World At War Dev Update: 29 September – 5 October 2026

World At War isn't public yet. This was the week the vehicles stopped feeling like boxes and started feeling like armour.

Part-by-part vehicle damage

Vehicles no longer have a health bar that ticks down. A vehicle's health is how much of it is still attached.

• Hits wear away the parts near where they land, and anything mounted on a broken part falls with it.
• Where you hit matters. Shoot off the barrel and the main gun stops firing. Break enough track links on one side and the track is thrown.
• Damaged armour darkens towards scorched black and turns pitted, so you can see how hurt a vehicle is.
• No more one-shots: crew can't be hurt while seated. Hits damage the vehicle instead, and you only die when it's destroyed.
• Repairs rebuild from debris. The Repair Tool puts knocked-off parts back for free from pieces lying nearby, or uses crates if they're gone.

All 24 vehicles rebuilt

The Sherman went first, from 63 parts to 563: twelve sprung road wheels, a toothed sprocket, 106 individual track links, a turret with a cupola and a .50 cal you can shoot off. Then every other vehicle followed.

• Real suspension: each wheel has its own spring, so hulls rock over the ground, and vehicles tilt with slopes instead of hanging a wheel in the air.
• Tank tracks animate. Tanks climb a 2.5-stud step, and heavy tanks smash through walls and cover with only a slight slowdown.
• Wheeled vehicles steer like cars and get over kerbs.
• Bigger vehicles: tanks are 1.3–1.45× bigger, wheeled vehicles 1.4–1.6×, and the helicopters up to 2×. Bigger parts are tougher too.
• Slower turrets, so tanks feel heavy: a Sherman turret now turns about 48° a second.
• Gun limits: main guns aim between −15° and +28°. Heavy tanks and tank destroyers only reach +18°, so helicopters overhead can punish them.
• Shell types: X cycles armour-piercing, high-explosive and canister.
• Helicopters can lose their rotors. Shoot off a tail rotor and it spins and falls; lose the main rotor and it drops.
• Vehicle aim: a crosshair follows your aim, and a ring shows where the barrel actually points (green on target, orange while turning).
• Muzzle flashes on every gun, from a spark on machine guns to a fire cone and smoke on cannons.

The kaiju, rebuilt

• A new model with about 600 parts: teeth, slit-pupil eyes, clawed hands and jagged back plates.
• A real tail with nine segments that drags along the ground and swings wide on turns.
• Footsteps make dust, a ground ring and a deep thud instead of explosions.
• New animations: a rolling walk, breathing when idle, a hunch before it charges and a rear-back roar.
• The breath attack glows up its back plates before firing, comes out of its mouth, and leaves blue-white fire and scorch marks.
• Smoother: the breath now burns through buildings instead of shattering them into hundreds of blocks, which took the server from about 20 to about 60 frames a second during a blast.
• Its health bar hides when a building blocks your view.

A real city

Inner City was rebuilt to feel like a city: whole blocks of buildings shoulder to shoulder, 2 to 10 storeys plus towers, shopfronts with awnings, rooftop clutter and furnished streets with lamps, traffic lights and crossings. The capture points are now small parks.

Infantry

• First person with guns: equipping a gun or the RPG switches to first person with the game's own crosshair. Right mouse or L2 aims down sights. Sprinting lowers the gun instead of swinging it across your view.
• Scopes: aiming hides the UI. The sniper gets a full black scope.
• The Armoury is open: press K, use the ARMOURY button or visit the lobby counter. Pick your primary, secondary, grenades and armour, and your loadout saves.
• New grenades with their own models and flatter, more accurate throws: Frag, Impact, Anti-tank, Smoke and C4, which sticks to whatever it hits.
• Thermal imaging (N): enemies glow white-hot. It sees through smoke and trees, but not walls.
• The Jack rights overturned vehicles.

Lobby voting

The Play button is gone. A voting station on the lobby wall offers three battles, each a game mode on a map, with a countdown. Step on a pad to vote. When voting ends, two-sided modes let you pick Red or Blue (or let the game balance you), and co-op modes send everyone to one base.

Phones, tablets and controllers

• Every panel scales to your screen and resizes when you rotate.
• On touch, the HUD moves out of the way of your thumbs, and the buttons sit in one cluster around the jump button: a big FIRE button plus Shell, Scope, Crate and Thermal.
• Controllers can navigate every menu, and the hints show controller buttons.
• Graphics setting (Auto, Low, High): Low turns off shadows and other effects and hides thousands of small details. Auto starts phones on Low and switches any device that drops below 35 FPS.

Fixes

• Vehicles would sometimes not drive if you got in straight after spawning them.
• Knocked-off parts no longer launch a whole tank into the sky.
• Wheeled vehicles no longer fall through the map when their underside is blown off.
• Tracks no longer kink out of line at the ends.
• Capture point markers no longer show through walls.
• About 20,000 fewer parts on every device.