What concerns you most about SHO?

[GoldenRivet]

Originally Posted by Sailor Steve

Nothing.

Nothing concerns me about it.

If I try it and it's as un-simlike as it looks like it's going to be, then I haven't lost anything except an hour of two of my time.

I have a tendency to agree with you here Steve.

But what if you play it and you find it somewhat enjoyable? enjoyable enough to pay the umpteen dollars a month to play it.

Assume now that you play it with the longevity by which you have enjoyed Silent Hunter III for example

does the gaming experience you had with Silent Hunter Online warrant paying for a modded SH3 5 times over? 10 times over? so on?

obviously a question that cannot be answered at this point

but one statement i can make for sure... in order to be worth the $150- $200 a year minimum it could potentially cost to play this title at any really enjoyable and immerse level - it better be the best silent hunter in the entire series.

Im sure as with other online games... you can pay for 3 - 6 month blocks for a lower rate... but then again, in 2012 i didnt spend more than $100 on video games all year long

seems like a tall order - it appears that the free is the hook, but to be very enjoyable or competitive with other players - there lies the line and sinker... the very reason i sunk a whole 10 minutes game time into World of Tanks and never looked back.

Originally Posted by StarTrekMike

That was a really well written post

thank you

Originally Posted by StarTrekMike

My concern is that this is just Ubisoft's way of saying "This is the way it is going to be from here on out!"

a good possibility that it will be this way from here on out - at least for ubisoft.

Originally Posted by StarTrekMike

I have had many discussions with folks I know about why simulators went from being one of the sure bets in the PC gaming market to something of a extreme fringe genre where only the most dedicated stick around and we only get a slow trickle of new blood.

in the yesteryear of gaming... right up until the late 1990s and early 2000s a lot of imagination was required to play video games of any type, let alone simulators.

video games as a whole (sims included) allow us to go out and do things we wouldnt ordinarily be able to do. Liberate Europe, Invade another planet, fly a 747 from New York to London, build a roman empire.

Simulators require a lot of imagination and patience when compared to a more "arcade" experience and i think a lot of this has to do with the instant gratification generation. we as a society very abruptly moved from one generation who very recently had to mail a letter hand written on actual paper and wait sometimes a week for a response and moved to a generation who has probably never written a letter and instead sends instantaneous communication from one side of the planet to the other. And thats no fault of theirs... they have that stuff now because WE got tired of waiting 14 days for a response from grandpa in Florida.

as people become more accustomed to instant gratification, the patience and imagination required to complete a real time 14 hour flight in Microsoft Flight Simulator diminishes in the players... as does the attention span (if you will) to sit and actually run the numbers, calculate your next move and put the time and effort into plotting an attack against a convoy for example.

Originally Posted by StarTrekMike

Big publishers don't want us around anymore, they tell us "not everyone has time for those sims, we need to try and grab a wider audience that might not care about historical or technical accuracy) without even looking at the fact that simulators are very much a "if you build it, they will come" kind of thing.

completely agree, especially with that last part, Silent Hunter was technical, and became more technical with the mods, but still brought in a large number of players who would have otherwise probably overlooked a submarine simulator.

Originally Posted by StarTrekMike

In a way, I am glad that big publishers leave sims to smaller, more talented, dedicated and more ethical privately owned developers, they have proved that customer satisfaction is not as important to them as their overall sales.

i think the next great subsim will probably be community developed and community backed... If every member of this site donated a dollar, we would already be off to a decent start.

if every member here donated $20 we would have about $1.7M invested in development of a title created entirely within the community.

[TorpX]

Good OP!

... what concerns you most about SHO?

What concerns me about it, or maybe I should say disturbs me, is that it shows Ubisoft is stubbornly determined to pursue their fast buck strategy even now. They seem to have learned nothing from their past escapades, and show little desire to.

If they had invested the sum they've spent on SHO, in making SH4 or SH5 GOOD, both we and they would be much better off.


Sometimes I wish I would win the lottery so I could buy Silent Hunter, and make it what it should be. How much do you think Ubi would want for Silent Hunter Commander's Edition?

[GoldenRivet]

Originally Posted by TorpX

How much do you think Ubi would want for Silent Hunter Commander's Edition?

a lot more than i have in my checking account

[Sailor Steve]

Originally Posted by GoldenRivet

But what if you play it and you find it somewhat enjoyable? enjoyable enough to pay the umpteen dollars a month to play it.

As I said in my earlier post, If it's fun enough to play, I'll play it. It's my understanding that there won't be a monthly fee to play it, which is good because that is something I will never do. Well, mostly not. I'll see how ROF works out when I finally have a computer that will run it.

Assume now that you play it with the longevity by which you have enjoyed Silent Hunter III for example

does the gaming experience you had with Silent Hunter Online warrant paying for a modded SH3 5 times over? 10 times over? so on?

No. If it was a perfect sim that allowed the same gameplay that SHII and Destroyer Command had? Maybe. I'd have to see before I could answer that.

