Longtime AusGamers contributor and industry veteran, James Cottee, is something of a World of Tanks expert. He's been bombardiering the game for most of its life and was kind enough to share with us a developer deep-dive on World of Tanks: Frontline with input from Regional Product Director, Alex de Giorgio.

Here's a snippet from hi chat and deep-dive Frontline feature:

“1.0 was one of the biggest and most difficult updates we have ever had in World of Tanks, one that was nearly 3 years in the making. Yet even during that launch period we were already focused on the next steps. The reality is you only ever really have a minute to stop and look at what has been achieved before it’s on to the next challenge. That’s one of the reasons we were able to launch Frontline just over a month after 1.0. Frontline was the culmination of a number of ideas and concepts we had been playing with over the past couple of years as well as the experience we gained from Grand Battles (30v30 Tier 10 random battles) or one of the many unique events we have run in the past. As a team we are always looking at offering new experiences built around the high-impact tank battles that are at the core of our game.”

It was a great idea, yet implementing Frontline proved to be a huge technical challenge. “We want the widest number of players to be able to enjoy tanks without needing powerful hardware, and the Core engine which we developed for 1.0 has really helped in this regard. Even so, there were a number of technical hurdles we had to overcome to get Frontline to perform the way we intended, especially with the introduction of respawning and the challenge of potentially having 60 tanks congregate in multiple locations in real time.

Click here for our full World of Tanks: Frontline interview feature.