What concerns you most about SHO?

[GoldenRivet]

Video game companies make games to generate revenue in order to create other titles and come out profitable just as any company or business should hope to do.

No matter what business you are in, you produce widgets, sell the widgets for a profit and hope to make more widgets for a greater profit.

Historically, as a video game company you either made competitive, insightful, thought provoking, cutting edge games... or you made total crap. Obviously those companies which made total crap didnt last long... and some of the game companies that made good games were purchased up by the buying power of companies that made *great* games.

of late, some video game companies have greatly modified their business strategy - that is to say that some companies stopped producing and selling widgets for a price and switched to producing widgets and making them available to consumers in such a way that you had to continuously pump money into the widget for it to keep working.

Picture 1980... atari makes pac man available in the home!

"Awesome, Thanks Atari!"

except in this alternate 1980 it wasnt on an atari, it was an affordable arcade console you have to put quarters in to play and every two weeks an atari rep comes to your home to collect the quarters....

"I was going to buy more games with those quarters"

i was around in 1980

i was a kid in 1980

i played games in 1980

i know 1980

im here to tell you... that would have gone over like a fart in a crowded elevator

This business strategy however works well with some games: World of Warcraft has been a cash cow for about a decade. I've never played it myself, the medieval fantasy, ghouls and goblins, dungeons and dragons bit has never really been my thing, but it is popular enough with a large enough group of people that WOW continues to get away with charging a monthly fee for the game

a fee which my research indicates is about $15 per month

assuming you have been a hard core WOW player since 2005... that translates to a game which has cost you almost $1500 not including any money spent on expansion packs, initial install or hardware upgrades etc

obviously some games work well with this type of marketing

other games however... dont

I have been a hard core Microsoft Flight Simulator player since my early Tandy 1000 days way back in 1985.

a bazillion times this computing power is in my jeans pocket now.

for over 20 years, the franchise has more or less defined PC flight simulation to a wide fan base made up of office chair novices to experienced real life airline pilots. The series helped inspire me to become an aviator in real life - not just on the PC.

"Ass, cash or gas... nobody rides for free ma'am"

When Microsoft decided to re-market Microsoft Flight Simulator as Microsoft Flight, a pay to expand / pay to play "game" - the 25 year run of what many consider to be the most successful flight simulation franchise in history - was over.

My fear is that the same may be true with our own beloved Silent Hunter Series.... which could put an undeserved black mark on the face of Submarine simulations as a whole.

Silent Hunter has perhaps been one of the most successful and longest running Sub Sim franchises available. Silent Hunter is now entering its sixth release title - Silent Hunter Online - which is thus far being received with mixed fanfare after Ubisofts failure to complete two back to back silent hunter titles leaving behind a jaded, unhappy and skeptical fan base for the latest entries of the series.

no caption required

In any game which spawns sequels, the subsequent releases in the series simply must offer more than prior releases in order to be successful.

at the time Silent Hunter III was announced, sub simmers have been interfacing with 2D gauge panels, disengaging atmosphere, a somewhat unattractive 3D environment and listening to the voices of our disembodied or invisible crewmen for decades. Part of what drove SHIII to the top of the subsim charts was simple... it changed everything.

literally.

a single changed everything. It set expectations, high expectations. and to the pleasant surprise of subsimmers across the land... in mid march 2005 - those expectations were delivered upon by Ubisoft when the highest rated silent hunter in the history of the series hit shelves.

rich, good looking environment, 3D interactive crewmen, a mostly functional and fairly detailed 3D submarine interior not to mention the various playable u-boats... these were all the ingredients necessary to breathe new and vigorous life into the series. and it worked.

according to subsim.com

"March 2005 - Silent Hunter III is released to wide acclaim and praise. Subsim adds a new server to handle the increased traffic and mods."

"Its true. Seriously... this is my serious face."

Though i do not have data immediately available to support this claim, i can certainly imagine that any data made available would indicate a major leap in new subsim.com forum members and additionally a dramatic increase in the number of individuals who play submarine simulations in the short time following the March 2005 release of silent hunter III.

unfortunately for the series, each of the following releases of Silent Hunter have seemed to be a step backwards from the glory of Silent Hunter III... a glory ubisoft has been thus far unable to reacquire.

