What have we learned?

[mookiemookie]

These are just some random thoughts that I had while thinking about the state of SH5.

Silent Hunter 3 was built from the ground up. Sure, it had its bugs, and sure it needed some work when it was released, but I don't recall it having serious game-breaking issues. Empty harbors? No biggie - If you're a realism oriented player you shouldn't be raiding them anyways. Collisions with DD's not realistic? Sure, not realistic, but not a game breaker. The TDC worked, the AI was dumb but could be easily tweaked, and life was good.

Silent Hunter 4 was built on top of the SH3 framework - the devs added some sorely needed features. However, this came at the expense of crippling, game-breaking bugs - remember the quick exit to Windows "A" key bug? The stadimeter bug? The torpedo speed bug? Radars not acting like real radars did? The CO2 bug? Broken stopwatches?

Now comes SH5 - and many of SH4's bugs are still present, along with some new ones. The AI is still dumb (planes fly right over me without acknowledging me at all - hell, they may as well wiggle their wings at me for as much as they do about me being there.), the CO2 bug is still there, the stadimeter is still broke and our new vaunted "RPG crew" system has a host of bugs all its own. It's like the mistakes of SH4 have been recreated, and then compounded by a boatload of new bugs.

When will there be a new SH built from the ground up? When will the mistakes of legacy SH titles be washed away. When are they going to throw out the old code and bugs, and start fresh? If you're building a house on a foundation that's all rickety, it doesn't matter what you add to the house, it's still going to be rickety at the core. Instead of going back through two titles worth of bugs to get a feature working, why don't we just start over and create something right the first time?

Granted, I'm not in the software industry. I don't know how development cycles work. I don't know what mandates the project managers at Ubi give the dev team. But wouldn't it make sense to build a stable game to start with instead of trying to tack something on to a base that's flawed to begin with?

I fear we'll never get the chance to find out. Unless there are some miracles performed by patches to come, I think this game may be the death knell for the series.