Quote:
Originally Posted by KeldorKatarn
Seriously I don't see your problem here honestly. The game is free to play. The designers made sure that all the pay-to-play moments are convenience only, you don't need to pay anything to play the game successfully, you just spend more time on certain tasks.
So what is the big cry here all about. Yes, Ubisoft didn't do what you liked them to do most.. fine. But that is no reason to call this game crap before you've even seen it. Our studio is not responsible for Ubisoft business decision nor is our game bad just because you think Ubisoft sucks.
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You're right about the latter part (and thanks for chiming in with the 'other side of the fence' viewpoint, I and I'm sure others appreciate it) - it's not your fault that Ubi made such an arse of SH5, then refused to fix it. And of course you work to the brief you're given, that much is expected.
Some of the ire directed at this game is based off fear of free to play - a fear quite justifiable given the 'grind or spend' mentality of some other F2P games. I soon stopped playing WoT after I realised just how long it was going to take me to get anywhere without spending any money; these games are designed to profit from human impatience. As it stands, we have only your word that payment items will be cosmetic only, and while I'm not questioning your honesty, until the game is actually out most people will take what you say regarding this with a pinch of salt - and rightly so, as these things are often changed during development.
Another part of the ire is directed at Flash games - generally seen as less complex, casual games rather than a vehicle for a relatively complicated sims. It remains to be seen whether SHO can be developed effectively under a Flash framework (remember, your 'effectively' and ours may differ), add in other issues such as browser crash and the general drift away from flash-utilisation in most major browsers and you should expect raised eyebrows, not to mention the annoyance many modders will have on discovering that they can't tweak their game the way they want.
Getting the game 'for free' is utterly irrelevant - what matters is getting a game that lives up to the series' history. What happens if I want to use manual targeting, and someone else doesn't? Do they have an unfair advantage? Will there even be manual targeting at all? What about traffic - will there be unrealistically large amounts of ship traffic to accommodate all these Kaleuns? What about time compression? Ship ID manuals?
These are the questions you need to consider answering if you want people here to 'like' this game. Nobody expects you to defend Ubi, nor fix the mess they made with SH5. However, from the outside, right now, it looks like you're taking the SH series and transplanting it into not only one of the worst game 'engines', preventing any modding, but also into a F2P format that will be resoundingly hated by any remotely serious gamer (and subsimmers are fairly serious, let's face it). Of course you're going to get a negative reaction.
Convince us that your game isn't just another Ubi money-grab. Convince us that realism will have its right and proper place alongside historical accuracy. Convince us that, despite the choice of format, this will be a game that
knows and respects the history of the Silent Hunter series.
Until you do that, few will even give this game the time of day. I've signed up to the beta in the same way bystanders are drawn to watch awful car accidents - I'm expecting it to be a travesty, if I'm honest - but I will give it a decent & proper chance to change my mind, and I will help the devs improve the game if I feel it possible. But given the history, you can't expect people to be jumping for joy at the news that their favourite franchise has just gone the way of APB and other colossal F2P failures.
I wish your dev crew the best of luck - they're gonna need it.
