Are people's objecting to an online subsim per se, or merely Ubi's "effort" here?

[Julhelm]

Originally Posted by Hinrich Schwab

Why is this concept "silly" to you? The consumers should rightfully dictate the direction of the products it is purchasing. This should be especially true in the gaming industry.

In what industry does that ever happen, though? Consumers don't dictate the direction of the auto industry. Consumers don't dictate the direction of Hollywood. Consumers don't dictate the direction of the food industry. Or the fashion industry.

Rather, in every case it is the industry dictating the direction of the consumers - so why should games be any different?

In fact, I'd go as far as saying letting the community dictate the design of a game is a recipe for disaster, as design by commitee always is.

The problem with gamers in general is that they tend to be conservative, reactionary, don't think things through completely before they demand things and suffer from a bad case of rose tinted glasses.

And then you have the dilemma of what part of the community to listen to. Do you listen to the hardcore grognards who want full procedural simulation with every last knob modelled and who froth at the mouth of the very thought of conceding realism for the sake of gameplay, or do you listen to the lite simmers who absolutely do not want a superhardcore procedural simulation but rather want a simple to learn UI and fun gameplay mechanics?

And are you going to listen to the nuke fans, the uboat fans, or the fleet boat fans? Budget says you can't please them all. Who gets to decide what the final game evolves into? Those who bitch the loudest?

Like I said, AOD is the best subsim ever and it was done in a time when forums didn't even exist. Whereas sims have become increasingly unsatisfactory ever since internet communities began bitching about "how it should be done".

Going back to beating the dead horse, if the executives at Ubisoft actually cared about the gamers paying them the money they so desperately seek,
it would be a non-issue because the resulting product would require minimal modding or patching.

Until that happens, the grognards will live up to their name.

Except UBI owes you nothing. If you are not happy with their product you can do what you'd do with any other unsatisfactory product: return it for a refund or sell it. Only successful products are supported, and SH5 was a flop, so it had the plug pulled on it, like thousands of games before it.

[Hinrich Schwab]

Originally Posted by Julhelm

In what industry does that ever happen, though? Consumers don't dictate the direction of the auto industry. Consumers don't dictate the direction of Hollywood. Consumers don't dictate the direction of the food industry. Or the fashion industry.

Rather, in every case it is the industry dictating the direction of the consumers - so why should games be any different?

Do not sales reflect the consumers' response to industry moves? I think you are confusing initiative with influence. In that case, the producers of goods most certainly do have initiative. However, it is the consumer who makes the final judgment.

In fact, I'd go as far as saying letting the community dictate the design of a game is a recipe for disaster, as design by commitee always is.

The problem with gamers in general is that they tend to be conservative, reactionary, don't think things through completely before they demand things and suffer from a bad case of rose tinted glasses.

How does this apply to the subsim community? After 10 years of Silent Hunter iterations by Ubi, the community here is rather certain what it wants. Blanket statements like this won't work because semantics will pick them apart. Had you stated, "...the mainstream gamer...", I might have agreed with you.

And then you have the dilemma of what part of the community to listen to. Do you listen to the hardcore grognards who want full procedural simulation with every last knob modelled and who froth at the mouth of the very thought of conceding realism for the sake of gameplay, or do you listen to the lite simmers who absolutely do not want a superhardcore procedural simulation but rather want a simple to learn UI and fun gameplay mechanics?

And are you going to listen to the nuke fans, the uboat fans, or the fleet boat fans? Budget says you can't please them all. Who gets to decide what the final game evolves into? Those who bitch the loudest?

Realism settings and autocrew options can balance this out. It isn't necessarily perfect, but it is better than absolute focus.

Like I said, AOD is the best subsim ever and it was done in a time when forums didn't even exist. Whereas sims have become increasingly unsatisfactory ever since internet communities began bitching about "how it should be done".

I have no arguments regarding AOD. I agree with you on that. Regarding the "unpleasable fanbase", all the internet has done is give the sim and wargaming community a voice. Nothing more. While AOD was the best subsim ever, it has its share of flaws, too. Specifically, manual control of the deck gun had to be patched in. Manual control of the deck gun trumps AI auto crew any day of the week, regardless of sim.

Except UBI owes you nothing.

I am more than aware of that. Pointing that out to me like I just fell of the turnip truck accomplishes nothing.

If you are not happy with their product you can do what you'd do with any other unsatisfactory product: return it for a refund or sell it.

In an increasingly digital world polluted with DRM, these options are dying out. The new standard is that if one has a computer product one is dissatisfied with, you out the money you spent with no recourse.

Only successful products are supported, and SH5 was a flop, so it had the plug pulled on it, like thousands of games before it.

You are stating the obvious. This is Economics 101. Likewise, this is also how consumers can dictate market response; by forcing a product flop.

The gist of your argument is pretty much, "The industry will do as it damn well pleases." However, the only trump to that is if the consumers generate such a vociferous and negative response that the producer in question has no alternative but to listen. That is the whole point of the complaints in the subsim community; to generate this level of response. To date, it has simply been unsuccessful. That doesn't mean there won't be a time where it will succeed.

[Julhelm]

Originally Posted by Hinrich Schwab

Do not sales reflect the consumers' response to industry moves? I think you are confusing initiative with influence. In that case, the producers of goods most certainly do have initiative. However, it is the consumer who makes the final judgment.

Sales in themselves offer no qualitiative feedback at all. Did SH5 flop because the game was flawed or did SH5 flop because of UBI DRM. In the end, sales will only show it flopped, so it is commercially unviable and won't be done again. No industry ever has direct input by consumers. Rather, they have designers who do their best to try and work out what the consumers actually want, not what they say they want.

