[FightingSteel1]

Warning...long post!

This post isn't meant to offend or somehow complain about submarine sims, like the Silent Hunter series. I realize I'm posting this on Subsim..., but there isn't a warship sim forum like this anywhere! I've been a fan of a variety of simulator games in my life, and own Aces of the Deep, SH3/4/5. I like sub games, but would love a surface war game.

I have observed that the simulation market has declined in volume of games, but in many ways has streamlined to provide some top notch quality games (like the DCS series, or modded versions of SH4/5). That being said, I can tell that any kind of WWII sim is increasingly a niche market, yet Silent Hunter continues to have releases throughout the 21st century. It has generally kept pace with aircraft sims, while leaving tank/naval sims in the dust. So, Ubisoft has been able to greenlight multiple submarine games in the past 10+ years, but never has anyone done the same with a surface sim.

To me this flies in the face of common sense (IMO), considering that surface warfare is decidedly more "diverse," with a larger number of both ships and factions involved to interest the end consumer. Ships like the Yamato, Bismarck, Missouri (amongst others) are still well known, and continue to be famous enough to interest those not only in the U.S., but in Europe and Asia as well. A surface sim has raw firepower, strategy, and the possibility of replicating some of the famous battles still talked about today.

Yet, those of us that are interested in the rest of the navies of the 20th century have had little to do for a long time. The Battlestations Midway or Pacific Storm games have come out, but those games don't really do anything well and are hardly good representations of the real thing. Enigma Rising Tide was interesting, but the alternate universe world and less than accessible design doesn't do what I'm looking for either. PT Boats was a bust.

It would seem to me that if a submarine simulation will sell, than a surface simulation will sell more (again, my opinion) and would be interesting to both the crowd that would buy a Silent Hunter game, or the crowd that buys other WWII based sims (like IL-2). I believe it would be a more of a sell in the general public as well, given the larger "wow" factor of Carriers, Battleships and Cruisers.

So, rant over for now I guess. I'm just disappointed that Ubisoft didn't look at the game engine, models and just the world that was created already for Silent Hunter and than put together a companion surface game. The framework is there but not utilized. For someone like me, I'm stuck dealing with Battlestations Midway or putting together a older Win2000/XP system to play Fighting Steel again, since new graphics drivers and other things have blown that game out. I have some hope for World of Warships, or War Thunders ship component, but I imagine that will probably just end up being BBs circling each other at turbo flank speed blasting until the other blows up.