Features in SH1 and Aces That Have Since "Disappeared"

[Schwieger]

Originally Posted by the_tyrant

I can almost imagine what happened:
marketing guy a: What games are popular these days? and why?
marketing guy b: Crysis is pretty popular, mainly because of the graphics.
marketing guy a: Good graphics, what else?
marketing guy b: Well Mass Effect sold well, the RPG elements proved to be popular towards nerds with no life.
marketing guy a: Ok, so we add RPG elements, what else?
marketing guy b: Battlestations pacific was well accepted by gamers, it replaced realism with action and explosions
marketing guy a: Good, so we will tell the developers of Silent Hunter 5 to make the graphics better, add RPG elements and action and explosions to what they already have



2 months later:

developers: OMG this game takes up 10 dvds, and another 500 GBs to install.
marketing people: remove everything, just keep the awesome graphics, RPG elements, action and explosions.

What Ubisoft doesn't realize is that most people who play subsims don't care for all the "awesome graphics, RPG elements, action and explosions"

Quite honestly, with what they gave us with SH5, they should have made a shooter. I remember seeing SH5 in stores not too long ago. I picked it up, looked at it, set it down and walked the other way.

[robbo180265]

Originally Posted by Subnuts

I'm going to shamelessly bump this thread just so the Eye Candie Queens can read it.

Gameplay > Graphics.

Yeah thanks mate - really useful thread necro

[longam]

<shrug>

[DavyJonesFootlocker]

What Ubisoft doesn't realize is that most people who play subsims don't care for all the "awesome graphics, RPG elements, action and explosions"

Oh, really. Well for your information I'm not one of them. I like my subsims with immersibilty AND nice graphics.

[Sailor Steve]

Originally Posted by DavyJonesFootlocker

Oh, really. Well for your information I'm not one of them. I like my subsims with immersibilty AND nice graphics.

As do many of us. The problem is that in this case they seem to think we only want one or the other. So they improve the graphics while throwing out all the things that made the earlier games great.

[goldorak]

Originally Posted by Sailor Steve

As do many of us. The problem is that in this case they seem to think we only want one or the other. So they improve the graphics while throwing out all the things that made the earlier games great.

Isn't that the truth.
To be honest, much of what has gone wrong with the videogames industry is because of their own mistakes. Its always easy to blame the customer, blame the pirtates etc... But when it comes down to earth, nobody told those studios to start spending milions or in many cases tens of milions of $ on one game. And to bet everything on it. The consequence as you can see in the console market is that many studios just go under because a game although it sells hundreds of thousands of units doesn't compensate what was invested to develop it.
So you hear the same old mantra, customers don't buy, pirates free load, the second hand game market kills us etc, etc, etc... Same old lame excuses for their own failings.
Whats so difficult to start doing games in a self sustainable way ?

SH 3 had nailed 90% of what a WW2 sub sim was about. How inconceivable was it to improve upon that basis for SH4 and 5 ? That would have been the correct choice, instead no. They decided another way and didn't get the first signal, that SH 4 sold way less that SH 3. That should have launched a RED ALERT doom signal in Ubisoft but no lets get on with the program. Lets do SH 5 more anticonsumer than ever, put a half finished alfa on the shleves and blame everyone except us. How did that work in the end eh ?

I have no sympathy at all for the videogames industry. For 1 developer/studio that gets it, 99% don't. And we are expected to pay the price.
So excuse me but I'll go back to playing SH3, SHI, DW and Sierra Fast Attack.
No DRM crap, I'll play when and how I want. Games like these are immortal, just like reading a nice book. They never go out of fashion. And that is what the industry fears. Having to constantly improve. Instead we get less and less, higher prices and more anticonsumer crap. Enjoy your new world guys.

[janh]

Blaming the customer never works... because it wouldn't make any difference. Imagine a restaurant owner blaming the people outside for passing by after a brief glance at the menu...

Blaming the pirates has worked for a long while, and surely was in order. However, I think this did only reduce the unpayed downloads (but I wouldn't even bet that -- lack of quality surely does so much better for new games!), but did evidently not lead to "enough" new sales -- as predicted by so many. I wouldn't even be surprised if someone finds one day that it actually also cut into the sales (of people buying after "testing" the downloaded version).

But now trying to suppress the second hand market just proves that the companies are after any $$$ they can get, no matter how, and not ever whether they step on the toes of their customers (surely SHV, the OSP-DRM, or the new Ubi concept could be named as premiere examples). Well, free market, and shareholder companies... who would be surprised. They are not a niche studio like Maddox 1C, who, correct me if I am wrong, do this as much for earning a living, as also by dedication to their projects.

The basic problem presently is that big publisher like Ubi want to publish (and earn) more frequently with a title. But you can guess that a game like SHIII-V has reached a complexity that just for the beta testing would require 6 months, if the companies had the goal to really release as bug-free as possible (and not scare of loads of customers for years by the bugged initial release and obviously lack of trying to deliver real quality for the $). I don't think it is realistic with such simulations, or strategy/tactic games that have evolved so far.

