IGN's Silent Hunter 5 Review

[Faamecanic]

Originally Posted by drtechno

"But no one who buys a submarine game wants to chat with dull crewmembers about their family back in Germany"


THANK YOU ! What was Ubi thinking..

I must be wierd then..... I wouldnt have minded it provided there were MORE than just the one sentance to converse with my crewman about.

Guess you never read Werner "Iron Coffins" or "U boat War Patrol" where the Kaptain of the Uboat got to know his men very well... to include passing on the message personally when one of his crewman had a baby "mit periscope" and handed out shots of beer to all crewmen.

[Heretic]

Originally Posted by drtechno

"But no one who buys a submarine game wants to chat with dull crewmembers about their family back in Germany"


THANK YOU ! What was Ubi thinking..

I don't think the concept itself is bad. The implementation... yeah.

[thyro]

Originally Posted by drtechno

"But no one who buys a submarine game wants to chat with dull crewmembers about their family back in Germany"


THANK YOU ! What was Ubi thinking..

Enough matter to introduce a new submariner officer ...

the Personal and Moral Officer

[drtechno]

Originally Posted by Heretic

I don't think the concept itself is bad. The implementation... yeah.

The implementation is always going to be bad..look at the best RPGs with the largest dialogue trees around.. even they get boring the thrid time through after you have gone through all the options. Its interesting the first or second time through. Then it gets old very fast when you know exactly what they are going to say and when. It just degenerates into 'talk to A, choose dialogue options A, C, B' to get effect XYZ, and the content becomes irrelevant.

Faamecanic: Perhaps you would like it even better if we included the need for the ship captain to eat at certain points during the day, go piss, and sleep, you would enjoy that too? You could even pick out the outfit you wear every day. Perhaps a petticoat would go best for the attack on this naval convoy ? We could call it Silent Hunter: The Sims. Or we could skip the sinking of ships, torpedos, etc. and just chat with the crew all day long about their feelings. Perhaps this should be Silent Hunter Second Life ? These aren't real people, this isn't real life, and we can skip all the day to day garbage to get at what most people want- A good sub sim. As I said above, if the best RPGs with massive dialogue trees get stale fast, then you can't possibly design a subsim with enough variety in there to make it entertaining. And would you really they rather spend the extra 2 months fixing bugs or creating more dialogue options that are (essentially) irrelevant to the actual GAME.

Please tell me that you really care to spend 45 mins clicking through your sonarman's childhood memories, wishes and dreams?? Oh joy. He didn't like it when his mother used to force him to eat weinerschnitzel so that's why he stole Herr Dummkopf's pickles when he was 9. He used his keen hearing to find the right moment to jump the fence. Oh how naughty that little boy was ! That led to an interesting encounter with Frau Aufsnacz that involved an apple, a lightbulb, and a very knobby stick. But thats another story..

[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."

[Rip]

Strange I don't have any eels in the torpedo room after I shoot them. Did he have unlimited ammo on maybe?

[JU_88]

Originally Posted by 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."

Thats a pretty good anology there mate

[Bilge_Rat]

Originally Posted by scrapser

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."

whatever fine distinction you want to put on it, a sim is a sim. Sh5 is a sub sim.

Hitting a target on 100% realism in SH5 is as hard as in SH3 or SH4, which is the real test as far as I am concerned..

[AS]

Hi all,

In my opinion the review is way too negative. Some aspects I cannot even confirm,

-e.g. frame dropping (turn off Vertical Sync in the option menue and SH5 will run smoothly on a modern PC)

- deck gun (it works fine for me. Only bug I discovered is that the man and unman deckgun commands are sometimes confused. Once my men refused to unman the deckgun, well just ordering "dive" does the trick)

- map and rudder: haven´t got any problems here. The rudder keys work fine as do the map tools. Using the old SH interface mod helps a lot

- running through your men: well, I´m glad this is so, otherwise you would always get stuck or forced to walk around those guys, which would be annoying as hell considering the cramped size of the U-Boat

RGP elements: yes, they feel unfinished, but I´m thankful for the approach. I like the idea and I use it just for the fun of it

The AI seems ok most of the time. Strangely, planes do not take any notice of me, even when they are exactly above me.

