Developer Wargaming announced World of Tanks: Heat during Gamescom ONL, a new standalone spinoff from the popular free-to-play tank battler where you outfit your tank with customized weaponry and a special pilot before trundling into battle. The studio didn’t share a release date for World of Tanks: Heat yet, but when the game does launch, it’ll do so simultaneously for PlayStation 5, Windows PC, and Xbox Series X with full cross-progression. Wargaming also said it’ll be Steam Deck compatible at launch.
In a news release, Wargaming CEO Victor Kislyi called World of Tanks: Heat the studio’s “bold vision for the franchise.” Instead of piloting realistic tanks from the World War II era and beyond, you take charge of new “creative reinterpretations” of post-war designs and customize them with armor, weapons, visual mods, and other abilities inspired by technologies of the late 20th century.
Each tank fits into a specialized combat role, and you can customize how it functions even further by picking a super-powered hero to pilot it. These heroes have a range of unique combat and support abilities that Kislyi said are designed to “let players enjoy tank warfare like never before,” though the Gamescom trailer didn’t go into much detail about how these powers work or what you can do with them.
Wargaming has kept World of Tanks updated with seasonal events, giant mechs, and other fresh inclusions since the tank battler launched in 2011, but World of Tanks: Heat is the franchise’s first major change since 2013’s mobile spinoff Blitz. It comes at a time when live service game makers are coming up with ways to, sometimes dramatically, reinvent their formulas. Blizzard found success with Overwatch 2‘s Stadium, for example, a MOBA-like mode where you customize heroes with ability augmentations that accounted for more than 50 percent of the game’s playtime in the week following launch. Even Respawn tinkered with Apex Legends recently and came up with Wildcard Mode, which removes the Legend cap for squads and drops looting in favor of more and faster combat.
Wargaming isn’t abandoning standard World of Tanks, though. The studio teased World of Tanks 2.0 during Gamescom as well — a “transformative overhaul” with new Tier XI tanks, a story-driven PvE mode, revamped matchmaking, and hundreds of balance adjustments for existing tanks.