Silent Hunter IV and V have both been good indicators that Ubisoft has been hearing the voices of the community... but not necessarily listening to the words.

Silent Hunter IV - we wanted fleet boats in the pacific, we got fleet boats in the pacific.

we also got a long list of bugs, a half finished game, a poor interface and an eventual shut off of support from ubisoft as their gamble appeared to be that the community would make Silent Hunter IV complete through mods. While many improvements have been made over the years, Silent Hunter IV never stepped out of the shadow of Silent Hunter III.

Silent Hunter V - players wanted a fully modeled interior, and more interactions with crew, a more believable 3D environment and more engaging campaign options... we got these things.

but we also got a severely limited number of playable boats by comparison to earlier releases, and the interactions with the crew were made through a very linear story line which developed at an agonizingly slow pace. The crew and u-boat "upgrades" and "special skills" were a poor joke. Instead of more realistic campaign options, we got a static capmaign that would be the same upon every replay of Silent Hunter V... and even the campaign failed to offer the player the full 1939-1945 war years.

Wolfpacks... which the community had been longing for since before Silent Hunter III were still ominously missing.

"Wolfpacks?.... i know nothing! nothing!"

major steps backwards.

Silent Hunter Online is an ever growing speck on the horizon visible from the conning towers of roughly 10,000 subsim.com members daily, many of whom are still frustrated by their experiences of SH IV and V. Needless to say, Silent Hunter Online is under the microscope here and elsewhere.

Simply based on what we already know, some assumptions are fair to make at this point in time.

Silent Hunter Online will be free to play

this unfortunately means it will be pay to win

very very likely a fledgling U-boat skipper will start out with a Type II or an early Type VII U-boat free of charge.

want a Type VIIC/41 or better flack or better batteries? Want a Type IX boat or a better conning tower emblem?

thats fine and well but the odds are at least some of these options will require a paid subscription or a credit card, simply meaning that crew skill upgrade costs you real tangible money.

we can also make the assumption that Silent Hunter Online will be mostly a 2D interface based on screenshots and video we have observed.

after nearly 10 years of 3D explorable interiors, a 2D interface could be a massive step in the wrong direction for the series.

finally, aside from being pay to win and aside from being a huge step back in the interface department... Silent Hunter online is a browser game, much to the chagrin of the hard core elite.

enough hell was raised over Silent Hunter 5 requiring a connection to play, one would only speculate that Ubisoft would have figured out the community has a problem with being online to play its games.

one good thing i can see about the browser format... almost no matter what your laptop or PC physical specs are, supposedly if its got an internet connection Silent Hunter online will probably be playable. this translates to a great deal of portability which gamers like myself who travel almost constantly will appreciate.

will silent hunter online be successful?

or is will ubisoft prove itself insane by doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result?




tell us... what concerns you most about SHO?

[Sailor Steve]

Nothing.

Nothing concerns me about it.

If I try it and it's as un-simlike as it looks like it's going to be, then I haven't lost anything except an hour of two of my time.

If it's fun enough to play, I'll play it.

It doesn't look like it's going to be anything like Rise Of Flight, which looks like a dedicated simulator. For that I'll gladly pay money for more well-simulated planes.

If it was as much a simulator as SH3, with pay-do-download new stuff, I'd go for it. It doesn't look like that's going to be the case, but I'll give it a shot, just in case.

No concerns at all.

[StarTrekMike]

That was a really well written post, it really does reflect many of my feelings on the subject, I think the Microsoft flight reference is apt and I compare SHO and MS Flight often because they share many (rather unfortunate) qualities.

My concern is that this is just Ubisoft's way of saying "This is the way it is going to be from here on out!" I mean, it is not hard to see that they have taken many steps away from the simulator genre and one only needs to look at how they handled the release of IL-2 Cliffs of Dover and pretty much any Silent Hunter since SHIII to see how little they actually care about the simulator audience.

I have had many discussions with folks I know about why simulators went from being one of the sure bets in the PC gaming market to something of a extreme fringe genre where only the most dedicated stick around and we only get a slow trickle of new blood.

The answer is simple, we as simmers are much more aware of our wants and needs than the average gamer, we have years of reading books, looking at data and playing prior simulators so we already know what we want and what we expect, companies like Ubisoft don't want to deal with those kinds of expectations because they require a investment of time and money that they are simply not willing to put forth.

