My initial impressions.

[Lawndart]

My fist impressions (8 hours)

First I need to go back to SH3, when I first got that I played it for awhile and put it down, but for the past several years I kept going back, new mods and the magic hit me.

Like games from long ago, you really could use a lot of imagination with SH3, the atmosphere and the relationships you form with your crew… IT all just started to feel like a really deep experience. In fact I was playing SH3 when I met my wife, but that’s another story.

Now I have SH4, initially I was pretty disappointed… The blurry look, no atmosphere compared to SH3, the home port office looked 1991, the clouds don’t even move and graphics are complete crap… but there is still magic this game because I want to play it now…

But that’s start with the critical stuff. I’m afraid most of the people complaining who have it are being very fair. There are blurry, scaled up graphics, the sound it missing in a lot of places, ships ground themselves all the time and re-spawn and do it over and over again…
The “office” is barely prototype quality. The lack of crew interaction really removes a lot of atmosphere, the repair screen and upgrades screens are missing a lot of content and descriptions are non existent. The crew on boats is neat if you’re up-close in the outside camera, but you never see them through the periscope because of the LOD. No AA… in fact you really don’t have any control over the graphics at all, just some filters. There are other nagging and glaring omissions but I want to move on. I really want the moders pay attention here…

Surprisingly most of the issues above can be corrected but the shear lack of content won’t come from UBI, it will come from the modders.
Unfortunately I don’t think moders can do much about the rendering but the rest of the game? It’s like open source, amazingly modable. The Devs did invest effort in making the whole world map… It’s also of interest that the dev would really like to release the source.

If you hold SH4 to Grey wolves or GXW standards you will be really upset, but if you hold it next to vanilla SH3, and the time it took to get used to that, it will grow on you in the exact same way. Sorry I didn't get into many specifics but most posting here have nailed the details pretty well. And I do want to get back to playing... (no time to figure out how to post the 100 screenshots I took)

So enjoy SH4 for what it is today, it has a bigger heart than SH3 so the potential is enormous.

The box contents are pretty nice, it really is a 2lbs box…

PS and a quastion I havent seen answered was where the life boats come from, they spawn behind the sinking ship so it's pretty convincing.