misha1967
02-04-12, 08:47 AM
Sorry, I just have to wax poetic for a bit here. Bear with me. :)
Having been a crazed, grognard simmer since computers got powerful enough to sim anything other than Lunar Lander, I thought I'd died and gone to heaven when Aces of the Deep came out (remember that one?).
Then came the Silent Hunters and things just got better. I thought I'd reached the pinnacle when SH3, after heavy modding because she wasn't much to write home about in her early release form, made it to my computer.
But I found Subsim.com and the most outstanding community of incredibly talented people and it just kept getting better to the point where I finally though "OK, this is it. It just doesn't get any better than this." With a fully modded GWX version of SH3, I was there.
How wrong I was.
Yes, I anticipated eagerly the release of SH5 once the first mentions of what it was going to include came out, but then it was released and turned out to be a horrid, arcade cluster-fnjord of a mistake. Pretty, yes, no doubt about it, but I already had "pretty" with my modded SH3. I just didn't need a "point and click" sub "simulator."
But I was happy still. I had my SH3 which, thanks to the modders here was about five steps beyond awesome already, so life was good.
And then the modders went to work on SH5 as well.
The result, as it stands now, is everything SH3 ever was and so much more. You see, I'm big on "immersion", which is a particularly apt word when you talk about sub sims :DL
And SH5, as it is now thanks to modders, has that in spades compared with even the most heavily modded versions of SH3. Your crew isn't just icons on the screen that you haul from here to there anymore, they're actually fully animated characters that you can talk to. Your boat isn't just a collection of "stations" anymore, it's actually a living, breathing environment you can walk through while listening to their conversations in the background, hearing the radio blaring, the gramophone playing or whatnot. When you have water flooding your boat, you're actually wading through it...
I could go on and on...
You can play it the "old way" by jumping between stations or you can actually walk between them. Gauges work, people talk, it's a living environment.
And that's what "simulation" is all about for me. You live it through the screen.
And none of that would have happened if it hadn't been for the tireless work of this forum's modders (with the help of the devs, I hasten to add). Thanks to them, I can actually pretend to be the captain of a real Uboat without the danger of being killed.
Immersion. I can listen to period-accurate radio, get historically accurate updates on what is going on with the world, I can even spend time on the bridge enjoying a sunset, the list goes on...
Every other sim I've ever played has always had this "let's just fast forward to the next bit of action" factor in there. This one doesn't. I can do that, to be sure, but never before have I had the feeling that switching on time compression might deprive me of something.
That, I tell you, is an accomplishment. And if it hadn't been for the dev team who just wouldn't give up on the franchise while keeping it open to modding and, much more so, by the modders constantly working to make a good thing even better, this would have never happened.
I'm loving every minute of it and I just want to say "thank you" to everybody who helped out turning this thing into a jewel. :salute:
Having been a crazed, grognard simmer since computers got powerful enough to sim anything other than Lunar Lander, I thought I'd died and gone to heaven when Aces of the Deep came out (remember that one?).
Then came the Silent Hunters and things just got better. I thought I'd reached the pinnacle when SH3, after heavy modding because she wasn't much to write home about in her early release form, made it to my computer.
But I found Subsim.com and the most outstanding community of incredibly talented people and it just kept getting better to the point where I finally though "OK, this is it. It just doesn't get any better than this." With a fully modded GWX version of SH3, I was there.
How wrong I was.
Yes, I anticipated eagerly the release of SH5 once the first mentions of what it was going to include came out, but then it was released and turned out to be a horrid, arcade cluster-fnjord of a mistake. Pretty, yes, no doubt about it, but I already had "pretty" with my modded SH3. I just didn't need a "point and click" sub "simulator."
But I was happy still. I had my SH3 which, thanks to the modders here was about five steps beyond awesome already, so life was good.
And then the modders went to work on SH5 as well.
The result, as it stands now, is everything SH3 ever was and so much more. You see, I'm big on "immersion", which is a particularly apt word when you talk about sub sims :DL
And SH5, as it is now thanks to modders, has that in spades compared with even the most heavily modded versions of SH3. Your crew isn't just icons on the screen that you haul from here to there anymore, they're actually fully animated characters that you can talk to. Your boat isn't just a collection of "stations" anymore, it's actually a living, breathing environment you can walk through while listening to their conversations in the background, hearing the radio blaring, the gramophone playing or whatnot. When you have water flooding your boat, you're actually wading through it...
I could go on and on...
You can play it the "old way" by jumping between stations or you can actually walk between them. Gauges work, people talk, it's a living environment.
And that's what "simulation" is all about for me. You live it through the screen.
And none of that would have happened if it hadn't been for the tireless work of this forum's modders (with the help of the devs, I hasten to add). Thanks to them, I can actually pretend to be the captain of a real Uboat without the danger of being killed.
Immersion. I can listen to period-accurate radio, get historically accurate updates on what is going on with the world, I can even spend time on the bridge enjoying a sunset, the list goes on...
Every other sim I've ever played has always had this "let's just fast forward to the next bit of action" factor in there. This one doesn't. I can do that, to be sure, but never before have I had the feeling that switching on time compression might deprive me of something.
That, I tell you, is an accomplishment. And if it hadn't been for the dev team who just wouldn't give up on the franchise while keeping it open to modding and, much more so, by the modders constantly working to make a good thing even better, this would have never happened.
I'm loving every minute of it and I just want to say "thank you" to everybody who helped out turning this thing into a jewel. :salute: