First Impressions, And A Question

[Sailor Steve]

Okay, as soon as the 'Offline' thread was confirmed , I ordered it cheap from Amazon. I was told to expect it to be delivered any time between November 9 and the 28th. Instead it showed up on Friday the 4th. That's a good start.

So I opened the box, not expecting to be surprised at all, since I follow pretty much every thread on the forums. Put it in the drive and clicked 'Install', and waited. Got it installed, jumped through all the Ubi hoops and looked it over. I got the whole "Uplay" thing about registering and so on. Then I went straight to the campaign, as I already knew there was no 'Academy' or anything like that. Annoyed that I had somehow missed the language selection, I stripped it out and installed it again. Same thing.

What was I missing? The third time of registering and grumbling, it finally ocurred to me to try the Custom Installation rather than the default one. And there it was: The language choice. So I fired it up again and this time even the intro movie was in German. Cool!

Started the first campaign mission, the tutorial, and thought it was kind of cool having someone wake me up to tell me the captain wanted me on the bridge. So I headed for the bridge, tried to climb the ladder and couldn't, tried again and failed, and remembered what someone had written long ago. Sometimes my memory really is a blessing, though I always call it a curse.

Rule 1: Don't look up and try to levitate to the conning tower. Look straight at the ladder and walk into it. You'll automatically be made to look up and climb the ladder. Simple, really. So I got to the bridge and the skipper...ahem, kaleun told me I was making the attack. Some of the interface items were a little hard to figure out, and I'm still not sure of myself after only one simple mission. But I sank the first ship, then said "screw it" and surfaced. Their searchlights didn't frighten me, though they were annoying. The funny part was that none of the crew followed me to the bridge. I made my attack all alone.

I sank the four ships and decided to head all the way back to Kiel just to check out the time compression.

First observation: My six-year-old single-core system actually ran it! Best frame rate was only 20-22 fps, and the bow and stern foam was a little choppy, but overall it works pretty well. It didn't crash during explosions, which SH3 has done on ocassion.

When I got to Kiel just before dawn I was surprised by a rather large German convoy heading out in the early morning fog. Also cool!

So I maneuvered all the way to the sub pen (which didn't even exist in 1939) and proceeded to crash into an invisible wall. No damage done, so I clicked on 'Dock At Kiel' and was told that my mission failed because I was exiting the scenario. I reloaded, and I was in the middle of Kiel harbor, except this time it was raining. So I clicked 'Dock At Kiel' again, and this time was taken to the interior of the sub pen that wasn't really there. That annoys me, but I've been looking at screenshots for over a year now, so I can't complain that I didn't know what was coming. After wandering around the pen for a bit I left the campaign again, and was again told "Mission Failed". But SH4 did something similar and had no real impact on the campaign, so I'm not worried. And I'm also just messing around right now, so I'm really not worried.

Second observation: The autosaves are annoying, especially since they interrupt the gameplay, but I suppose I should be grateful, and I stop and save a lot in other games anyway. Also when I booted it up from scratch again I once again had to go through the launcher again to get to the game. They may have dropped the online requirement, but they really want you to come visit them.

So, my first impression is that while it's not set up to my liking (I know, there are plenty of mods to play with. I'm just pointing out my first impressions) it is actually not "crap", even right out of the box. It's just different. And the interface, while a little jarring at first, is actually not bad, except for all the things that I couldn't find, and I know there are mods for that. It's just not as bad as some people made it out to be. Of course I haven't encountered any of the bugs yet, and probably won't as mods are my next stop.

And now for the Question: You folks who have been playing it for awhile and have sunk lots of ships - does it give any of them names? Dan told me that it would do that, and one of the reasons I wanted to get it is to see about a Ship Names mod for SH5, since I have all the information all ready to go. Bigboywooly once sent me a screenshot of an Editor screen with ship names and information, but I haven't found it yet and am not even sure where to look. Any help in this department would be appreciated. I know that SH4 would do a much better job with names than SH3 does, and I see no reason why SH5 would not be just as good, or even better, but I need to find out how to do it first.