All that said, just from what I've seen I'm already fairly well convinced that it's not the kind of game that will hold my interest for long.

it appears that the free is the hook, but to be very enjoyable or competitive with other players - there lies the line and sinker... the very reason i sunk a whole 10 minutes game time into World of Tanks and never looked back.

No. If the game was interesting to me I might be convinced to pay to have other sub types, but that would be a one-time event. Pay to get goodies sooner? No. I don't care for "competitive" games. Adversarial play? Sure, but not competing against other players on the same side. Not only is that about as unrealistic as you can get, but it doesn't appeal to me at any personal level.

[Feuer Frei!]

Nothing concerns me about SHO. Why? Because i won't play it.
Too simplistic and restricted in development for my tastes. Looks like a game made for 10-year-olds tbh.
Also, there seems to be a general consensus here perhaps that Ubisoft has deemed sub sims dead under the water, we can see that with this latest installment, then why the hell do they persist in producing SHO? I mean really, if there is no dollars to be made in sub sims then why bother?

It's a niche market for one, and two, well, we all know what sort of release states the silent hunter series of games has had.
Why waste precious resources producing more sub sims when we and they know that it ain't gonna make them rich and no way in hell will there be ongoing support for it with upgrades/updates because.........sub sims are no money-makers for developers.

The key to it is if you want to produce sub sims, then you have to have passion! Not a view to milking the cow for all it's worth(making money). Passion!
Let's face it, Ubi has bigger fish to fry then stuffing around with a browser game which is marketed towards god-knows-who. Can't be sub simmers, surely!
Adolescent, puberty blue, pimply-faced teens who have a penchant for raising more than just a periscope. Who knows.

As for bigger fish, FarCry series, AC Series, to name 2.
Yea i realize also that game devs have seperate teams for seperate games being developed in-house.
Still, why oh why bother Ubisoft?

[BigBANGtheory]

The art of a good sim franchise imho is to strive closer to perfection and realism with each itteration. What concerns me is that instead of building on and improving SH we've got something that just completely ignores all that, and thus raises the question will we ever see the light?

You might as well covert Halo into a browser based FPS and release it on xbox as a new a fresh look to the series. It will probably get a solid 3/5 in xbox reviews too as the gaming press is largely bent as hell.

I think part of the problem here is that SHO is being marketed completely wrong, this is not PC gaming this should be marketed towards Android & iOS. Silent Hunter Online (for tablets) and when you look at it in that context actually there is some merit and good work going on. I think they should use the gyro sensors to move the periscope that would be ace

[longam]

Warp
Lack of 3D
Browser based game play

If I was at my old job it would do to pass time......but

[Ducimus]

Originally Posted by Feuer Frei!

Nothing concerns me about SHO. Why? Because i won't play it.
Too simplistic and restricted in development for my tastes.

Pretty much how I feel about SHO, with one added reason. Being an online only title, there's going to be a problem:

Ubisoft's QA sucks.

Unlike SH3, SH4, and SH5, there will be no way for the player community to fix or find work arounds for the many bugs and broken features that Ubisoft will inevitably leave in the game after they abandon it for other projects.

[Red October1984]

The fact that it's an online only title....

That is annoying. Ubi doesn't care anymore. It's as simple as that for me.

[Vince82]

All of this, combined with the now poor reputation of the series, doesn't add up to a financial success to in my view.

Edit (so it's better understandable) It's a 'free' online game it's almost certainly going to be succesfull. Even we can try it at no cost at all. Reputation within a relatively small group of people doesn't matter at all, because Ubi is targetting a way larger market than the subsim community.

[GoldenRivet]

Originally Posted by Vince82

reputation within a relatively small group of people doesn't matter at all.

i think the opposite is true

in a small community reputation is everything.

the problem here is that ubi is trying to make a subsim that is naturally a niche market into a non-niche market... in other words, generally a small group have loved and nurtured the series. now they want to make it available to everyone and try to get everyone to love it and nuture it.

when they dont love it... and it loses money and gets bad reviews or a poor reception the subsim genre will probably become a "leper" genre that developers shy away from in the future.

which leaves us with no new game titles for years and years

Im here to tell you this free to play, pay to win / browser game mash up is not going to pair well with a subsim.

but thats just my opinion talking

[Takeda Shingen]

Originally Posted by Vince82

It's a free online game it's almost certainly going to be succesfull. Even we can try it at no cost at all, reputation within a relatively small group of people doesn't matter at all. Ubi is targetting a way larger market than the subsim community.

The reputation absolutely does matter, especially once you stick the Silent Hunter intellectual property label on it. And a P2W game is absolutely not free.

[desertstriker]

Originally Posted by Vince82

It's a free online game it's almost certainly going to be succesfull. Even we can try it at no cost at all, reputation within a relatively small group of people doesn't matter at all. Ubi is targetting a way larger market than the subsim community.

But ubi cant do it without the subsim.com community because what we say will matter. if we all hate the game thats ALOT of people saying it is garbage. why did they invite onkel neal down and give his thoughts? Ubi is targeting a larger community you are right there but how many of that outer target will stick with the game? probably not alot because they don't have the patience for the genre.