Love Silent Hunter, Hate Ubisoft

[DelphiUniverse]

I love Silent Hunter and I hate Ubisoft.

Ubisoft have good taste for graphics, nice and shiny things. Ubisoft have crappy taste for good quality code, and Ubisoft truelly hate its crowds, more than you can imagine. They would rather crap on your head than give you a cookie.

Beside this, can we really expect SH6, if so I have no expectations to it, because I know it will be just as crappy as SH5 (technically speaking)

[Kapitanleutnant]

Originally Posted by DelphiUniverse

can we really expect SH6

I hope not!

[JU_88]

Originally Posted by DelphiUniverse

I love Silent Hunter and I hate Ubisoft.

Ubisoft have good taste for graphics, nice and shiny things. Ubisoft have crappy taste for good quality code, and Ubisoft truelly hate its crowds, more than you can imagine. They would rather crap on your head than give you a cookie.

Beside this, can we really expect SH6, if so I have no expectations to it, because I know it will be just as crappy as SH5 (technically speaking)

No SH6 im sure.
While there are some really good guys over at UBI romania, (some of which have been active members of this forum) on the whole the company's attitude is pretty stubbon and they generally ignore the indervidual gamer.
SH5 is a complicated one, they experimented with the franchise, but could not see it though within the time and budget allowed.
It was over ambitious I guess.

[Trevally.]

Here we go again


Can we not get a sticky thread with the following polls

Do you hate UBI? - yes/no
Will you never buy another ubi game? - yes/no
Is SH5 worth buying yet? - yes/no
Will it every be as good as SH3? - yes/no
Is DRM gone yet? - yes/no

[DelphiUniverse]

The last year or so all I have been thinking about is 'Open Source'

It's a good thought, but unfortunately the open source community sucks so much on designing user interfaces. It seems like the OSC only know how to make good code. It's like that with most OS games that I have seen, the user interface just sucks so much and this is where ubisoft puts great effort.

So it is a hard one. An open source submarine simulator would be a good thing in all ways that I can think of, but the punishment is that we have to suffer user interface designs done by 14 year old kids who don't even know how to flush a toilet.

If there ever is such a project, I demand the job of designing user interfaces. I know how to do it, how to make it usable.

[Takeda Shingen]

Originally Posted by Trevally.

Here we go again


Can we not get a sticky thread with the following polls

Do you hate UBI? - yes/no
Will you never buy another ubi game? - yes/no
Is SH5 worth buying yet? - yes/no
Will it every be as good as SH3? - yes/no
Is DRM gone yet? - yes/no

I could think of few things more painful that taking that sort of discussion and placing it permanently at the top of the forum.

[Ducimus]

Originally Posted by Kapitanleutnant

I hope not!

Ditto. In all reality, i don't think anyone REALLY want's a SH6 by ubisoft.

If ubisoft was to make Silent Hunter 6, they would most assuredly use SH5 as a base, when they need to start over from scratch and build a new game from the ground up.

Think about it....

Silent Hunter 3 was great, but it wasn't perfect. It had a few unresolved issues of its own.

SH4 was built upon SH3. It retained some of the unresolved issues from SH3, while introducing some bugs of its own.

SH5 was built upon SH4. It retains some of the unresolved issues from SH3, AND SH4, while introducing some new bugs of its own.

SH6? Can you imagine the roach motel that this title would be? it would most likely retain unresolved issues from all previous titles and introduce new bugs as well.

No thanks. Time to let it go, or start over from scratch - which ubisoft will never do.

[DelphiUniverse]

Can we not raise a donation fund for Ubisoft, and we donate money to them to keep a few of their internal workers patching a future sh6.

We can ask that in the ubisoft forums. If we could feed just one or two programmers inside Ubisoft to keep patches coming.

I dunno, it's one option.

Heck, we could also raise a SH5 donation fund too, to have them send out a few more patches

We need to properly advertize the fund on youtube and elsewhere to raise interest.

[Ducimus]

Originally Posted by DelphiUniverse

Can we not raise a donation fund for Ubisoft, and we donate money to them to keep a few of their internal workers patching a future sh6.

We can ask that in the ubisoft forums. If we could feed just one or two programmers inside Ubisoft to keep patches coming.

I dunno, it's one option.

Heck, we could also raise a SH5 donation fund too, to have them send out a few more patches

The problem with that idea is Ubisoft is a Corporation. And corporations exist for only ONE purpose - to make money. Submarine simulations, hell, simulations in general, is not where the money is in gaming these days.
They're not going to spend the time and resources on a nitch genre that will have little return on their initial investment.

