Wolfpack vs Uboat -- Differences ? ? Pro's/Cons
 

OK

I have to ask.. What are the differences between the 2 ?

A list would be nice... Any one want to give it a shot ?

They are 2 completely different games

Wolfpack is a multiplayer-only sim where a group of players work together to hunt for enemy vessels. "Co-op Silent Hunter" is the best description for it.

UBOAT is a crew management game wrapped in a submarine theme. "The Sims submerged" would be the best description for it.

Yep 2 completely different games.. BUY BOTH



Wolfpack - Instant action Mission base.. very immersive solo or as designed, Multiplayer Crewed.. all manual..


UBOAT - think Silent Hunter series with a RPG twist .. you really have to keep up with the crew, including shooting the cook now and then.. although most solutions can be AI.. you can manual attack..kinda too.. When you first start it looks a lot like the map and time compression everyone is use to from the Silent Hunter Series.. The Planes are already there with a full UBOAT interior.. radios stations and transmissions from HQ etc.. a very good looking FULL Blown game.. mission can be anything from ship sinking to spy drop off to find lost ships and help other subs damaged to diving for wreckage goodies.. but lots of bugs to start with in their Early Access (more features = more bugs).. I am sure that will change.. NO Multiplayer..


I have to say by content UBOAT has the top spot.. but for an immersive feel on a 1-2 hr hunt.. Wolfpack wins there.

yep...need both...:)

I wish.

The game is currently just a convoy attack simulator, of which you are already near enough to find them. There is no "hunting" for targets involved.

Both games are great but not finished yet. Completly different styles. Unfortunatly Uboat is almost unplayable atm. But really promising. I'd say the best mod ever would be a way to switch to Wolfpack when you are close enough to hear a contact in Uboat then back to your Uboat campaign with updated stat^^ It will depends on the games but if we could get enough info from saved games and edit them maybe. Or a campaign in Wolfpack but doesn't really seem to fit in the game. I don't know. We will see but I hope they will both be finished and polished :-) I love the crew management in Uboat. Having to sleep, repair, recharge, ... is really cool. It adds to realism imo. Uboat is more a campaign solo game while Wolfpack is pure immersion. In wolfpack you are on a mission to attack a convoy. It's really the time when in a campaign you dive to make a sweep and you heard them. It's time to attack on full realism mode in coop (or even lonewolf style)

If wolfpack get a good mission editor, accessible through editable files
+ stats files at the end of the mission.
and
if Uboat makes it possible to edit saved games :

You could pass from one to the other.

That would make that the perfect game Imo.
No places feels like Wolfpack
but full traversal of the Atlantic makes no sense in wolfpack.

By the way : Wolfpack > Uboat (since a wolfpack is many uboat ;-))

It’s patently obvious what the differences are; I suggest you read their store pages and watch a video on YouTube about each and do your own research.

There’s no point asking someone here to spoon feed it all to you because they’re completely different.

One is heavily based on co-op realism, the other is a single player management game.

U-boat is a new game and it's very good.
Wolfpack is a new experience and it's awesome!

Personally i was very excited about both games. And i was surprised how fast i lost interest in Wolfpack. I followed the development over a year and watched a lot of streams after release. I wish, the spark would have set me on fire. The depth of simulation is very, very nice. But it has too many edges. Its graphics are not comparable to UBOAT and the gameplay becomes extremly fast repetitive.



Overall i recognized a deep lack of communication from the dev-team and updated perspectives for the game. Additionally the gameplay is to narrow focussed for me. I like to walk around the sub, manage things, feel the immersion and hunt ships. UBOAT might get all this very detailed sim-feeling from Wolfpack when the SDK is released, but Wolfpack will never get the broad gameplay from UBOAT. So in my opinion Wolfpack is a really nice done simulator, but will loose the race. Main reason is the missing community communication from the devs and nearly no content updates (so far). I cant see, where the game is going.

It's EARLY ALPHA... what we have to 'play' (test really) is a bare bones semi-random mission with early interactive stations.

Read the Roadmap to see what's coming. Read the interviews.

I really hate this aspect of Early Access. People have no patience, and they certainly don't respect the development process. There is so much more to come, and what we have may well significantly change.

You've basically paid to test and give bug reports and watch the development process.

If you're not onboard with that, you might as well wait until full release.

