle, all in the Mark I tank equipped with short-range flamethrowers. This was very exciting for players, and requests have come and gone, asking if we would ever bring back the event or consider flamethrowers as a mainstay in the game.

Initial development on flamethrowers as part of the main game started in 2020. The first prototype borrowed the mechanics of the Mark I and Monster Tanks, which simulate the effect of a tank being engulfed in flames and taking damage consistently by using just a ton of invisible shells that are fired at the target tank, and we do mean a ton!

This was problematic, however, due to the complexity of all the collision surface detections we had to account for that were causing server performance issues, not to mention client performance issues with all the flame VFX on screen as well.

Because of the results of this prototype, we had to refocus our priorities on other matters for the game (prepping Cold War mode for release, for example), and flamethrower mechanics and development got shelved.

Fast-forward a couple of years, when we were planning new features and unique tank mechanics for 2023. The discussion of flamethrowers was revived! We approached this first by running the same server performance tests we did in the past. With new optimizations and code in the game, we were curious if we still in fact had the same issues.

There was a performance improvement, but it wasn’t significant enough for us to be confident. But the conversation then shifted, as our AI engineer had a potential solution for us: a node-based collision system using splines to interpolate the flame VFX between each of the nodes to give the visual effect of a flame stream.

This solution removed the collision issue of firing numerous shells from our old prototype, and only had to detect the collision of the nodes when they made contact with tanks. There still are a lot of nodes being fired out, but nothing close to the number of shells being fired before. This easily proved successful to client and server performance for us!

We didn't want to just use the same flamethrower mechanics seen by the Mark I or even our Awakened Monster Tanks from the Halloween Monster Mash event mode. We wanted something more historically accurate and fitting to WoTMA that makes sense.

We delved into a lot of reference imagery and video footage of how flamethrowers worked historically and best fitted that look and feel into WoTMA, most importantly making the flamethrowers act like a stream of flames that gives the user more control.

In addition to all of that info, BAM had this to say specifically about the TVP VTU Koncept:

We know you’ve got questions. We know you’re excited, because we are, too. Keep an eye out for our new Flamethrower Game Guide on August 15th, and in the meantime, join us on our Discord for all the latest flamethrower discussion!