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Originally Posted by Sailor Steve
To Justin Prince: that has to be just about the best post I've read on this subject!  I agree with every single point; your negative reasons concerning multi-national campaigns reflects the way I feel exactly. I also like every one of your suggestions, most especially number four: air raids while in base. |
I agree Steve - that was a great post and I too agree with all his points.
Those who don't want immersive simulation with 3D crew members and mobility around the boat - go play SH II - better yet get rid of Windows altogether and revert to DOS - after all it's all unecessary eye-candy, right? <sigh> I am soooooo bored with hearing this tired old stuff from gamers who "don't get it" as regards realism and simulation and who create a false opposition between realism and game-play. It is NOT necessary to say either/or in today's computing environment. A simulation means a simulation of reality, in detail.
Proof? Check out the screenshots and videos of Microsoft's coming Flight Simulator X (10) with migrating birds, herds of moving wild animals, moving traffic, car headlights, real-world dynamic weather downloaded in real time from satellite, specular reflections in cockpit glass, complex shadows, thermals updrafts, airport ground traffic animations and moving trees and cornfields. THAT is the kind of level of realism and immersion possible, demanded, enjoyed and possible in today's flight simulators whose flight models are immesaurably more complex than the hydrodynamic models for submarines and have to be different for every aircraft. I have over 450 aircraft in my current FS9 installation and I am running all that on a 7 year old PC with only just over 800 MB of RAM, an old nVida 5200 128MB GFx card and an Athlone 1700 MHZ CPU, so this level of immersive realism does NOT require an Alienware Ferrari. MS FS9 2004 is already so realistic that you can take a whole course of flying lessons and get a virtual license within the "game".
This is 2006 for goodness sake so let's just IGNORE all these "who needs the future I just want a board game" folk and press for the same levels of immersive realism in Ocean combat simulators that the flight sim world demanded and got long ago. We did it with SH III which, for all its faults, was a really massive upgrade from SH II, because we all stuck to our guns and requested what we mostly eventually got. Let's do the same for SH IV and one day soon we'll find ourselves walking around inside our creaking, humming, ultra-immersive Gato class sub, listening to Tokyo Rose, with asdic pings and crew chatter in the background, off watch sailors sleeping in dark bunks, others sitting on the torpedo racks playing harmonica and joking, fish in the sea outside, trees on the headlands we pass, and wind blown spray whining across the conning tower.