What makes SH3 so great?

[Sailor Steve]

SH3 is lacking in several areas, but they are easy to overlook. The graphics are still quite good, just not as good as the newer versions. There are stock things as well as mods that were great from the start. There's something about having the home guard and the pretty nurses waving and cheering and the band playing while you sail in and out of the harbor.

On the other hand, SH4 has become kind of a poor relation to SH3. Because it had certain problems it was avoided in favor of the older game, even though most of those problems have been long since fixed. So SH4 has some great AI and performance and campaign mods, but very little of the graphics mods that SH3 has benefitted from. Call me a graphics junkie if you like. I don't need the latest pretties or the biggest explosions, but I love sailing out of Kiel and through the working locks, admiring the ships coming and going and the planes circling overhead. That kind of ambience tickles me.

The other thing that only SH3 has is Commander, which not only lets you control all sorts of in-game functions, but gives you a realistic career with crew reassignments, a huge database of crewmen so you'll almost never see the same name twice, and it gives names to the ships you sink, as well as the cargo they were carrying, the number of crew aboard and the number of crew lost.

Those are just a very few of the things that keep SH3 ahead of the rest. For now.

Originally Posted by privateer

SH4 has only what? 3 years? But that will change.

I certainly hope so. There's so much more that can be done with it, and it is the better game for several reasons other than just the graphics.