SH4 User Manual
 

I have no worries at all that Silent Hunter 4 will go from being a good game to a great game within a few months (after additional patching and modding) but the SH4 user manual leaves much to be desired in my view.

As I think we all realize, the continuation of the Silent Hunter series is dependant to a large degree on SH4 attracting the 'casual gamer' and therefore increasing sales over Silent Hunter 3.

The problem that I see is that the SH4 user manual pre supposes to some degree that you have come to this game from Silent Hunter 3, and the manual therefore doesn't bother to explain a lot of functionality and game play issues in any great detail at all.

Because I purchased a new computer system about 6 months ago, and because I didn't want to load the SH3 copy protection drivers onto my new system, I hadn't played SH3 for quite a while when SH4 arrived at my house. A lot of things are obviously similar in the two games and I was able to remember a lot from SH3, but there were a few things I couldn't remember, and the answers certainly weren't to be found in the SH4 user manual.

If I had been totally new to Silent Hunter 4, I would have fumbled around trying to find solutions to my problems myself and hopefully would have found my way to this excellent Forum, but I can't help feeling that the bug issues we're finding are to a large degree fixable, but the quality of the user manual is not.

I hope the casual gamers enjoy the game enough not to worry about it. :D

I agree, I picked up SH4 since I absolutely loved SH3 although (and im ashamed to admit this) I never played SH3 on more than 30% realism. However Im trying to get that number up now and its quite hard with the limited information given. Good thing I found this site back in the day for SH3 info.

(First Post. Hurray!)

...so much so that they print the SH3 U-boat box art on every page of the SH4 manual. I hope someone got called on the red carpet for that one. Actually, not just for that, but for the entire manual. What garbage.

What art is that??

The dimed image in every manual page in my manual is the exact same picture as is printed in color on my mouse mat that came with the Deluxe Edition. If you look closely in the background there is a sinking warship in the right side. And the coning tower is definetly a US sub.

I got the collectors edition and I have a Balao in the background of the manual :hmm:

I, and many other people, have on each page of the manual the artwork of the U-boat with the depth charge explosion in the background from SH3.

Well folks...Looks like the manual that came with the regular retail version, (which has a glued-in binding), has the U-boat background.

The manual that comes with the Collectors Edition, (which has a stapled binding), has the US sub background.

Wonder why the difference? :hmm:

How about getting B&W manual half the size of US manual?:stare:

The user manual for SH4 is on the verge of insulting. No details on submarine types? No info on torpedoes? No convoy route map?

Who made this game, high school students?

Yep...a rush job..no doubt!

Ubi should have taken a look at the way the original Silent Hunter manual was put together...lots of info.

Put's their's to shame

(I guess they spent as much time putting the manual together as they have the actual game)

Here's the problem as I see it. Joe Smith is shopping in Best Buy and sees Silent Hunter 4 on the display shelf. He picks it up and checks it out. He sees a game where he'll be an American submarine Captain in the Pacific. So far so good. Now he checks the specs on the box. He determines that his system can handle it. He buys it and takes it home.

At home he installs the game and starts to read the user manual. This doesn't take him long because about half the manual is full of pictures of ships which can also be seen within the game.

Joe Smith is a casual gamer and he has never played a sub sim before. He loads a mission. He decides to start in the port. So now he encounters his first problem; the user manual says that he can turn his sub in two ways: Click on the rudders indicator or click on the compass. So his first problem as he attempts to leave port is that he can only see the compass and can't see any rudder indicators. On the keyboard he can see the keys for 'hard to port', 'hard to starboard' and 'rudder a midships'. Nowhere in the user manual does it tell him he can click on the button at the bottom of the compass to show the rudder indicator in order to make directional changes in much smaller increments.

So let's say he manages to leave port having destroyed half the US Navy in the process. Now he needs to plot a course. The user manual isn't very helpful here either, but he manages to place some waypoints. He decides that he wants a totally different course and he wants to delete all his existing waypoints. The user manual tells him to use the eraser to delete individual waypoints, but it doesn't mention that selecting SHIFT and using the eraser will delete all the waypoints at the same time.

These are the kinds of details that are vital to a new player in order for him to enjoy the game and not be frustrated by it.

In my opinion, much more attention to detail was required in the making of the user manual in order to ensure that a new player can really understand what he's doing.

I started with SH3. The poor documentation was my main complaint with the simulation. I had hoped SH4 would have been better. It's hard to believe the manual is even worse. I don't know how anyone could purchase either game and play it without the SH outside community. You need to go to multiple sources of information on-line to get the knowledge. I think this is what UBI relys on, however this has another negative affect. A good hardcopy manual helps prevent software piracy on a complex piece of software. You can find all the information you need to play on-line. The poor documentation discourages new users and encourges illegal copies. UBI looses twice.

I was all for cutting the dev's some slack till I got forcibly retired after 4 patrols in spite of sending at least 20,000 tons to the bottom each mission.

If the next patch dont clean up this mess its time to consider a class action lawsuit :damn: