Massive Price Drop!

[jerm138]

This whole thing is very reminiscent of Microsoft FSX, and the end of many years of flight simulation.

"Casual Gamers" will never be interested in niche games like this. They want to load the game, and be killing within seconds. Look at CODMW2. That game was a nonstop barrage of killing and action. THAT'S what the casual gamer wants, and there is no feasible way for a submarine game to provide that. Most people who like that barrage of cannon fodder will never understand the thrill of tracking a contact for hours in REAL TIME, and feel the excitement of waiting to see if your torpedoes hit... so why pander to them?

Microsoft went down the exact same path with their Flight Simulator series... they focused all of their efforts on "eye candy" for the new generation. They weren't interested, and the loyal following they had built over so many years just got angry, and the series died.

[Coldcall]

Originally Posted by Neal Stevens

I don't think one can discount the massive marketing power of a major publisher like Ubi or EA. When Sonalysts decided to publish their own game, Dangerous Waters, as a direct download only (to begin with) the sales were terrible, even though that game was the first and best example of a sub/ship/air naval simulation.

I'm not discounting their big marketing resources but there are other ways for independents to get good pr without blowing wads on primetime advertisements. However it does not appear that Ubi even used their huge marketing resources for SH5.

But hey, I see im debating this against a tide of defeatism so if folks honestly think that game making is dead unless you are one of the big 4 or 5 publishers, then thats really depressing.

What can i say? :-)

[Commie]

Originally Posted by jerm138

This whole thing is very reminiscent of Microsoft FSX, and the end of many years of flight simulation.

"Casual Gamers" will never be interested in niche games like this. They want to load the game, and be killing within seconds. Look at CODMW2. That game was a nonstop barrage of killing and action. THAT'S what the casual gamer wants, and there is no feasible way for a submarine game to provide that. Most people who like that barrage of cannon fodder will never understand the thrill of tracking a contact for hours in REAL TIME, and feel the excitement of waiting to see if your torpedoes hit... so why pander to them?

Microsoft went down the exact same path with their Flight Simulator series... they focused all of their efforts on "eye candy" for the new generation. They weren't interested, and the loyal following they had built over so many years just got angry, and the series died.

Again with the 'casual gamer' blame game. The thing is the 'casual gamer' is not responsible for the death of sims or strategy per se. In the 80's and 90's until the advent of the 3d video cards, most PC games were much more complicated and sold in comparative quantities as the few sims around these days, and many sold less. So it's not that sims all of a sudden stopped being bought!

The problem is that 3D video cards really pushed the action First/Third person shooter from the late 90's and for developers and publishers the ability to relatively easily create immersive, realistic worlds with lots of eye candy enabled the rise of the 'casual gamer', a demographic that was easy to satisfy and potentially far larger than the already existing hard-core PC gamer.

It was quicker to make an action game, and also had other benefits of lower costs of manufacture, without fancy manuals etc. Publishers only think about maximising revenue and not maintaining a customer base that as a percentage was fast getting smaller and smaller.

The sad thing is that the market for sims or even the harder core FPS games like Deus Ex, System Shock hasn't dried up, as all those gamers are still around and in fact have been joined by new generations.

There's money lying on the pavement just waiting to be scooped up. The problem is that UBI, EA, Vivendi and the like think it's too little for them to bother bending and picking it up!

[KL-alfman]

Originally Posted by Commie

the harder core FPS games like Deus Ex, System Shock hasn't dried up

yeah!
the great Looking Glass Studios!
Ultima Underworld and System Shock, all-time classics.

shame on you Eidos!

[SteamWake]

Originally Posted by Commie

In the 80's and 90's until the advent of the 3d video cards, most PC games were much more complicated

Done alot of coding have you?

[Coldcall]

Originally Posted by SteamWake

Done alot of coding have you?

I think there is a valid point that games today are no more superior (and probably less so) from a complexity standpoint, and in depth of game mechanics than games from the late 80s and through the 90s.

I think there is a simple reason for this which is that in the 80s and 90s you were probbaly using a PC, and had enough knowledge of MS Dos to configure and autoexec bat file or whatever to make sure you can run game x...So gamers back then were much more use to dealing with command lines, or games which were complex compared to todays standards.

IMO gameplay mechanics have not progressed in the same way graphics have and in many games one can see the developers have used the eye candy as a redeeming factor in a games with very shallow dumbed down gameplay.

I'd prefer a a more equal mixture of decent graphics and better gameplay. One of the reasons i like the SH series, regardless of the all the problems, is because it feels like one of the last hold-outs from that era when PC games were more complex.

[tonschk]

Originally Posted by The General

How do you know you need to MOD the hell out of it when you haven't played it?


The people who haven't yet purchased the game can't really call themselves Subsim fans can they? They're the followers not the leaders.

I Agree with The General



;

[janh]

Nope, simple: I haven't bought X only translates into "I am not a fan of X". But does not translate into any bigger ensemble, i.e. "I am not a fan of the franchise series of X" or "I am not a fan of the game genre of X" both would be false statements.

