There exists a good foundation that will only be improved (probably vastly) by the modding community, personally I like the game but it feels very much like ubisoft deliberately half-assed it for lack of a better term, when the development expenditures started cutting into the 'predicted' net sales amount.
Any developer that loves what he does would flip at this, and I'm sure that some of them did, but you have to understand that they are mostly powerless as to the demands of the monkeys with loudspeakers that call themselves 'management'. unfortunately companies have the business mentality of 'we're in it to win it' which isn't necessarily bad, except when they define 'win' as net profit + being the one and only force driving their business.
Ubisoft's management has made some very poor decisions, but they have a good core group of various studio talents that can manage to produce good and decent games despite the concessions that management demands in order to hit the magical 'net sales market projections'.
Unfortunately this means that a lot of games that could of been 'great' (the later Ghost Recon/Rainbow Six/Splinter Cell/SHV/etc ) have been sidelined to decent or mediocre due to a few key decisions that saved a little time at the expense of further development of things like story/plot/character development/features/background/immersion/etc...since management is more interested in the formula of More Title Volumes = Projected Net Sales +, and is the semi-garuenteed slow road to ubi's continued existence...which seems to be their main focus now as demonstrated by their seemingly endless Sequel grinding, then focusing their efforts on trying to make anything truly new and groundbreaking.
Anyways /rant.
I cant wait for more of our beloved modders to dig into SHV.
