Look at the manual for Falcon 4, are you seriously saying that sh3 was more complicated ? and therefore it was ok for it to be bug filled and incomplete ?
I would say that games have become simpler from a gameplay point of view and shoddy manuals just compliment the shoddy workmanship on the games.
There are some games that come out complete and relativly bug free these days, but publishers only care about money and most developers dont have the power to say NO.
The only part that has become more complicated is the graphics and other developers and thier publishers have proven you can have both.
Ubisoft doesnt have a good reputation when it comes to "finished" games with good manuals.

As for manuals needing to change at the last minute...this shows a lack of planing and poor quality employees doing the job. Why ? Money..and making more of it.

Games you are refering to were not big money makers "back in the day" they were made with *mostly* loving care to do the best with the limited (computing)recources they had to play with. Nowdays there are recources to burn and efficent code written to the best it can be is a hard thing to find.

Sh3's crappy manual is imo mainly due to the fact that there is no "game" to document because it was never completed anywhere near what it could and should have been.

Its all about cutting costs to improve the bottom line, blame rests solely with the Corporation.

That reminds me of the Grand Theft Auto Games. :hmm:

BTW: Whats a PDF?

PDF = Portable Document File

I don't think I've ever seen a bigger manual (printed or electronic) than the one for Falcon 4. Too have something like that for an SH game would be insane, but cool. Besides, for the people who don't want to kill their own printers to print it out, take the file to Kinkos or something. I don't know how they charge for printing documents, but they laminated my SHIII map for under $5.

What part?

Interesting subject though... even though they are extremely differente types of games that belong to completely diferent categories, lets compare SHIII to San Andreas:

Music:
San Andreas has hours of legaly licensed music from very very famous artists from the era that they're representing... SHIII stock comes with a couple of minutes worth of speech in the gramaphone.

Map:
They both come with a nifty map, but as a personal opinion, I think the San Andreas' one had a little more info on it

Instrunction manual:
SHIII is by nature a sim game that demands a thick instructional book, but instead comes with a very poor booklet, printed with a very limited number of colours, talks about features that aren't in the game, and is in general of mediocre quality. San Andreas is by nature a very simple game to play, which would demand only a very simple flyer for instructions, but instead comes with a high quality hard cover book printed with very nice colors that not only teaches you the very simple controls of the game, but also includes A LOT of extras (like tourist information, and fake advertisments) that realy help to inmerse more into the game and further ease your mind into beleiving that San Andreas does indeed exist.

Gameplay:
SHIII comes with a handfull of single player missions, and an interactive campaign that, although very heavily scripted to include lots and lots of special events, to the common player feels like nothing more than a bunch of go to square XY and sit there for 24hrs missions that never ever end (worst of all, most players find nothing in said patrol squares and then dedicate their time to freelancing). You can either play the single missions or the campaing, but thay're in no way conected or related to each other. San Andreas, on the other hand, has a "big picture campaign" type of story that includes very different types of missions to perform, from ilegal street racing, to robbing banks, to buying real estate and coletcting rent, to doing hit jobs on oponents, to fighting gang wars for turf, to... well basicaly any out of the law experience that you can think of. As a bonus, there are many many side missions that you can acomplish, independantly from the main story, but that will reward you in their own way. These are basicaly the equivalent of SHIII single players missions, but are presented in an integrated fashion within the main game, and don't feel like two distinct and separate things.

In game graphs and textures:
Take a look at the dials in stock SHIII... do we need to go any further?. San Andreas may not be the greatest when it comes to graphics, but come on SHIII!!! gauges that can't even be read?!?!

Voice acting and sound efects:
SHIII comes with terrible voice acting and sound efects, so much that a majority of us download mods to fix this (and the textures as well). San Andreas has so-so sound efects that do the job in a suficiently adequate way, but also includes excelent voice acting from professional and very famous holywood actors.

Player interface:
SHIII plays out in mainly in first person view, but the options to be done in said view are limited at best... you end up using abstract guis for most of your chores. San Andreas plays out mainly in third person view (an inferior choice to begin with) but prooves itself to be highly interactive and ituitive, making the player think that the little guy in the screen can do almost anything in his virtual world.

