Gaijin Entertainment, developer of War Thunder, announced that one of the game’s jet aircraft, the R2Y2, will soon go the way of the dodo.
A relevant problem with free-to-play games focusing on historical vehicles is that at some point, they run out of real vehicles to implement and start to resort to polluting the roster with a bunch of “paper vehicles” that were never historically built and only ever existed as projects or worse.
As such, it’s nice to see one developer taking one step away from this practice, with the removal of the R2Y2, a “paper aircraft” by Gaijin’s own admission, which derived from the Yokosuka R2Y “Keiun” reconnaissance aircraft, which itself only was built with a single prototype.
The prototype of the Keiun was destroyed in 1945 right after its maiden flight and the turbojet-powered light bomber R2Y2 never passed the stage of a proposal.
Back in 2014, Gaijin turned that proposal into a flyable plane in War Thunder in 2014 since the Japanese tech tree was thin and lacked aircraft to fulfill the role as the first jest were being introduced.
Now things are different, and the Japanese tree can count on many aircraft including “guests” from the Thai Air Force. As such the R2Y2 is being binned and removed from research effective April 30.
Of course, those who already have one or more of its three variations will still keep them. Even having a single research point spent on any of them will allow the player to complete the research (of that specific variation, not all three).
Since Gaijin wants the game to focus on aircraft that were actually built in some form, it has no plans to ever bring the aircraft back in the future.