I bet I can find a super-primitive sprite based U-boat shooter game on some box or gameboy that you guys both surely would hate. And then you'd be subsim fans according to your explanations, right?

[jerm138]

Originally Posted by Commie

Again with the 'casual gamer' blame game.

You started off sounding like you were going to disagree with me, but then what you wrote completely supported my statement.

[Captain Wreckless]

Originally Posted by TDK1044

I heard that Ubisoft has done a deal to give a Toyota away with every copy!

[sav112]

Originally Posted by The General

How do you know you need to MOD the hell out of it when you haven't played it?

The people who haven't yet purchased the game can't really call themselves Subsim fans can they? They're the followers not the leaders.
;

I dont have to Jump off a cliff to know its not for me.
I think you’ll find it is the real fans that are concerned and making a statement not buying the game.

Lead away......or as some would say be led down the garden path. However thats not having a go as I'm sure most bought the game knowing fine well the problems.
But don’t insult the people that are wise enough to form there own view from the facts without having to play the game.

[Kapitanleutnant]

Originally Posted by jerm138

Most people who like that barrage of cannon fodder will never understand the thrill of tracking a contact for hours in REAL TIME, and feel the excitement of waiting to see if your torpedoes hit... so why pander to them?

I like Silent Hunter and Modern Warfare, which kind of ****s your theory with a rake..... MW2 has shifted 25 million units - and that's just legitimate sales. Please try not to tar all of those people with the same brush. Gross generalisations like this make you look like an idiot.

e:

Originally Posted by The General

How do you know you need to MOD the hell out of it when you haven't played it?

MOD

"Mod" is a contraction of "Modification", it's not an acronym, and should not be fully capitalised. Stop butchering the English language.

[Nisgeis]

Originally Posted by Kapitanleutnant

Gross generalisations like this make you look like an idiot.

Gross generalisations make everyone look like an idiot. Oh wait...

[karamazovnew]

Originally Posted by jerm138

This whole thing is very reminiscent of Microsoft FSX, and the end of many years of flight simulation.

Microsoft went down the exact same path with their Flight Simulator series... they focused all of their efforts on "eye candy" for the new generation. They weren't interested, and the loyal following they had built over so many years just got angry, and the series died.

Wowowowow! You just can't be serious to compare the FS series to Silent Hunter.

FS relies a lot on 3'd party apps and it's oriented towards any flight enthusiasts. The core FSX is the best core FS of all. The improvements were there, not just in graphics. Most of all, FS is a true-blood sim. Maybe not so "professional-looking" as X-Plane. But hey, in FS you can learn how to read a real approach plate. I managed to get the flight plans and airport charts of the Otopeni Bucharest airport. I used them in the game. I found a 757 real operations manual and used it to learn to fly the LevelD 757. I parked near a VOR antenna that's depicted in the game. I even recognized my tiny village where my parents live. I'm sad that the Aces team was sacked. But they left us with an amazing sim that we'll be able to play for years and years, with 3d glasses and, in the future, HMD's. Plus, they're still at it, looking for another publisher. The level of customization and detail in FS is simply mind-blowing. Microsoft's decision was a real surprise.

Silent Hunter on the other hand really is an ugly duckling of sims. What's annoying about the latest version (apart from the unprecedented number and "quality" of bugs) is that waaay too many of our requested features have been ignored (and no, I don't care about WHY they ignored them). I knew it would be a flop since January. It had been already clear then that the game would need a lot of modding to turn it into a sim, and we should be grateful for the modding tools that we were provided out of the box. But SH5 has been filled with unfortunate design choices and too many bugs. There deffinitely won't be a SH6. And if there will be one, I guarantee you that no sane fan would buy it if it's just another candy-shop with rats in it. I'm actually surprised that the community hasn't already abandoned this game. It's been out for one month and there's still no patch 1.2. Kudos to the modders.

I don't want to upset the dev team but I really don't think they can handle making a real naval sim. A thumbs up for the effort, sure, and there's gotta be passionate people there. But that's useless because a dev team depends on a chain of command.
They are UBI, don't separate them from the mother company, take them as a whole. And the WHOLE failed on this one. They might be better for arcade sims so I'm sure they will have lots of success in that area.
What we need is to teleport Bullfrog, Microprose, Looking Glass and Particle Systems from the past and ask them to make a real WW2 sub sim. We'd have a better chance at asking the old Microprose members to team up than we have a chance for SH6 to be a good sim (or released at all).

[jerm138]

Originally Posted by karamazovnew

Wowowowow! You just can't be serious to compare the FS series to Silent Hunter.

I'm not comparing the programs themselves... Of course they're way different.

I'm comparing the effect of not listening to your customer base... which the makers of FSX and the makers of SH5 both seem to have done. Microsoft Flight Simulator died shortly after FSX, and people are speculating about whether or not the Silent Hunter series will survive. It's a valid comparison.