IGN's Silent Hunter 5 Review

[scrapser]

Silent Hunter is a submarine simulation (or was). Up until SH5 this meant simulating a WW2 era submarine in either the Atlantic or Pacific. To create immersion...graphics, audio, random weather (environment), physics, and enemy AI were employed. It's important to realize that the AI for enemy craft (air and sea) can be summarized as a way to make each unit behave to a singular purpose...attack your submarine...almost as if each ship or airplane was a person just as "you" are your "submarine" despite the fact that you have a crew. This is not much different from how FPS games work.

In a FPS game you shoot the enemy and the enemy shoots you until one of you dies or is seriously wounded. It's that simple. The AI is getting better so the enemy can both prosecute you and retreat to survive in increasingly sophisticated ways. But it is still pretty simple in terms of the overall behavior.

With SH5, crew interaction has been introduced and tied to the overall performance of the submarine. In other words, the submarine's ability to do what it needs to do is tied to the crew moral and skill matrix which in turn is affected by how you interact with the crew. This is a big can of worms and nothing like the AI you see with the enemy ships and aircraft or even the AI of the enemy in a FPS game.

I sincerely believe crew interaction is a good idea but I think implementing it in the only submarine simulation on the market demands out of necessity that it be thought through and introduced in increments so it does not cripple the player's ability to enjoy the sim experience. Right now crew interaction is violating one of the principle rules of entertainment..."suspension of disbelief." It's no different than being fully immersed in watching a movie and unexpectedly seeing the microphone hanging over an actor's head or maybe seeing the camera crew and director in the reflection of a window on the set.

So in short, as it stands crew interaction is almost a good idea. It's essentially a work in progress. As far as SH5 is concerned, it is now a submarine captain simulation and the submarine is now part of the background environment...i.e., part of the captain's "world."