Maturity of gameplay:
SHIII, although basicaly a war game, feels that it needs to protect the audience from themselves, and white washes most every aspect of the game, such as no sailors on the enemy ship's (your not hurting anyone, your just blowing up empty ships), or no swastikas or nazi logos anywhere (you're not realy playing for the bad guys). Ubisoft seems very preocupied with not hurting anyone's feelings with any type of controversial matter. This earns the game a "Teen" rating even though we all know that today's teens don't have the patience or interest necesary for this types of games, whereas we (the loyal gamers of this genre) feel cheated out of some of the aspects that we were looking for in the SHIII experience when we first decided to buy the game.
Meanwhile, San Andreas, even though it's just a Pop-culture shoot em up of sorts, recognizes that today's gaming market isn't made out of just helpless kids, and chooses to target a mature adult audience head on, with a product that involves touchy subjects such as crime, violence, police corruption, ilegal street racing, drugs, murder and sex. They don't care that by doing that they'll earn a rating of "Mature" that will basicaly cut them off from a big part of the market, as long as they make a product that will apeal to their intended audience: Adults... If you feel like it's too violent or crude for you, don't worry, your not the audience that the game was intended for (don't play it)

I guess I could go on and on, and I'm sure that many won't agree with my sometimes incorrect opinions, but it all boils down to this:

One company decided to take a smart subject, and do a rush job on it, cutting corners on most anything that they could think of trying to save a buck, and chose to have one outsanding feature as their selling point (the graphics), trying to make a profit by limiting their potential losses.

The other company took a very dumb pop-culture instant gratification visceral experience, and decided to do it in a big way, spending incredible amounts of money on it, risking heavy economical losses in the process, by choosing not to spend heavily on just one big selling feature, but on many many features that would make the game cooler but costed a fortune to implement (can you imagine what the famous actors got payed for their voices, when they could've just as easily used unknown voice talent?)

Who came out on top? :|\\

1. Falcon 4 was a fiasco that, simply put, didn't work, was dumped on the market in an appalling condition, was never made to work by its manufacturers, and IIRC was only salvaged after years of work by hobbyists working on an illegally leaked copy of the source code - do you really want to hold up F4 as an example of good software development/documentation practices?

Silent Hunter III is in a lot better shape than F4 was.

2. Welcome to the real world, corporations have a LEGAL OBLIGATION to maximise profits, if you don't like their products, don't buy them.

Falcon 4 was way way way more complicated than SH3, at least they attempted to make a Simulator, and they didnt fail in the manual department either. I never said Falcon4 was released bug free I was only using it for the manual side of things.
When I mentioned "Other Developers" a little further down I was not refering to F4 anymore, sorry if this confused.
I disagree that Sh3 was released in better condition tho, I think more work went into F4 despite its short comings.

Other developers/publishers (and I dont mean F4 in this part either) have proven that thier "Legal Obligation" can still be achieved without resorting to destroying thier art, there is no reason for Ubisoft to use the "Legal Obligation" as an excuse unless they were going to sell it at half price, for the half game(simulator?) they released.

There is no excuse or legal obligation for Corps to rip people off, just that so many do because of the wording chosen and its disgusting practise.

and for what its worth...I will buy sh4 if its another rush job I wont be getting 5, I give them a chance or 2, but yeah I vote with my wallet for all the good it does (very little)

Sh3 was a waste of some beautifull 3d models.

I know the "no ability to patch"-part, but I don't understand what you mean with "games being a lot simpler". X-Com UFO Defence aka UFO Enemy Unknown was anything but simple.

Because? If they could do it right before, why can't they now?

Excuse me, but didn't it occur to you that maybe GTA came out on top because the genre had a bigger following than the submarine sim genre has?

That's not even an argument, just a personal attack. You might as well cry "OMG u're teh ignorant so Im not talkin 2 u!!1". Please address what he has to write instead of just calling him "ignorant".

I have no idea what kind of "legal obligation" you are talking about here. Please enlighten me.

If you ask me, companies and corporations have an ethical obligation to make their products as good as possible.

