You obviously didn't try "Railroads", what a disaster and I think Pirates!, though still fun, has been watered down more and more with every incarnation since its inception on the C64. I don't think Sid Meier would be interested in revisiting Silent Service and as for his Microprose compatriot Bill Stealey, he has been working on a semi-sequel to M1 Tank Platoon which also looks like a complete mess.

As for Silent Hunter Online...

Whilst I too am annoyed at Ubisoft for there failure to address many of the shortcomings in SH5 I am willing to give the new game a chance, no it probably won't have a full 3d interior and the quality of graphics of SH 4 & 5, but neither did the original Silent Hunter, Red Storm Rising or Iron Wolves and they were still highly thought of playable, enjoyable games. The worst part for me is that it probably won't be be very moddable and that we wont get to see all of the great endeavours of the Subsim modding community as a part of the new game.

Being free to play will open up the series to those who wouldn't have tried it before. Being Flash based will allow non pc users to play, dramatically expanding the user base.

Yes, addons will cost money (shock) but we are starting at a zero price point and the $40-$50 we would have paid for a retail game will probably buy quite a lot of the available addons. As we are dealing directly with the publisher all profits instead of the usual 25-33%ish will go directly to them, hopefully encouraging further development of the game to include playable surface units etc.

At the very least Ubisoft surprisingly still seems to see some value in the series, some SH vets like Dan has been involved at project inception & the new team will bring fresh energy and direction to the series. Plus it will be a lot harder for Ubisoft to simply wash their hands of an always on MMO game!

Gaming industries are pushing everything online now.Single player is being fazed out slowly but surely.In a real world i have enough interactions with people,so sometimes when i want to relax and pretend to be somebody else i play simulations.It is me time...alone time.Oh money,how i loathe thee

If it's anything like other FTP games out there, $40-50 will get you almost nothing. Perhaps one u-boat and a week's worth of "decent" play. They all say they are "free" but you end up sinking hundreds of dollars into it just to stay competitive. The rest will be endless struggling of xp/coin/whatever grind. Then more grind. No thanks. Silent Hunter is officially dead. Would have been better to just have let it fizzle out with SH5 than what's going to happen with SHO.