hi BBW! :salute:

Well, English isn't their primary language, and map typos can be fixed during the final phase (haha, even though "Galverston" was never fixed in SH3--were they trying to have a laugh on me? :haha:).

One thing I do not understand, how anyone can describe SH3 as "half-cocked"? SH4, yeah, no doubt; pre-patches it had a lot of bugs. But SH3 was as good as any sub game ever was on release... yet it gets lumped in with its brothers SH2 and SH4 as half-cocked :timeout:

I agree with you, Ubisoft's marketing approach has been a complete disaster, and I say that calmly without malice or because someone in the echelons decided to supply information only to CasualGamer.com instead of simulation communities. The end result is the game commercial performance is going to suffer.

Thanks a lot, for this detailed answer, Neal. But you forget, the romanian developers are part of the ubi-machine. This makes the whole thing of judging quite complex. And your personal relationship to some of the devs, lets SUBSIM not getting more objective, even i understand your point of view a lot better.

And they do follow orders, this is no taunt or ranting. Its no mysterious spoken word from a glass sphere, which they are following, right? ;) So, they are not that independent, one would wish to. Which does not mean, i do not believe in passion of their work! How could i be that ignorant. But the target of their hard works fits not the intention many would like to see here. Simply cause of the UBI HQ in their back. If they could have decided on their own, together with some skilled people from here...the SH5 would be mind blowing. No doubt on that.

But the strategy behind and the whole game concept are more or less far from what we all exspected to come, right?

So, one cant blame the devs for beeing unpassioned. But one (can) MUST blame UBI for the result we have now.

I wasn't around for SH1 or SH2 so i can't comment, though I've heard something about Neal having to pay someone to finish SH2....is this true ?

SH3 was released in a very poor state...requiring 3 patches to get it stable. A lot of people complained about starforce DRM at the time.

Sh4 was released in a very poor state too....I lost count of the patches though the last one was in a mission add on which you had to pay for. I have never heard of anyone getting that patch without having to buy the UBoat Addon thingy....please correct me if i'm wrong.

SH5 is rapidly looking like it will be released in an unfinished and/or unpolished state too.. It will also use a controversial DRM protection system.

Given the above history, I don't think anyone can really blame subsimmers for being disapointed with UBI, getting annoyed with UBI and wanting to protest. Human nature is what it is.

That said, subsim.com is a community and I would hate for this community to loose the "ear" of the devs. But how does the community maintain the ear of the devs whilst also recognising the frustrations of its members to UBI, the people who pay the devs ? Its like being stuck between a rock and a hardplace.

I imagine subsim.com wouldn't exist without members so its first allegiance should be to them. Perhapps uniting them behind a more "diplomatic" approach to UBI might be a solution...I don't know.

Alas for me, I think we've had a good couple of weeks of pre-release fun, and hopefully a few more to come to. And once the game is out then the party will really get started :yep:

So lets all have some fun, get annoyed, hava-a-rant, smack the moderators, ride the mature donkey and be good ministers of disorder and mayhem.....but lets all do it together, as a community, and as 'one'.

Anyone for careball ? Rules are simple, we each take turns passing a fluffy ball to eachother in a caring and considerate manner.:salute:

Out of the box was playable but sooo many bugs which caused crashing
Even after a further 3 patches it was still never great in terms of stability or from a savegame POV
And those patches introduced new bugs like the land unit camera bounce

Thats how I found here looking for ways to cure problems

Even if you say SH3 wasnt too bad then why the slide downhill with SH4 ?
And what we are witnessing now with SH5

Yeah I know the Med map is typos - in some cases - but from past experience am not 100% convinced those lil things wont slip past
Galverston wasnt the only one on the SH3 map IIRC - been so long since looked at stock SH3 map tho

To a degree, but please understand: I know what objective is, to friends and strangers. When I review the games, I am conscious of my obligation to the players, my friends in the community like you, to be objective, to be honest. I may soften the blow as compared to other reviewers who adore cheap shot rhetoric, I may state factually that this or that feature is not very good, but I really would not be an honest person if I covered it up or lied about it. And devs understand that, they know where their work falls short (and in a computer game, there is always some parts that they wish they had more time to work on). So, yeah, when I put on my reviewer hat, I'm serious about it. :salute:



Agreed. Agreed! Yes, I think that is correct, but I advocate blaming Ubisoft with the level if dignity that I hope sets Subsim apart from the the old usenet rabble approach. :yep:

The strategy of the game is very different from what I expected. I think like most, I was expecting SH3 2.0; an SH3 with full boat access and wolfpacks, a continuation of the traditional career based simulation. When I learned the scope was narrower and the aim was to replicate a Das Boot experience, I thought, Hmmm... well, let me wait and see before I decide. Hell, I cannot count how many things in life I thought I would not like only to discover how great they were.... like when the girls in Mrs. Peabody's 3rd grade class would flirt with me, I just wished they would leave me alone... :doh:

So, yeah, this was not what I was expecting, and I may not like it. There are plenty of subsims I did not care for. One thing I will say, I hope if there ever is an SH6 (doubtful), they will not neglect the great resource of this community like they did this time.

