Hey Ubi, consider this...

[kylania]

Originally Posted by SilentOtto

NOTE: This was my rant, and I feel I have the right to express it! :P

But... but.. your name is SilentOtto!

[SilentOtto]

¬¬ it is!

Sigh...the old Falcon 4 manual.




Remember the days when you would spend almost a week reading the manual before playing the game?

I understand this is not cost-feasible any longer, all I ask is that developers stop claiming that pdf manuals and materials will be robust or immersive. Stop it, it's insulting.

[kylania]

Originally Posted by trotter

I understand this is not cost-feasible any longer, all I ask is that developers stop claiming that pdf manuals and materials will be robust or immersive. Stop it, it's insulting.

I agree.

[janh]

Originally Posted by trotter

Sigh...the old Falcon 4 manual.

So beautiful...Gorgeous, what great memories. I still own pretty much all the manuals of the older games I have bought since the 90s. The disks are already gone (and backed up on my HD -- yeah you could do that before DRM! That was before the "greedy companies age"...). And some of them really do look like very solid books, like the manual to "Secret Weapons of the Luftwaffe", or many others. That alone was a big point for me to keep buying games.

But Ubisoft really gets it right with the annouced move away from paper... Someone in their marketing department really knows customer wishes! Next they declare that since people don't really like reading online manuals, and since baloon tips in the games need to be concise, also the features and functionality of games must be simplified. And in two year they realise, that they can save a lot of energy and help the environment if they only sell licenses to "imaginary games"... How far has this strayed from the right path already??? I have the impression that the days of Ubisoft in the PC market targeting a grown up, educated customership may be over within the next two years... After that it will be dumbed down console type games, and baby toys...

[daft]

Am I the only one that remembers that Falcon 4 was rushed to market full of bugs (and was a bit poo to begin with), got a few patches before the dev team were laid off and then had to rely on modders to really shine. That was back in -98 or -99.

[mikeydredd]

You're dead right - it was Christmas '98.

I bought Falcon 4.0 on the way to hospital knowing that it had a huge manual that I would be able to read there while recovering. (Did the same thing with Falcon 3.0 as well!)

When I got out I installed and it was a load of bollux.

Deleted it and didn't re - install untill patch 1.08.

Still playing FreeFalcon 5.3 - and reading that manual!

Dredd

[The General]

Originally Posted by wetwarev7

Why not... just charge a bit more?

Um, I paid the full asking price on the day of release, which was the equivalent to roughly 50.00 US Dollars. Two or three weeks later, Amazon was practically paying us to take a copy! This does not bode well for the Silent Hunter franchise or any other PC title. Even though there are more PC's in the world than all the Consoles combined, there seems to be a lull in production and support of PC games lately. I guess the Console market is just killing it.

[speedbird]

Guys, chill...

I was the one moaning about SH5 this and SH5 that earlier on, but now I have seen the light...

This game is been developed as we speak by you modders!
If the patch doesn't arrive for another year the game is already 500 per cent better than it was last week because of... yes, YOU!

My only hope is that somebody rings devs and says: "Hey boys! Look
what this crowd have done with our game!! What are we gonna do about patch #3? It's already done!?!?

[Fincuan]

Originally Posted by daft

Am I the only one that remembers that Falcon 4 was rushed to market full of bugs (and was a bit poo to begin with), got a few patches before the dev team were laid off and then had to rely on modders to really shine. That was back in -98 or -99.

That is entirely true, but it still had a kick-ass manual

In the case of F4 the dev-team was by the way disbanded pretty soon after release and before patch 1.08 was out, but as a parting gift they pushed out the patch working on their own time. Coincidentally the source-code for the game was also leaked pretty soon afterwards, allowing modding to levels we can only dream of in the SH, and pretty much any other, series of games. The F4 modding scene would be very different today without that "leak".

[janh]

Originally Posted by Fincuan

In the case of F4 the dev-team was by the way disbanded pretty soon after release and before patch 1.08 was out, but as a parting gift they pushed out the patch working on their own time. Coincidentally the source-code for the game was also leaked pretty soon afterwards, allowing modding to levels we can only dream of in the SH, and pretty much any other, series of games. The F4 modding scene would be very different today without that "leak".

Yeah, without that parting gift I would have learned my first lesson not to buy games anymore before the last patch is announced, but luckily at that time it went by well. It is actually the only time that I can recall having bought a product that was that buggy as they are typically nowadays. But I honestly have changed my buying habits since the the rise of internet and "customer-side beta-testing" a lot and keep watching the forums of new games for months before I decide to buy.

But one thought I had here is: If it obviously takes modders to convert the SHV into a submarine simulation, then Ubi could be consequent in that they release the sources, too, and have the modders be able to do their worked properly and not patch it together...
Is the Falcon 4 source code then public by now? I'd be too curious to check how they did it...

[Commie]

Originally Posted by trotter

Sigh...the old Falcon 4 manual.




Remember the days when you would spend almost a week reading the manual before playing the game?

I understand this is not cost-feasible any longer, all I ask is that developers stop claiming that pdf manuals and materials will be robust or immersive. Stop it, it's insulting.

Hehe. I have this too!

I disagree that it wouldn't be cost effective. Companies make collectors' editions of games with more fancy and costlier (but more useless) trinkets included for not much more than a basic version of the game so why couldn't they make a decent manual instead which would be cheaper anyway? The squadron commander's edition of Falcon with the binder was just 10 dollars more than the normal one which had a huge manual anyway, so it seems that costs of production weren't excessive.

Relatively it was just as expensive, even more so to make a big game in 1991 than now. Just read about Origin and their problems with packing a game box with a dozen diskettes which led to them losing their independence as their ambitions overtook the technology(cost effective cd-roms weren't available).

Greed killed off the simulation companies more than a lack of income. All those mergers in the 90's where one company would pay excessively for a brand name and then decide to trim staff and quality in order to get a quick return on their investment are the reason sims died and not because people weren't buying them! If UBI still made enough from SH3 and SH4 in this day and age with smaller sales than Microprose and the rest then it shows that the market isn't dead for sims(and sub sims are arguably more niche than flight sims).