But play testing as each new system and mission is added would really help propel the game to be the best it could be, but you need patience and respect of the process.

Can you give us some ideas on how we can make it a "hunting" sim?

Co-oping a single uboat (with captain controlled time compression) through a silent hunter style career is the game i really want.

But that's not what wolfpack is, and i'm ok with that. It's just not something that will (or even hasn't so far) kept my attention. It's become rather repetitive already. Cool for an occasional session, but not something we'd do nightly.

It already is a hunting sim; the only thing to possibly change is that the grid were supposed to go to, we never need to get there... we could have to hunt in and around that grid, but that would probably mean about an hour plus, of real time “hunting” before a convoy was detected.

Most people wouldn’t be up for that, but having it as a separate mission as an. option would be great.

The only other hunting I can think of is multiple different contacts at range, and some might be ships we can’t attack, this we have to then turn around and go to find the other contacts and see if we can find some to attack.

That would be very cool, but again increases game time.

I definitely however veto any time compression in the game; it would destroy what the game is.

Thanks, gutted, for the feedback. Agreed it can be repetitive, although we have a lot more content to come and a lot of other features that will deepen the gameplay. The current version is about 20% of the total game. We have stuff planned that will address the variety of missions, some of it I cannot discuss at this time. I will say that when the Enigma, HF/DF and kurzsignale parts are finished, you will have more hunting options.

We had a lot of discussions about time compression and warping. Initially I was in favor of it, because my time to play games is pretty limited. We examined the mechanics of a Silent Hunter style career and essentially, it is the same thing over and over:

1. the player starts the mission
2. clicks on max time compression
3. watches a sub icon move across a computer screen map of the world
4. waits 2~20 minutes for the game to spawn a convoy ("intercept" a convoy)
5. alerts the player and stops time compression
6. player now makes the observations necessary for the approach.

Spawn a convoy or to "intercept" a convoy is essentially the same thing. Whether the game has convoys in a database and they are generated when the player's coordinates meet the required criterion for "contact" and convoy generation. Or if the game randomly spawns a convoy at predetermined intervals, the player really has no way of seeing this and the perception is the same: our sub is sailing at 2048x times actual speed and we came across a convoy.

When a player watches a sub at max TC zipping across a map of the North Sea and Atlantic Ocean, it's all imaginary and simply feeds the perception that the sub is "in the world". When a player is "hunting" he is simply watching a screensaver until the game spawns a convoy.

If there are radio messages informing the player of possible contacts or map updates that show intel where convoys might be, that does add a lot to the perception that the player is hunting. But it still boils down to the same thing--max TC until the game stops you and says "hey, you just found a convoy". Player decides to investigate a harbor? Spawned enemies, contact. Player sails across the Atlantic to the Horn of Africa? Spawned enemies, contact. Player sails to the US East Coast? Spawned enemies, contact. That's not bad, I'm not saying that. But it is what the games amount to.

With a co-op game, we simply cannot expect 5 players to spend a lot of time looking (waiting until the game spawns a convoy). We sure don't want 5 people to spend an hour looking for a convoy and never finding it. And we made the decision to avoid time compression because that's too game-y for the atmosphere we wanted for Wolfpack. Real time tactics build a lot of tension, real human emotion, and that makes Wolfpack different from Silent Hunter where a guy can zip around a convoy in 2 minutes and replay the same scenario until he gets the results he wants (that's fun too, but a different fun). In Wolfpack, no computer message alerts you "there's a convoy, get ready!" You and your crew find and examine the convoy with your own eyes.

So the current version of Wolfpack cuts out the hunting aspect that involves a lot of time waiting. Because as any hunter knows, there is a lot more time involved in hunting than in finding.

Correct me if wrong Neal, but while there may not be a "There's a convoy, get ready" message, in reality, Wolfpack just starts (currently) at the next step from such a message and one knows there's a convoy somewhere in the vicinity.
I.e., in SH one gets: A. A convoy reported message then goes to an intercept spot and then B: hunts for and hopefully finds it.
Wolfpack just skips A and goes to B in other words. The B has the same aspects in either game (other than multi or not obviously) ?
Regarding TC, I'm not sure it's any more "gamey" then plopping one's boat in the middle of the ocean with the foreknowledge that there's a convoy already nearby.
But doing the "plopping" is a good time saver idea, which of course, is all tc is too.