Very good review, Neal. This is why I read subsim instead of Gamespot (or many others) when it comes to naval games
One could make a list of items that could be expected in a game with Silent Hunter in the title, and adding a few desired aspects myself it would turn out like this:
- full boat access
- RPG elements
- dynamic campaign
- remaining time periods of the era
- remaining sub types
- wolfpacks
- believable boat handling
- more complex/believable navigation
O.k., so far they focused on adding points 1-3. As you reviewed it, they don't seem to be finished at all. At least points 1 and 2 don't. The crew just standing around should be upgraded with the necessary animations and scripts to control those animations.
RPG elements need to be layed out in a satisfying way, I think it is very easy to just throw in some cheesy cliches - just as they did for now. But that is certainly not the end of the RPG-element, it's rather the beginning.
Points 4,5 I somewhat assume to be worked on in form of an addon. As the dynamic campaign seems to appear all nice any well designed (if I didn't miss anything here) it takes quite a lot of effort to not only introduce the '44-'45 era and more U-boat types, but to also bring it to the same level.
That is what I fear. The game seems to be very unfinished in many aspects. I don't believe we will see any of the last three points on the list any time soon because it takes so much effort to work on the aspects in 1-5.
Especially, now that they _introduced_ points 1 and 2, they now need to _make something out of it_. From all the descriptions it seems that those two aspects are mere stublets for new features and not really fully flegded features themselves.
Points 7 and 8 I added on my behalf. When I play a submarine simulation, I don't go that much for a 'Das Boot'-experience (which is nice), but I would more like to see the actual mechanics of a submarine in full effect, and that includes a more sophisticated approach to navigation - including a non-flat map, needed tools, scripts so that the navigator can deal with this partly. Everything would be better then just zipping around by waypoints with an realtime-100%-true position marker of your sub on the map (well, teleporting wouldn't, but still).
If UBI is really going for 1. an addon and 2. for a game called
'Silent Hunter VI'
then I even more effort would go into updated graphics and such.
So, maybe no wolfpacks again, just the highly needed improvements on the newest features to the series. Or _if_ they would go for wolfpacks, then maybe we would see even more halfbaked features in future versions of the game.
So far, thanks for the insights into the game @all.
Regards, i.
EDIT: One thing I might add is this: the drops-on-the-screen effect looks very nice, but seems often to be very misplaced. I mean if the captain is standing on the brigde (not wearing glasses) where are these drops supposed to be dropping onto ? This effect should really be limited to Binocular- UZO- and Peri-views.
Even inside the boat this effect takes place