I find BIS is trying presently something interesting, which may work. ARMA and ARMA2, unlike OFP, are probably now becoming more of a niche game (though their also try to attract casual gamers by having a really wide range of in-game options to reduce complexity and niveau). And these simulations really are complex now. Just see much detail is in ARMA2, with a powerful modding language, tools, an internal precompiler, or its features including AI successfully using building walls and objects for cover while acting quite smart even in a dog-fight. However, even ARMA2 loses half its market value within 1-2 years.
BIS is recently offering two types of addons: (i) for about half the price of the original game, which then include core enhancements of the game engine by features desired by the community (for example the FLIR and backpack systems). (ii) addons with purely maps and units, which also could be supplied by modders, but are much cheaper. Both appears to "support" the value and price of the original, and could guarantee much longer term sales potential if the customer-ship is satisfied with the content. And this way, the large development costs pay off and maybe we will also see an ARMA3 with again substantial content and feature addition, not only visual polishing. No need to publish a complete new game every year, if you can upgrade the engine with the things your customers really care for until it truly reaches its limits.

I agree, I love arm2 and have supported Bohemia Interactive from the early days.
They are one of the main reasons why I stick with PC gaming.
Everyone knows that their games are buggy from release BUT they are fully supported with frequent patches, beta patches released to the public, official add ons and a modding community that's absolutely fantastic and on par with the subsim community.
All this from a small team, the best thing ubisoft could do is give up on the SH franchise at this point and let the better people take up the mantle.
I don't think SH5 is the last subsim we will see but I hope it's the last from ubisoft.
Maybe other smaller teams will do a better job but they're just scared to go up against the SH franchise.

[janh]

To be honest, I skipped ARMA1 because it did hardly have any new feature compared to OFP, or significant AI changes -- mostly a graphics polish that I was keen on.

But I bought ARMA2 just 4 weeks after release date, once I was sure it actually delivered something that was truly going beyond OFP. I it actually not so buggy. There were performance issues, which they finally solved, but per se I saw no real game breaking bug. Oh, I run it on an ASUS Gamer Notebook, 2GB and 2 Core2Duo 2.0GHz with an 8600M GT, so it is not surprising that this causes some performance issues, but it actually ran quite smoothly after the 2nd patch. Of course the graphics settings are at the lower quality end, but it is still very "cute" for a simulation.
For sure, the customer support with BIS games, their interaction and support of modders (even adding new modding commands in patches) is at the highest level. There is very few companies out there that show a similar commitment to their products and customer wishes/complaints.

[mikeydredd]

This thread brought back so many memories of "the good old days" of simulators, which in my opinion were the 90's.

Back then the target audience for pc games were by and large "us" - the simulator generation if you like. Primarily men in their late 20's to 40's, with enough disposable income to buy a pc for home use (my first pc cost me £1350 in 1992), well educated, well read, with an interest in world events and history. Pc games had, largely, to cater for "us".

That is no longer the case and while broadly, the simulator market has remained with "us", the video games market has moved on markedly, in effect leaving our little niche and "us" way behind in terms of market share.

It now has to cater for "them" - the mass market - teens to early 20's, wanting and demanding cheap thrills, easy accessability, simplistic interfaces, and EYE CANDY. And no manual, at all.

Which is what they and, unfortunately, we, have got.

In the video gaming world we are the dinosaurs gentlemen, and it seems that there is very little we can do to alter that.

Break out your Dosbox and support the modders, it's all that's left for "us".

Have a nice day!

Regards,

Dredd

[Zoomer96]

I miss the bathythermograph! You could just look at it and tell if you were in a thermal or if there wasn't one. Sometimes the thermal wouldn't be that good and maybe the destroyer would locate you. The Quartermasters log indicated what ship you sank and the tonnage. Also all of the fleet boats had the Mod 3 or 4 conning tower. I like the graphics of SH4 and 5 like the sunsets and stuff like that but I would have been happy with the bow planes deploying during the dive or fleet boats with correct props and not uboat props. I liked SH1 cause it was the next step up from Silent Service II.

I don't remember having any trouble running it but back then. It didn't have any bugs that I remember but you had to have the top of the line 486 DX 66 mother board. 4 megabytes ram (cost $300 dollars) really made it shine! The radar worked right out of the box and it didn't take 20 minutes to get to your patrol area.......

[John Channing]

Sure it did.

The most famous one was that if you were being hunted by OpFor DD's, once you gave them the slip if you went into time compression they would immediately find you again, drive in a straight line to where you were and begin destroying you. There were others, but that's the one that used to drive me nuts.

That, and no stadimeter. In fact, other than radar, no way at all to estimate range.

JCC

[janh]

Originally Posted by mikeydredd

... And no manual, at all. ...

That's one thing I truly miss. I still have all of the thicker manuals of my past games, though many the 5 1/4" or 3.5" disks have long ended up in the trash. But some of the manuals have really nice history or technical background sections, identification booklets, and so much more. Those added a lot to the time and fun I had with games like Jane's Longbow, Secret Weapons of the Luftwaffe and all those ancient treasures. Sad that they didn't really built something new on the framework of the latter ones.