Is SHIII + GWX What Stock SHIII Should Have Been in the First Place?
 

I'm not knocking stock SHIII at all. I think it was a fastastic sim when it came out and still do. It has set the bar for any and all subsequent subsims and yeah, like it or not, SHIV is going to have to meet or exceed that expectation. That's reality both in a gaming sense and a business sense.

But the original game had problems (both buggy and otherwise) which all of us know about and which has been thoroughly documented. It appears GWX addressed a lot of these concerns. But now with GWX do we finally have the game SHIII should have been when released in the first place?

And now that we have GWX, does the mod lessen the historical impact SHIII had when it first appeared on the shelves?

I'm curious to know what you guys think.

IMHO and only my opinion.... yes. SHIII with GWX has what they did not deliver, and for whatever reason that was.. As with most games the publisher rules when a game is to hit the market, whether it's finished or not. That's also the reason for patches, to fix errors not seen until a game is played by the masses. And unfortunately SHIII never got the 5th patch it needed. To me GWX is part 5th patch and expansion pack for SHIII. The same could be said for RUB and NYGM mods for SHIII. It just depends on what you see that these mods have accomplished. Which to me is a great deal of things corrected and improved upon for game play and eyecandy of course.

Yes, SH3+GWX is acceptable.
 

Acceptable is an important word. SH3 had a great basis and concept but was incomplete and not properly tested. Do you remember the great black obelisk and partical spray nonsense? And too, it's programmers were too action game focused and did not realize that people would play it for hours, not just minutes, and often in near real time. GWX completes what they left unfinished. It is a great compliment and gift to us, the ordinary players, that The Captain and his crew at GWX put so much into making it right. SH3 out of the box was not acceptable, but at least it learned from the fatal failures of SH2 and had a dynamic core that could be made to work.

Thank you Grey Wolves, IUB, NYGM and all the amazing combined work of skinners and modders that presented us with such enhancements to the game.

I disagree, because of one main feature that is still missing.

GWX didn't add or fix what SH3 should have had, which are wolve-packs.
I'm not talking multiplayer, which gives some sort of feeling of being in wolve-pack, but single-player off course...in a fully dynamic campaign.


But I always loved SH3, and do so even more with the incredible GWX-mod! :up:

Not quite right to say that GWX has no wolf packs. There are other U-boats and they come when you call and they do attack. The problem is that there is no AI torpedo which means they attack on the surface with deck guns.

Can't disagree with you people here but I think GT is right on the money with his viewpoint :yep:
SH3 was def 'half baked' but thanks to a small group of modders the game has been improved to such a high standard I only hope the devs of SH4 take stock and notice how this community (and many others) can thrive given the right product.

So to all you mod teams out there..and in particular the Kpt. and GWX team...I leave you with these immortal words from Old Winston himself..."Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few" :rock: Mines a pint :()1:

Salute :arrgh!:

I wish a mod on scale much like GWX could have been done for B-17II. It's a shame the same could not be done. It was a great Sim with so much potential:(

Is SHIII + GWX What Stock SHIII Should Have Been in the First Place?

No. Not even close. The very first time someone said this I started to grind my teeth.

There are a number of things that no mod can address, let alone fix.

1) The sound applications are bad. The whispering mode should only be on when silent running is engaged. As it is it tells you any time you've been detected, even when the crew couldn't know that.

2) The interiors of the subs are wrong. The observation periscope is in the wrong place. There should be a very large housing running through the control room for the attack periscope. There is no helmsman at the front of the control room.

3) The crew management is of course totally bogus. There are no watch shifts. The radio and sound stations should not both have to be manned to make one of them work. The watch officer has to be manually placed on the bridge every time you surface. When engine room crew are too tired to work they should be rotated out automatically by their watch officers.

There are dozens of other things that I don't seem to be able to think of right now, and they will never be fixed without source-code access. GWX is probably a great mod, but it is not "SHIII as it should have been".

Stock bugs that everyone knows about aside.

The GW team,and all modders at that,have done more for this game in terms of patching,fixing,and adding more stuff then Ubi ever did for the game.

Ubi gave us a broken,half finished product and then dumped it without really fixing it.It then fell to the community which took the reigns and did what Ubi refused to do,could not do,or simply did not want do and made this game what it should have been on release day.

With a question like this it all comes down to personal tastes and what you expected/wanted when you bought the game.I expected a Uboat simulator..what I got was a broken arcade submarine game.Now I got what I expected when I first bought the game.So to me..YES..GWX IS what SH3 should have been from day one.

For others the stock game may have been just right for them so the answer would be an obvious no.

I must say having been the person who posed the question in the first place it now behooves me to answer my own post.

I think we now have what SH3 should have been in the first place, thanks to a superb community and the tireless efforts of modders all over the globe. I still maintain stock SH3 was a high bar in subsims when it first appeared...but it WAS a half-finished product. Need we be reminded of the patch after patch that came out? To be sure UBI was pretty fast with these patches, but good grief they must have played the game themselves and knew these problems existed. But for whatever reason the product was rushed to the shelves and we had what some have deemed "a broken game."

Now I'm not certain it was "broken" per se but it was most certainly not polished. Then again few games are nowadays. But, yeah, today with NYGM and GWX we finally have a game that SH3 SHOULD have been in the first place. It didn't have to be so...well, half-baked in the beginning.

As awesome as it was when it came out, it now pales in comparison to what modders have done to it. But I guess, to be fair, this is true of a lot of games.

(It's just that we bubbleheads tend to be a pickier lot. I know I am, anyway.)

Which brings up the second question. Does this in any way diminish SH3's historical impact on subsims? The answer to that, imo, is an unqualified no. With the graphics, the attention to detail and a crew we could manage (okay, I admit made easier after a few mods came on line) SH3 was a trend-setting submarine sim as soon as it was released. And no one can take that away from it, despite any faults it may have had in the beginning.

Eh, my two yen.

Many things that are wrong or incorrect in stock SHIII are hardcoded and unchangeable. That's why GWX didn't correct the errors some complain about. And there's no way the source code will ever be given for them to be fixed. So we have to live with what we have... and GWX makes it as close as it can be for now.

The same thing happened with B17 "the Mighty 8th" as GSpecter knows all too well. We begged for that to be fixed but it all fell on deaf ears. The same will happen with SHIII if a fix is ever asked for again. That's a given we all know, as the 5th patch was asked for. The answer was "it ain't gonna happen, SHIV is more important". Just hope they do SHIV right, right from the start. But IMHO, I don't think that will happen either.

Me too.

HB

Me Three.

To the original question - goddamn no, we would have waited all these !years! for it then - i have been having fun with StockSHIII, Rub in any form and GW1.1 for a long time, GWX is what carries on the torch for me.

A hell of a job.

I can't help to place similarities between Falcon4.0 and SHIII - both were far beyond anything we had when they came out - and both have been taken to unbelivable levels by comunity modders. I'm flying Falcon4.0 on my 8th year now in 87th Stray Dogs, and i can't see that stop anytime soon - Falcon just IS that great.

SHIII has one MAJOR advantage though - it has developers, that imo works with the comunity in ways i would wish for for Falcon. And they continue to develope the product beyond what i had dared hope for - WAY TO GO DUDES.

I agree. The community and modders for the subsim community are awesome. We can never praise them enough, imo.

But I'm curious. Why do so many people believe SH4 will not be developed properly? Is it because of the experience with UBI in the past or what? Jus' wonderin'....