Hell, it could be reasonably argued that Ubisoft minimized their initial investment on SH4 and Sh5. Look at how they reused SH3 and SH4 when making SH5. If you look in SH5 files you'll see legacy files from BOTH previous titles. The majority of the drive space used in SH5's installation, is just a needless bloat of resources that arent even being used because they didn't even spend the man hours to clean up the files. They just added to it. Think about that - they didn't even take the time to clean up the files. They did the bare minimum because developer hours equals money spent on production. Honestly, if ubisoft was going to invest into a producing a game, they'll do it on a title that has a much higher potential return.

Take a look at steam's top 10:
http://store.steampowered.com/stats/

See any simulation there? I see mostly FPS's or FPS hybrids.

[JU_88]

Originally Posted by DelphiUniverse

Can we not raise a donation fund for Ubisoft, and we donate money to them to keep a few of their internal workers patching a future sh6.

We can ask that in the ubisoft forums. If we could feed just one or two programmers inside Ubisoft to keep patches coming.

I dunno, it's one option.

Heck, we could also raise a SH5 donation fund too, to have them send out a few more patches

We need to properly advertize the fund on youtube and elsewhere to raise interest.

You aware that the average development cost of modern PC/Console game is an 8 figure number, right? ($27 million is about the going rate )
Anyway Ubisoft have plenty of money to invest in to new projects, they dont need donations. They won't do another SH because of the reason Ducimus pointed out above.

[DelphiUniverse]

It's so strange to think about the times when SH3 came, then SH4, then SH5 one after the other, and it all stopped now? Doesn't sound right. Ubisoft is one among few who release this kind of game, if no other company is doing it, then ubisoft are by definition the only company that actually have cared for subsim. They are not bad but good, its a good company. Blizzard certainly never cared, neither did GasPoweredGames So Ubisoft have been caring in a careless way

Ubi-Care Obama-Care

[Ducimus]

The "rapid release" of submarine sim's, is basically, us.... living in a bubble, or so is my thought.

The name of the series, is no accident. The "Silent Hunter" name goes back to Strategic Simulations, Inc. who published the first of the series.


Silent Hunter was an SSI title, and SSI was acquired by ubisoft. My guess is Ubisoft Romania as we know it, was sort of a legacy remnant of that era, only with newer employee's as im sure the original developers moved on some time ago.

[JU_88]

Originally Posted by DelphiUniverse

It's so strange to think about the times when SH3 came, then SH4, then SH5 one after the other, and it all stopped now? Doesn't sound right. Ubisoft is one among few who release this kind of game, if no other company is doing it, then ubisoft are by definition the only company that actually have cared for subsim. They are not bad but good, its a good company. Blizzard certainly never cared, neither did GasPoweredGames So Ubisoft have been caring in a careless way

Ubi-Care Obama-Care

Yep 3 SH games in 5 years!
For Subsim (or any sim) franchise that is just mental! As far as I know each one sold worse than the last.
Sh3 was a successful franchise reboot and it wowed alot of people,
its success paved the way for Sh4 - which more of the same with better visuals and set in a slighly less popular theatre (for subsimming anyway)
Then SHV.... we all know the story, so i wont repeat it.

What Ubi perhaps should have done with SH5 is treat is as an 'SH3 refresh' and gone for an expanding sim, like IL2 or Railworks, arguably they maybe should have done this at SH4 even.

They could have kept a small team to create paid DLC and and addons (even when inbetween projects.) They could release new ship packs, Theatres of war, playable Subs and even surface ships.
This in turn would have funded additional patches.

Modders have proven that the potentional for any one of last 3 SH games is vast. If you ask me Ubi missed a trick here, they saw the SH3 modding scene explode, they should have learned something from it.

[francho1961]

My greetings to all, Ubisoft is a company and gets games that do not work to see if any of those games are a success and so the saga continues .... Before risking the SH-6 would get an extension as with SH-4 remember .... friends who is a company that only cares about money.
Good hunting commanders.

[Dowly]

Originally Posted by JU_88

What Ubi perhaps should have done with SH5 is treat is as an 'SH3 refresh' and gone for an expanding sim, like IL2 or Railworks, arguably they maybe should have done this at SH4 even.

Should've done it with SH4. More thought should've been on bettering the
stuff INSIDE the subs instead of outside.