My initial thoughts

[GoldenRivet]

my specs

Windows 10 home edition 64
Intel Core i7-6700K CPU
16 Gb RAM
Hard drive 1.5 Tb total
Dual Radeon RX480

now the meat...


I think many sub simmers are accustomed to being captain and using a point and click to give orders sort of interface.

U-boat is not that kind of subsim, and i think it has been fairly open about what it is from the beginning. so there shouldnt be many surprises for those of you who have been keeping up with the news.

What u-boat isnt:

it is NOT silent hunter on steroids, if you think you are going to just press D for dive, C for crash dive, and 1 for ahead slow etc and the crew is going to respond in kind... this isnt your grandpappy's subsim.

what u-boat is:

lets say SIMS 4 has a late night rendezvous with silent hunter 5 and they have a baby... well... u-boat is the product of that union. and for that reason, traditional sub simmers are going to go through a bit of a teething process and encounter some growing pains while they adjust to a new way of playing an old genre.

to say that u-boat is tedious, is a bit of an overstatement - because played right... it really isnt tedious. the tutorial is tedious as hell, but it tries to cover a lot of bases in a short time, actual game play is not that way, but can be in certain situations

During my first sandbox mission, i was tasked with transporting the boat from la Rochelle to kiel for a base change... which seemed a little backwards, because in may of 1941, it seems the transfer would have gone the other way. but i digress...

on the first outing, what one has to realize is that you dont play u-boat as any one character. You are certainly in command of the boat, but in a weird new play style that is going to take some adjusting to.

on the whole, the new play-style, really isnt that different from what you're used to... and here's what i mean:

lets compare to everyone's old favorite, Silent Hunter III et al

diesel engine compartment in silent hunter III, you wanted it to run more efficiently, what did you have to do? Put more sailors and an officer with a specific skill set in the compartment by dragging from their bunks and dropping them in the compartment via a 2D interface representing all the compartments of the boat.

how do you do it in Uboat?

the exact same way.

only difference is, instead of dragging and dropping them in a 2D interface illustrated on a "sheet of paper" on screen... you are moving laterally from one live action 3d view of a compartment to another, finding the officer you need, clicking on him and telling him where to go. meanwhile all of the other activity aboard the boat continues all around you. need more sailors in the compartment with the officer? well, you dont have to drag and drop them, just click the little + or - arrows assigning or removing helpers from a specific officer and you're done... they respond to that que automatically.

same concept... but animated.

a lot of u-boat is tied up in crew management. this is true, but in a good way.

when you are in port, you can visit the recruiting officer to review your crew roster of potential crewmen to join your boat. we used to have a fair amount of "make believe" involved when we played GWX with SH3Commander if Herbert Szhulz was a bit of a hot head, prone to fighting with others at the first agitation... we kinda had to pretend that. If Werner Stiener was a poor farm boy who joined the kriegsmarine to bring honor to his family, you made that up and sort of used your imagination and ran with it. fun as it was... it was ultimately a solitary, lonely experience. even with mods that gave us full interiors and a crew that sort of just stood there like wax sculptures, it all lacked depth.

well, U-boat does that imagineering for us. because it will tell you each person's personality traits in the roster when you click on them... so if you want a boat full of ambitious, dutiful, dedicated sailors... pick them, but they are more expensive, and sometimes, you will end up with a hot headed guy who picks a fight on patrol and has to be ordered to clean toilets as punishment.

yes really - their personality traits all come out in game, during patrol. so the shy orphan who joined the kriegsmarine because he had nowhere else to go... well, he might freeze up in combat and you will have deal with that as an officer in real life would. think of the captain in das boot going for his pistol when Johann loses it during a bad depth charging... yes, that exact scenario can play out, and you might have to shoot little Johann dead if his antics cannot be subdued and it threatens giving away the boat's position.

As for tactics and combat, im still learning my way around the UI my first real encounter was a single merchant carrying trucks under escort, i never saw the destroyer really, but i closed to within about 1000 meters of the merchant at periscope depth.

The attack periscope view offered a very satisfying and - in my opinion - ultra realistic view of the seascape. It took me some time to figure out how i was going to go about the attack but i sank the merchant and came under attack by the escort.

I was forced down to about 220 meters, creaking, groaning no damage from depth charges, the retaliation didnt last long.

in first person view, under the blue lights, crew walking around, going about their various duties it provided hands down the most realistic, real time depth charge attack i have ever endured in a subsim.

having crewmen turn off various machinery to cut noise for example, the tension was palpable. then... we developed a leak in the bow torpedo room hatch and were taking quite a bit of water. guys werent just standing around... one of the crew went to the storage compartment, grabbed some gear, came trotting along and began phsyically trying to repair the leaking hatch. The rest of the crew wasnt standing there blankly either... they had grown up crap to do despite being shin deep in water LOL they were doing their various duties, quite autonomously.

i had one of my officers and two of his assistants bailing water, bucket by bucket then carrying it from the forward torpedo room, to the command room, then dumping each bucket into the bilge, we turned on the bilge pump and the leak was eventually stopped though the water took agonizingly long to get rid of. it eventually flooded over into the bow crew compartment quite realistically.

with all of this going on, it was hard to feel "alone" aboard the boat. everyone had a job to do, they were doing it without being micromanaged, and the goal was to get the boat repaired and floated. We always heard about people having "das boot" repair moments on the sea floor while playing SH3 or SH5 etc... well i used to think so to... but no. THIS is where those das boot moments are.

what the guys who made U-boat have managed to do is create a subsim that brings the u-boat environment to life, and if you're throwing your hands up and surrendering on release day... you're going to be missing out on something that in my honest and educated opinion, has the opportunity to be grown into, developed into and modded into probably one of the absolute best U-boat games ever made

be patient.

i have games that rubbed me the wrong way when they came out.

God knows cold waters gave me fits at first, but i stuck with it. and out of my entire steam inventory... it has the most play hours of any title i have.

I honestly cannot think of a subsim released in the history of our genre that was more deserving of a chance than this one.