Silent Hunter Online

[Hinrich Schwab]

Originally Posted by Julhelm

Exciting as in WW2-exciting. Or Hunt for the Red October-exciting. Or Red Storm Rising-exciting. Red Storm Rising managed to portray 1980's submarine ops in an intense and exciting manner because it went for a big, WW2-style shooting war against a numerically superior enemy.

DW on the other hand portrays modern ops much like the small-scale skirmishes one would realistically expect post-USSR and as a result is rather more dull. Sometimes you just have to sacrifice some realism in order to craft a fun experience. Even milsims like ARMA do this to some extent. As it is, such a hardcore sim as DW will never cater to anyone but the most hardcore simmer, which is about as niche as it gets. It can have all the merits in the world in regards to systems modelling etc but that doesn't matter when the stock scenarios it ships with are unimaginative and mundane. At least in SH4 you get some payoff for all the hard work by getting treated with some nice fireworks, but DW fails in that regard too.

I'm a more casual simmer so while I find more "lite" sims like Strike Fighters or Red Storm Rising entertaining and worthwhile ultra-hardcore sims like DCS and DW are too complex and dull to be worthwhile to me.

Btw, consider that I play Red Storm Rising and Fast Attack more or less on a regular basis still, while the Sonalysts games remain shelved. But maybe I'm an anomaly.

You aren't an anomaly, DW just doesn't suit your preferred play style, that is all. To be fair, DW is pretty hardcore, as is Sub Command and the other Sonalysts sims.

[Julhelm]

Yeah. I'd like to believe there probably exists a whole bunch of customers like me that haven't been sufficiently catered to in the nuke sim market. God knows I've wanted a Red Storm Rising-like game literally for ages. It's actually to the point where I'm learning programming just to be able to do it myself

[Sonarman]

In case you haven't seen it before you can read Sid Meier's thoughts on Red Storm Rising and his other games in this excellent Gamespot article

Subsim member Weps was actually working on an RSR remake but his site has not been updated in a while - check it out here

[martes86]

Well, I think we can safely assume that the market for subsims is pretty much a goner unless a new independent company rises up and develops the subsim of our dreams. With the most outstanding saga of the genre going haywire, seems like we'll be stuck with the same titles for a veeeery long while.

While I don't doubt that SHO could indeed be fun and all that (haven't tried it yet), specially since I've played a few MMOs, so it's not like I despise the genre, I think that (and I'm sure lots of people will agree with me) it wasn't the way to go. Lots of things could have been done on SH5, but instead, they try to squeeze more money by converting a WW2 naval sim into an MMO, a genre which I never thought I'd associate with a sim.

Oh and it runs in Flash (game performance issues, anyone?). Definitely not the way to go, folks. We're not given access to source codes because they know for a fact that anything coming into the community's hands, returns as a kick-ass product loved by everyone without need for anything else, which means no new purchases, no business for them.

Finally, I couldn't miss the chance (now that I've noticed the previous posts; hi Dan ) to thank the devs again for doing all they could in taking the SH saga to a good place, too bad that money is the only thing that talks (besides the CEOs) at corporate management.

Cheers

[Hinrich Schwab]

Ubi is writing this in ActionScript??!!



Good luck with that and all of the fun bugs that generates...buttons that don't work. CPU hogging...disappearing local data and such.