Now, the interesting question is how did it get that way? How did sims go from one of the more popular gaming genre's to one of the least in such a short time? (compare sim production from 1997 to about 2001 and you will see what I mean.)

The answer lies with the publishers, guys like EA (who once controlled the mighty Jane's combat simulation's), Activision and Ubisoft (who owns Silent Hunter, the Lock-on name and a few others) have worked very hard to convince the public that specific genre's are dead (sims being one of them) and they do that because they want two things.

1.) Customers that are younger and more receptive to newer practices like DLC, the free to play concept, MMO social features and invasive DRM practices, us older gamers are not as keen to jump on those particular industry buzzword wagon.

2.) Genre's like the tactical shooter (the original Rainbow six, Ghost recon), the simulator and others have reached a very high level of sophistication and did so rather early, these publishers don't want to invest that much money and time into pleasing the fans of those early games because they can't exploit them like they do with more modern properties or even modern interpretations of games like Rainbow six or Ghost recon (both pale shadows of what they once were.)

Big publishers don't want us around anymore, they tell us "not everyone has time for those sims, we need to try and grab a wider audience that might not care about historical or technical accuracy) without even looking at the fact that simulators are very much a "if you build it, they will come" kind of thing.

Simulators are not dying because nobody wants them, they are dying because these big publishers don't want to make them, not because they are too expensive but because the market already knows what it wants, we know what kind of quality we expect and many of us won't settle for anything less than that.

Many call us stubborn but in reality, we are some of the best consumers in the gaming industry, we don't just buy everything just because, we actually think about our purchases and tend to stick with them longer (which brings me to my final point.)

Guys like EA, Activision and Ubisoft hate the idea of a title that lasts more than a fiscal year, they want to put out sequel after sequel and only add small additions to each, it is good business but bad for the overall gaming market because games are no longer designed to have any sort of longevity, sims tend to gather loyal fanbases that are hesitant to move on to something new if they feel the current version works just fine.

It is a sad state of affairs that is only made worse when companies like Ubisoft sit on properties like Silent Hunter and don't just auction them to whoever might be willing to give it a fair shake, they did the same with Lock-on and yet Eagle Dynamics still said what essentially amounts to a "screw you!" and released a followup called Flaming cliffs (though you still need the original Lock-on disc, thanks Ubisoft...)

Companies like 777 (and the new 777/1C merger), Eagle Dynamics, Laminar research, Chris Roberts with his Star Citizen project and even Fingers crossed interactive (Scott Juliano) with his Rogue system project are proving that the demand for simulators of all types is still high, not in the way the demand for the next Call of duty is high but still enough for publishers to take notice.

In a way, I am glad that big publishers leave sims to smaller, more talented, dedicated and more ethical privately owned developers, they have proved that customer satisfaction is not as important to them as their overall sales.

Still, it would be nice if we could have a larger audience for sims, at least enough to lower prices on peripherals and bolster the sizes of the teams working on sims currently.

Silent Hunter online is simply a symptom of a larger disease and other great franchises have been tainted by it also, just take a look at Mechwarrior online and Microsoft Flight (thankfully a failure).

[GoldenRivet]

Originally Posted by Sailor Steve

Nothing.

Nothing concerns me about it.

If I try it and it's as un-simlike as it looks like it's going to be, then I haven't lost anything except an hour of two of my time.

I have a tendency to agree with you here Steve.

But what if you play it and you find it somewhat enjoyable? enjoyable enough to pay the umpteen dollars a month to play it.

Assume now that you play it with the longevity by which you have enjoyed Silent Hunter III for example

does the gaming experience you had with Silent Hunter Online warrant paying for a modded SH3 5 times over? 10 times over? so on?

obviously a question that cannot be answered at this point

but one statement i can make for sure... in order to be worth the $150- $200 a year minimum it could potentially cost to play this title at any really enjoyable and immerse level - it better be the best silent hunter in the entire series.

Im sure as with other online games... you can pay for 3 - 6 month blocks for a lower rate... but then again, in 2012 i didnt spend more than $100 on video games all year long

seems like a tall order - it appears that the free is the hook, but to be very enjoyable or competitive with other players - there lies the line and sinker... the very reason i sunk a whole 10 minutes game time into World of Tanks and never looked back.

