[CCIP]

Personally, I also think SH4 and 5 get unfair flak as being 'botched' and 'worse' than SH3 - they were not. People really need to go back and remember SH3 as it was when it first came out. It's just that SH3 came after a long drought and filled an empty niche. I think very few people these days remember what SH3 was actually like when it first came out, and tend to compare 4 and 5 to what it became (largely thanks to mods) rather than on their own merits. That's not to say 4 and 5 shouldn't have been more, but the rumors of their being worse than 3 are greatly exaggerated. But they came at a point when the target market was already saturated. SH4 tried to capture that market with another theater, wasn't a significant technical improvement over 3 (although still an improvement), but that market was so sold on SH3 that many were too loyal to the Atlantic theater to give the Pacific a fair try. IMHO as both a game and a platform for mods, SH4 is far better than SH3. It's only because of loyalty of the fanbase to its predecessor that it never took off. SH5 instead tried to expand the market to more casual players - again, not a terrible idea, and again many good concepts. Sadly money ran out before ambitions, and the design was never really finished, and support cut off early. But as released, I'd argue it was better than SH3. It was just that we came to expect a lot more thanks to SH3, which brought something incredibly fresh to the table that, for all its flaws, still turned out to be exactly what so many of us wanted for years.

Give it a few years for technology to get substantially ahead, and the thirst for a new subsim will come back.