I believe you. Seriously. I never doubt about that.

So, its the same with me. I also exspected, they would learn from the former feedbacks and create, what thousands of people here where exspecting. But they are ignorant and try to settle a horse, which is not going to run as fast, they hoped.

It does not need some marketing experts, who say "Our collected data gives a clear sight on the market. we need to build this game mainly for consoles. and we need to make it easy to deal with. the campaign is not free, its a story mode. so everybody knows, what to do and the whole family may experience it like a film. this is going to be a great hit! i swear.." to make this game a success. As you simply need to take a look at this genre. Rascal rightfully stated, the players they are targeting (mainstream and console players) mostly do not want such a game. The topic "Submarine Simulation" is mostly interesting for people like us here. So i guess, the marketing management and the head of simulation gaming, will be fired, shortly after they got the first sales data. lol.

And as SH5 wont be a success, there wont be a SH6, unless we make it, through modding SH5...

I don't think anyone of us points our ranting at the devs. I mean, I was one of the lucky ones to meet them, talk to them and I got the feeling that they are as much passionate about the game as much as we are. But I also got the impression that they were on a tight schedule and that they had to decide which parts could make it in before the release and which couldn't.

I don't blame any of the devs. If the Ubi management gave them 1 more year, I'm sure there would be all types and the full war. I'm also sure that if the devs were to decide, they would probably choose another solution than this DRM.
As I wrote somewhere else: I just don't understand why the people in charge don't choose the Windows activation process solution instead. Let the users play the game as they wish, but within the first 30 days, it must be activated ONCE. It would make it much more acceptable for anyone, I would think.

Not quite. I'm not 100% up on all the facts, but the story as I understood it at the time was that the game did have problems, many of which were fixed by a single official patch. What Subsim (with help from others) paid an outside developer to do was rewrite the UBI multiplayer (with UBI's permission) to use the Windows version, which made the multiplayer work a whole lot better.

Other than that, the patch and mods made SH2 into a great game. What couldn't be fixed to make it a good sim was the scripted mission campaign. There were new and better ones written, and it got some random flavor, but that was about it.

While the devs themselves are present and take what we say into account, I think the higher ups at Ubi are losing the "personal touch" with the community. At a large monolithic company like Ubi, everyone has someone higher up to report to. And with a situation like that, the wishes of the "little people" (us!) get lost along the way. I'm convinced that some empty suit in a boardroom somewhere is the one making the decisions on the focus of the game. And Dan & crew are doing their best to reconcile the two, but it comes down to Ubi being the one who signs their paycheck.

I too wanted SH3 version 2.0. I would have been perfectly happy with SH3 with spiffied up graphics and environment, wolfpacks, a more interactive BdU and refined AI. But we shall see.

Of course, this is just me musing, I could be completely off base.

i agree and go one better, when updating windows validates the install by rechecking the registration and this too can be a good model to follow where the game validates on startup then goes offline unless your in multiplayer.

i see no reason (related to the game) for it to stay online the whole time

Irrelevent Neal - this is why you have consultants and English speaking testers. I doubt it would be hard to find someone that can spell country names in English - just find a map, any map. I mean, Lybia?! Heck, even Wikipedia spells it right, lol!

Sure, it may seem minor in the scheme of things, but it shows a distinct lack of attention, especially given that it is a major screen that many people will spend time looking at.

Lack of attention is akin to laziness. So, what other corners have been cut?

BTW, I don't speak French, German, Spanish etc, yet these are all languages used by JSGME. It wasn't really that hard to find people to translate the interface for me. ;)

Not by a long shot.

Hmmm you will see, they are blind like worms.............:damn:
It is an illusion to think that Ubi keeps an eye on things that happend here.
We only can get them on the financial terrain cause thats the first reason why Ubi works out any game.

If we wanne change something we have to work out an commercial strategic concept that they can follow.
The first point in a conceptline of an new SH-Game is, "how we can sell more units".
There we have to interact.
If we are able to create an good logical concept that Ubi shows that this concept will bring them more money, maybe they will open up the ears.

Thats the only way.........

Sorry for my poor english.

Regards

AOTD|MadMax

simple...they need to involve community and make the game be more free of bugs. it would simply sell better.

:know:

I seriously think its time the SubSim community wrote it's own SubSim. We have the knowledge, hell we have everything we need here.

If we pooled our resources we could have it done in 6 months tops. It's gonna take longer than that and an equivalent effort just to get SH5 up to scratch anyway by the sound of it, that's if anyone actually buys it!

So....

Just planting seeds...

We don't have the programmers.

If you want to help with a subsim, speak to the dangerdeep guys.