Originally Posted by StarTrekMike

That was a really well written post

thank you

Originally Posted by StarTrekMike

My concern is that this is just Ubisoft's way of saying "This is the way it is going to be from here on out!"

a good possibility that it will be this way from here on out - at least for ubisoft.

Originally Posted by StarTrekMike

I have had many discussions with folks I know about why simulators went from being one of the sure bets in the PC gaming market to something of a extreme fringe genre where only the most dedicated stick around and we only get a slow trickle of new blood.

in the yesteryear of gaming... right up until the late 1990s and early 2000s a lot of imagination was required to play video games of any type, let alone simulators.

video games as a whole (sims included) allow us to go out and do things we wouldnt ordinarily be able to do. Liberate Europe, Invade another planet, fly a 747 from New York to London, build a roman empire.

Simulators require a lot of imagination and patience when compared to a more "arcade" experience and i think a lot of this has to do with the instant gratification generation. we as a society very abruptly moved from one generation who very recently had to mail a letter hand written on actual paper and wait sometimes a week for a response and moved to a generation who has probably never written a letter and instead sends instantaneous communication from one side of the planet to the other. And thats no fault of theirs... they have that stuff now because WE got tired of waiting 14 days for a response from grandpa in Florida.

as people become more accustomed to instant gratification, the patience and imagination required to complete a real time 14 hour flight in Microsoft Flight Simulator diminishes in the players... as does the attention span (if you will) to sit and actually run the numbers, calculate your next move and put the time and effort into plotting an attack against a convoy for example.

Originally Posted by StarTrekMike

Big publishers don't want us around anymore, they tell us "not everyone has time for those sims, we need to try and grab a wider audience that might not care about historical or technical accuracy) without even looking at the fact that simulators are very much a "if you build it, they will come" kind of thing.

completely agree, especially with that last part, Silent Hunter was technical, and became more technical with the mods, but still brought in a large number of players who would have otherwise probably overlooked a submarine simulator.

Originally Posted by StarTrekMike

In a way, I am glad that big publishers leave sims to smaller, more talented, dedicated and more ethical privately owned developers, they have proved that customer satisfaction is not as important to them as their overall sales.

i think the next great subsim will probably be community developed and community backed... If every member of this site donated a dollar, we would already be off to a decent start.

if every member here donated $20 we would have about $1.7M invested in development of a title created entirely within the community.

[TorpX]

Good OP!

... what concerns you most about SHO?

What concerns me about it, or maybe I should say disturbs me, is that it shows Ubisoft is stubbornly determined to pursue their fast buck strategy even now. They seem to have learned nothing from their past escapades, and show little desire to.

If they had invested the sum they've spent on SHO, in making SH4 or SH5 GOOD, both we and they would be much better off.


Sometimes I wish I would win the lottery so I could buy Silent Hunter, and make it what it should be. How much do you think Ubi would want for Silent Hunter Commander's Edition?

[GoldenRivet]

Originally Posted by TorpX

How much do you think Ubi would want for Silent Hunter Commander's Edition?

a lot more than i have in my checking account

[Sailor Steve]

Originally Posted by GoldenRivet

But what if you play it and you find it somewhat enjoyable? enjoyable enough to pay the umpteen dollars a month to play it.

As I said in my earlier post, If it's fun enough to play, I'll play it. It's my understanding that there won't be a monthly fee to play it, which is good because that is something I will never do. Well, mostly not. I'll see how ROF works out when I finally have a computer that will run it.

Assume now that you play it with the longevity by which you have enjoyed Silent Hunter III for example

does the gaming experience you had with Silent Hunter Online warrant paying for a modded SH3 5 times over? 10 times over? so on?

No. If it was a perfect sim that allowed the same gameplay that SHII and Destroyer Command had? Maybe. I'd have to see before I could answer that.

All that said, just from what I've seen I'm already fairly well convinced that it's not the kind of game that will hold my interest for long.

it appears that the free is the hook, but to be very enjoyable or competitive with other players - there lies the line and sinker... the very reason i sunk a whole 10 minutes game time into World of Tanks and never looked back.

No. If the game was interesting to me I might be convinced to pay to have other sub types, but that would be a one-time event. Pay to get goodies sooner? No. I don't care for "competitive" games. Adversarial play? Sure, but not competing against other players on the same side. Not only is that about as unrealistic as you can get, but it doesn't appeal to me at any personal level.

