[Onkel Neal]

Originally Posted by gutted

Co-oping a single uboat (with captain controlled time compression) through a silent hunter style career is the game i really want.

But that's not what wolfpack is, and i'm ok with that. It's just not something that will (or even hasn't so far) kept my attention. It's become rather repetitive already. Cool for an occasional session, but not something we'd do nightly.

Thanks, gutted, for the feedback. Agreed it can be repetitive, although we have a lot more content to come and a lot of other features that will deepen the gameplay. The current version is about 20% of the total game. We have stuff planned that will address the variety of missions, some of it I cannot discuss at this time. I will say that when the Enigma, HF/DF and kurzsignale parts are finished, you will have more hunting options.

We had a lot of discussions about time compression and warping. Initially I was in favor of it, because my time to play games is pretty limited. We examined the mechanics of a Silent Hunter style career and essentially, it is the same thing over and over:

1. the player starts the mission
2. clicks on max time compression
3. watches a sub icon move across a computer screen map of the world
4. waits 2~20 minutes for the game to spawn a convoy ("intercept" a convoy)
5. alerts the player and stops time compression
6. player now makes the observations necessary for the approach.

Spawn a convoy or to "intercept" a convoy is essentially the same thing. Whether the game has convoys in a database and they are generated when the player's coordinates meet the required criterion for "contact" and convoy generation. Or if the game randomly spawns a convoy at predetermined intervals, the player really has no way of seeing this and the perception is the same: our sub is sailing at 2048x times actual speed and we came across a convoy.

When a player watches a sub at max TC zipping across a map of the North Sea and Atlantic Ocean, it's all imaginary and simply feeds the perception that the sub is "in the world". When a player is "hunting" he is simply watching a screensaver until the game spawns a convoy.

If there are radio messages informing the player of possible contacts or map updates that show intel where convoys might be, that does add a lot to the perception that the player is hunting. But it still boils down to the same thing--max TC until the game stops you and says "hey, you just found a convoy". Player decides to investigate a harbor? Spawned enemies, contact. Player sails across the Atlantic to the Horn of Africa? Spawned enemies, contact. Player sails to the US East Coast? Spawned enemies, contact. That's not bad, I'm not saying that. But it is what the games amount to.

With a co-op game, we simply cannot expect 5 players to spend a lot of time looking (waiting until the game spawns a convoy). We sure don't want 5 people to spend an hour looking for a convoy and never finding it. And we made the decision to avoid time compression because that's too game-y for the atmosphere we wanted for Wolfpack. Real time tactics build a lot of tension, real human emotion, and that makes Wolfpack different from Silent Hunter where a guy can zip around a convoy in 2 minutes and replay the same scenario until he gets the results he wants (that's fun too, but a different fun). In Wolfpack, no computer message alerts you "there's a convoy, get ready!" You and your crew find and examine the convoy with your own eyes.

So the current version of Wolfpack cuts out the hunting aspect that involves a lot of time waiting. Because as any hunter knows, there is a lot more time involved in hunting than in finding.