Commonwealth ships sail into World of Warships

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It's not often I get the option to field Australian forces in a wargame—apart from Emu War! I guess—but the new Commonwealth tech tree in World of Warships adds Australian ships like the Cerberus alongside cruisers from various Commonwealth nations, including the New Zealand cruiser Auckland and India's Delhi.

The Commonwealth tech tree is part of March's 13.2 update, which also brings a Commonwealth Team Event Pass with a bunch of rewards to unlock, including camouflages and historical commanders Harold Farncomb and Leonard Murray. It's the first Event Pass to replace daily missions with weekly ones.

Next month, World of Warships is getting a Piñata Hunt event to tie in with April Fool's Day, which will see two teams of seven ships compete to sink a special piñata ship—presumably with torpedoes and turrets rather than baseball bats. Piñata Hunt will take place on a dressed-up version of the Hotspot map, and players can win piñata tokens to exchange for camouflages and a commemorative flag.

To celebrate the Commonwealth additions, World of Warships committed to a donation of $AU10,000 to the Australian National Maritime Museum. The museum's deputy director, Michael Baldwin, said, "We thank Wargaming for its generous support. We have, over the past few years, enjoyed our involvement with the World of Warships game by participating in live, online events that bring museum research and objects to new, worldwide museum audiences, such as during the Longest Night of Museums. Gaming provides new ways of looking into our maritime heritage and provides new avenues for storytelling."

Jody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, Five Out of Ten Magazine, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he's written about why Silent Hill belongs on PC, why Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, and how weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.