[Feuer Frei!]

Nothing concerns me about SHO. Why? Because i won't play it.
Too simplistic and restricted in development for my tastes. Looks like a game made for 10-year-olds tbh.
Also, there seems to be a general consensus here perhaps that Ubisoft has deemed sub sims dead under the water, we can see that with this latest installment, then why the hell do they persist in producing SHO? I mean really, if there is no dollars to be made in sub sims then why bother?

It's a niche market for one, and two, well, we all know what sort of release states the silent hunter series of games has had.
Why waste precious resources producing more sub sims when we and they know that it ain't gonna make them rich and no way in hell will there be ongoing support for it with upgrades/updates because.........sub sims are no money-makers for developers.

The key to it is if you want to produce sub sims, then you have to have passion! Not a view to milking the cow for all it's worth(making money). Passion!
Let's face it, Ubi has bigger fish to fry then stuffing around with a browser game which is marketed towards god-knows-who. Can't be sub simmers, surely!
Adolescent, puberty blue, pimply-faced teens who have a penchant for raising more than just a periscope. Who knows.

As for bigger fish, FarCry series, AC Series, to name 2.
Yea i realize also that game devs have seperate teams for seperate games being developed in-house.
Still, why oh why bother Ubisoft?

[BigBANGtheory]

The art of a good sim franchise imho is to strive closer to perfection and realism with each itteration. What concerns me is that instead of building on and improving SH we've got something that just completely ignores all that, and thus raises the question will we ever see the light?

You might as well covert Halo into a browser based FPS and release it on xbox as a new a fresh look to the series. It will probably get a solid 3/5 in xbox reviews too as the gaming press is largely bent as hell.

I think part of the problem here is that SHO is being marketed completely wrong, this is not PC gaming this should be marketed towards Android & iOS. Silent Hunter Online (for tablets) and when you look at it in that context actually there is some merit and good work going on. I think they should use the gyro sensors to move the periscope that would be ace

[longam]

Warp
Lack of 3D
Browser based game play

If I was at my old job it would do to pass time......but

[Harald_Lange]

Nothing concerns me either, I have Sh3 & NYGM, what is there to complain about ?

[John Channing]

I'm gonna go with Steve on this one. If it's fun I will play it. If it keeps my interest I will stay with it. Only time will tell.

I can enjoy the Sub in Battlefield 1942.

I can also enjoy SH4, full realism, no map contacts or external camera in an S Boat with no radar.

JCC

[SubV]

They should break contract with Ubisoft and start a Silent Hunter kickstarter.

[vanjast]

My concerns...
It's all ON-LINE... Very bad for client game ownership - nothing beats a CD at the moment. This is just another method of working the clients bank account over when they want too. It's also probably an indication that UBI is having problems with their developer staff - they cannot seem to keep them ??. Not that new ideas are bad, but non-sensical ideas that do not cultivate client 'loyalty'.

That being said, as I mentioned before.. it opens the door for other private developers to provide a better product.

[desertstriker]

you hit it on the head Golden, and startrekmike is right too. I have noticed (heck i am only 20 this year) that my generation is more into the fast action shooters like Battlefield 3 and now 4. I even enjoy these games but they don't call to me like silent hunter 3 does.

This brings me to make this point we (and many others) have called for a SDK kit for SH3 but why don't they oblidge us? i can only imagine they are afraid of the fact we would revive the game and make it what SH5 and SH4 could have been. I point to a source code project called freespace2 open a while back volition released the source code and the game has been updated with really cool modern day shinny graphics and many moders have made their own models for ships.

Unfortunatly i thik Ubi is doing this to see if the multiplayer will revive the genre. and they look to many other games that are successful because of multiplayer. i point to call of duty battlefeild 3 and many more where you can complete the "story" in under 8 hours but then the devs design a multilayer that is more than the story and is designed to be the backbone of the game.

now if you want to know what really scares me about SHO it is what are they going to do to get money from players. yes it is free to play but all games that are F2P have some "hook" to get money will that stick us to basic torpedoes? a little type 2 and to get a better sub you have to pay? to join whatever form of alliance/guild you have to pay to join/ start? or oh you want a new conning tower or something that will be $20, or heaven forbid pay to repair.