Tried reloading save games as well as starting new campaign and this problem persists. Thanks for the tips about crew mods, I don't like too many mods installed but I'll give that one a go
From reading other posts in the forums it's becoming depressingly clear that there are a multitude of other really silly flaws waiting for me to encounter in this release that, to me, points to the developr having a poor work ethic and apathy. It's not as though the flaws are the kind that are extremely difficult to find (unassigned keyboard controls such as gramophone, radio, depth under keep prior to patch for example). I suspect the quality control department is extremely minimal or apathy runs rampant.
I'm usually forgiving of some flaws in a game release because I'm a programmer myself and know how easy it is for bugs to appear in release code. The flaws being found however are blatently obvious and visible within half an hour of play by players who do not have an intimate knowledge of the game's code. This is the kind of stuff even the smallest QA tgeam should nail and iron out.
There's also the point that this is the 5th installment of the franchise, so you would expect any reasonably competent developer to learn from past mistakes and have its game engine become more stable over time and be relatively free of such silly errors. Sadly this doesn't seem to be the case with this Bucharest-based developer, which is unfortunate because simulation developers (especially naval sim devs) are few and far between.
Some people defend all these flaws by pointing at Ubisoft and claiming restrictive development time deadlines but this is just unfounded guesswork, parroted across threads by lots of posters. Other developers are under the same pressure at Ubisoft and do not have as many silly flaws as found in this series. I hasten to add though that I only came into SH at Silent Hunter 4 (also infested with silly flaws)
I suspect what's happening is that because the SH series is extremely moddable, the developers (and probably Ubisoft) are resting on their laurels and pushing poor quality release code onto the market in the knowledge that they can get away with it by having modding community do all the hard quality control work and interim patching with mods, while they benefit from sales revenue and take their time with 'official' patches. This is something all fans should be up in arms about rather than being apathetic and accepting of it.
I'm also really annoyed at the worthless manual for this game, it's laughable. Features and mechanics changes in SH5 seems to be moving it towards becoming more approchable by novices. This is a good move because a long-running franchise is dependant on bringing new blood into the scene. As long as the game can scale its difficulty to both novices and experts this is a very good thing. However, providing players with a ludicrously worthless manual and equally worthless tutorial is no way to go about making a game approachable with the aim of growing the fan-base.
If there are concerns about the costs of printing large manuals, why not simply have a more in-depth manual on the CD as a PDF file? As it stands, SH5 is just as difficult and tedious to get into for newcomers as all the other releases and the bugs and flaws causing confusion don't make it any easier. This is certainlt eh last of this series that I will spend money on until I see at least 3 or more patches as well as glowing reviews from the community on how the game is at now at its best