Nor do I like this "argument". It addressed nothing, justifies nothing, and pretty much is just a way to avoid the whole discussion.

here here :yep:. Yesterday's games may seem simple now, but try to program one for yourself and see exactly how much work it took. It's all about doing the best with what you have at the moment, and today's games seem to fall short for the most part... they don't feel like they're pushing the envelope on technology, they just feel like resource hoghs.

Damn straight :up: . SHIII in particular is not only bugged, it's just plain incomplete. Just one example out of many: it includes sound files that are never used!!! that's not a bug, that's releasing an incomplete product on purpouse!

Your right, it is unfair to compare them sales-wise, however, I was refering more on the lines of: "who gave their customer more than they expected, and who gave their customer less than they expected", as a way of measuring which is the more profesional company.

As a side note, let us not forget that there was a time when the GTA series was somewhat obscure (I never bother to play I, II or III)... It was only when they came out with GTAIII, which was a incredibly vast improvement over GTAII, that the franchise took off. If Ubisoft did the same, making SHIV a vast improvement over SHIII, then they would probably see a very significant increase in sales by the time SHV rolled by... maybe, no? ;)

Yes indeed, and the thing of it is, that succesfull bussines people understand that the way to maximize profit is precisely to deliver a high quality product that "blows the competition out of the water".

Dantenoc, I generally agree with you... though you should know that the exceedingly accusing tone does not help getting your point across.

But you realize you're comparing San Andreas - which is something like the 3rd iteration of the GTA3 game, with long development time, to SH3 - which was the first experiment for its team?!

Likewise, Falcon 4 is certainly a revolutionary product even in its unfinished release form, but it had a development time of how many years?!

Always assuming malicious intentions on the part of the developers is a little bit insulting. For example, swastikas are present in the US edition, while the European ones are devoid of it because some countries - Germany for example - do not allow displaying it in a game.

F4 constantly crashed on most machines several patches after release.

SH3 works, you may not like some of the design decisions, but it worked. F4 was a dismal failure - a dismal failure with a pretty manual is of little help.

and I'm sure that in every case there is someone just like you complaining about the game - it is the nature of the beast, you can't please everyone.

Do a spot of reading on corporations law, a board of directors is required to act (within the law) to maximise the return to shareholders.

The difference is that directors cannot go to jail for being unethical, but they can for breaking the law and not trying to get proper returns to shareholders.

No, it is a practical suggestion - if enough people do not buy the product (ie do not like it), the maker will have to react in the marketplace and it matters little if you 'like' the argument.

Its easy to argue that by releasing shoddy products they are reducing profits to shareholders because people stop suporting the product.
You are arguing that they should be reducing the cost of R&D department by cutting corners, not concidering that final sales far outstrip the saving they make in R&D, they will lose sales if they keep doing it and thats bigger money, after all sales easily pay for R&D and then some. This is where the profit comes from.

I think you are using the Corporate Obligation to shareholders as a poor argument because we are criticising your favorite game. This seems strange to me because our comments are related to making the game better, which is what you want too.

If F4 was a "Dismal Failure" how can you not say the same about Sh3 which crashes to desktop losing an entire patrol for me on several occasions.

Falcon4 is still being played by lots of people because of the complexity of the game and the fact that other people have fixed alot of the problems, even though alot of other flight sims have been released.

Sh3 will be forgotten the minute somthing else comes along with more complexity.
Most likely Sh4 in this case but if they drop the ball again sales will suffer for it.
Im sure they will still get your money though.

I never patched F4 and I cant remember a single crash for what its worth, I thought most of the complaints regarding it were regarding some of its features not working quite right or being incomplete, which is exactly the same problem as sh3. Note I said some. Alot of the comunity work has gone into updating the graphics.

I cant believe you are defending them for being unethical, says alot really, as I said arguing because we are criticising your game of the moment.

Falcon 4.0 had both crashes and a host of gameplay bugs. The campaign, as released, was almost unplayable. The first patch was out within 2-3 days of the release and it made things even worse. I know cuz I was there (and I don't mean on the purchaser side, either).

The problem with your example is that Falcon 4.0 spent so much money in the development stage trying to fix the many problems it had that it ended up bankrupting Microprose, in spite of the fact that it reputedly grossed around $25,000,000 in sales.

JCC

I remember when the 1.08 patch was released and the very next day the entire Falcon 4 team was laid off.