[drmezza]

Hello @AzureSkies, and all the fine people at KFG,


Thanks so much for involving the community in the process of this new game being built. I was an avid player of Janes' Fleet Command and Dangerous Waters, and am currently replaying Cold Waters again.

I greatly support the hard work you are doing and welcome the opportunity of becoming a beta-tester, if you would be open to that. Due to circumstances, I currently have a lot of time on my hands, so please reach out to me (myusername[at]gmail.com) if you feel like you can use my help.



When I did some soul-searching into what naval simulation games I have played and actually spent a lot of time on, two deciding factors for me stood out:


1) realism (or lack thereof);
2) graphics


I was struck by the fact that I even enter and tend to stick with simulation games which have their realism and graphics in order, sometimes even wandering in to non-naval genres: Train Sim World (TSW) and, to a lesser degree: Farming Simulator stand out to me.


I thus end up at my main points w.r.t. the constructon of Blue Water:



Ad 1) Maybe 688i H/K overdid it a bit with their sense of realism (I never bothered with manually plotting target solutions, but the options was there), but: the way the passive sonar waterfall in Cold Waters is solely used for target classification purposes, seems a bit like babying the player. What I'm trying to say is: lovers of this genre are total suckers for realism. We understand certain sacrifices will have to be made in the interest of broader market-appeal, but please, don't dumb it down too much.

Ad 2) This is not true for all lovers of this genre, but it certainly is for me: I'm having a hard time enjoying (naval) simulation games when the graphical realism is not up to speed with the times. I'm not even talking about ray tracing etc., but using a modern state-of-the-art engine (like Unreal) and having us pay the licensing fees for doing so, are a conditio sine qua non. In fact: I don't even care that much about trains, but take a look at TSW on the one hand, and Train Simulator 2019 on the other, and you'll get my point. It's supposed to be a simulation, and these days a mid-range GPU suffices to make a game look awesome. Make sure to let us pay for the privilege, like the devs of TSW do (every DLC comes at a price, but that's allright). We understand you're operating in a nich market, so appropriate prices are part of the deal.


That is all for now. Keep up the good work!



Best,




DrMezza.