Don´t get me wrong, SH5 has problems and glitches. But compared to the older versions it´s pretty good. PLUS: I´ve been playing for at least 60 hours now, sometimes I keep SH5 running "in the background" the whole day, and I haven´t encountered a single crash. To be fair I have to add that I´m running SH5 on a new computer with a clean Win7 install.

Just my two cents,

Cheers, AS

[SteamWake]

Originally Posted by Heretic

I don't think the concept itself is bad. The implementation... yeah.

I saw a mudcrab the other day

Pretty good review hard to disagree with just about anything. You can tell he was trying his best to be gracious.

The only 'flaws' I saw with the review was that evidently he could not find his way down onto the deck to man the deck gun and the comment about torps still being in the room after they are all spent.

[scrapser]

Originally Posted by Bilge_Rat

whatever fine distinction you want to put on it, a sim is a sim. Sh5 is a sub sim.

Hitting a target on 100% realism in SH5 is as hard as in SH3 or SH4, which is the real test as far as I am concerned..

You may have missed my overall point but no worries mate. We all have our standards. Nice picture you included by the way.

[janh]

Originally Posted by Bilge_Rat

whatever fine distinction you want to put on it, a sim is a sim. Sh5 is a sub sim.

Hitting a target on 100% realism in SH5 is as hard as in SH3 or SH4, which is the real test as far as I am concerned..

And what is it about those pictures...? Did you want to point at something important???

I guess the review is a bit negative, but not too bad. Using the word "scripted" was surely an unhappy choice, but to be honest, when I saw the first preview video of the new campaign system and explanation, I also was suspecting each one to be set of scripted missions. I haven't seen the developers really explaining what dynamics there is (or showing source examples), and what part of each campaign/force setup, patrol areas etc may be scripted. And how far scripts are designed to dynamically deviate from their plan.

There has not been a good, detailed explanation of so many features in SHV, and whether and how they changed from SHIII->IV->V.

[SteamWake]

Go here... sink x of y before such a date, return to base. Then and only then can you 'advance' the campaign.

Sounds scripted to me.

[mookiemookie]

Originally Posted by SteamWake

Go here... sink x of y before such a date, return to base. Then and only then can you 'advance' the campaign.

Sounds scripted to me.

No, you don't have to do any of that. History will still happen no matter what. You can completely ignore all of those goals, and still move on to the next phase.

[mcarlsonus]

Depending on, "Unpaid, Volunteer Staff," a.k.a., "Modders" to make the game playable is letting Ubi off too easily. We've ALL enjoyed the largesse of the modders over the years - and so has UBI !!! Quite apparently, they currently labor under the impression they can release even MORE unfinished product - and charge us money for the privilege and honor of using it! Why? Because they know FULL WELL that our faith and confidence in UNPAID SUBSIM TALENT/"MODDERS" allows them to get away with it! Look at, "our" (meaning, "those who bought the product in the past") experience with two previous, "flawed" and, "more-flawed-than-the-one-before" versions. Sense a trend? SH3 - buggy, SH4-buggy beyond belief, SH5 - so flawed, it's virtually unplayable and, in several cases, unrecognizable to those who've invested time and money into previous versions of the same sim...

Remember the days when Modders were the folks who made the gameplay more fun, more realistic, et.al. ? NOW they're expected to make the dang thing SIMPLY WORK PROPERLY! STOP encouraging Ubi, and other similar firms with similar attitudes, by posting comments like, "Oh, the modders'll make this thing playable in a year," or, "that stuff can be fixed by modders," and/or posting stuff that obviously refers to a mod work-around, such as this from a post above, "...Using the old SH interface mod helps a lot...," ad infinitum. Until Ubi either pays these fine folks, or gives away the product for free as it really IS nothing more than an unfinished beta effort, we should hold THEIR feet to the fire - for a change! After all, we're expected to pay hard-earned money for their MINIMAL effort (I suspect they probably spent more on packaging than development!)