How does this apply to the subsim community? After 10 years of Silent Hunter iterations by Ubi, the community here is rather certain what it wants. Blanket statements like this won't work because semantics will pick them apart. Had you stated, "...the mainstream gamer...", I might have agreed with you.

So what does the community want? Is the community a monolithic block of diehard U-Boat fans or what? Are all these requirements compiled into a charter that can be found somewhere here? See, the problem with gamers in general and simmers in particular is that they all know exactly how to design the perfect game but they can never actually pin down what they want into a feature-by-feature list or any other usable format (And which wouldn't take on unrealistic proportions).

Realism settings and autocrew options can balance this out. It isn't necessarily perfect, but it is better than absolute focus.

I beg to differ. I have never played a hardcore procedural sim where realism settings or autocrew managed to transform the game into casual lite sim. Never. DCS has never turned into SF2 and DW has never turned into RSR by the flick of a few settings in a menu. Because they were designed to focus on different aspects. Realism settings the way they are implemented in DCS and DW only serve to dumb down the procedural simulation to a point which defeats it's purpose. The strength of lite sims has always been that they are designed around really good tactical combat.

While AOD was the best subsim ever, it has its share of flaws, too. Specifically, manual control of the deck gun had to be patched in. Manual control of the deck gun trumps AI auto crew any day of the week, regardless of sim.

See, this is the gist of the problem. You concur AOD is the best subsim ever, yet the first thing you bring up is that it lacked certain features. What about all the features that made AOD the best? What are those? That's a hell of a lot more useful to any dev than the neverending negativity and bitching about lack of features.

Community input is only useful if it has some constructive value to it. You say the internet has given the sim and wargaming community a voice. Then I have to say that voice tends to be mostly negative and confrontative towards developers. I remember the big patch wars on the SimHQ SF boards that not only split the community into two warring camps, but also resulted in the main developer (who had always had an open and communicative presence on the boards) to leave all sim boards completely and now can only be found on his own boards. More recently, how about the huge flamewars between Il-2 and Il-2 CoD communities, the amazing vitriol being spewed towards Luthier on multiple forums. Or how about the ridiculous bitching and trolling in the MS Flight forum on AVSIM, so bad they had to close it down.

Or if we look on this very board, the biggest thread on SHO is a 10+ page rant-fest. Read through that thread. It's literally a bunch of angry reactionaries with an axe to grind because they bought SH5 and found out it sucked even though every review portal on the planet said the game was going to be a lemon.

Actually, go to any place really on the internet where people can have their say, and you'll find they usually have negative things to say. As a designer, I'm much more interested in what you like and why than what you hate.

I am more than aware of that. Pointing that out to me like I just fell of the turnip truck accomplishes nothing.

In an increasingly digital world polluted with DRM, these options are dying out. The new standard is that if one has a computer product one is dissatisfied with, you out the money you spent with no recourse.[/quote]
To be fair, that has always been in the EULAs ever since they started putting EULAs in the installers. You never legally owned those games, you licensed them. DRM is just a way to enforce the EULA. I find the idea ridiculous tbh but that's what we get for voting all these pro-corporate neoliberals into power. It's really a tangent to the discussion and not confined to PC gaming at all like some would imply.

You are stating the obvious. This is Economics 101. Likewise, this is also how consumers can dictate market response; by forcing a product flop.

All that happens by forcing a product flop is that a studio gets shut down and the devs find job elsewhere making farmville clones. Is this really the outcome you want? I doubt it.

However, the only trump to that is if the consumers generate such a vociferous and negative response that the producer in question has no alternative but to listen. That is the whole point of the complaints in the subsim community; to generate this level of response. To date, it has simply been unsuccessful. That doesn't mean there won't be a time where it will succeed.

You don't get it. If a product flops that simply means it is commercially unviable and guarantees it will not be done again. Publishers are publicly traded companies and they only care about turning a profit. If you won't part with your money, they will instead focus on easier consumers who do and who don't start a lot of trouble.

The only way you can hope to have any kind of input or change things is by contributing positive feedback and make sure your pet genre is seen as commercially successful. A massive negative response with calls for boycott etc at this point will only make sure the genre gets buried again, permanently.

[P_Funk]

I think critics of my post are missing a crucial point: target audience. Who are they designing this for? If they're designing it for us then they will make their version but also be aware that a great deal of the community is going to want to create their own. This is why traditionally games have shipped with mission editors, map editors, and even the holy grail of modding the SDK. This however has happened less and less because of the success of console games and the advent of micro transactions. Mods are competition for this cash cow.

Its a cynical mindset that has nothing to do with the health of the community or the long term quality of the product. However, modding potential has given longer life to many games and has in and of itself spawned entire consumer bases based on those mods. I only purchased BF2 to play Project Reality. BF3 however cannot be modded to the same extent as BF2 as easily so the likelihood of anything like PR showing up there is very slim. This is fine for them cause they get their micro transactions from the mainstream community.

But this brings me back to the first point: target audience. Sim communities are pretty much the diametric opposite of mainstream communities. We are niche gamers. We play things that most people don't. Thats fine. They play Call of Duty, I play PR. They play World of Tanks or something, I play IL-2.

There are two audiences at play there, niche and mainstream. They are very different and as such call for very different design decisions. I'm fine with that. I don't need to shame (even though I enjoy it) the mainstream gamer to be able to enjoy my niche game... that is until they start killing all the nice games in favor of trying to turn them into maintream online cash cows.

The simple fact is that they abused and tormented the Silent Hunter community progressively overtime, putting unrealistic pressures on the developers of the games and then basically seeing us as more trouble than we're worth because we won't tolorate a broken game with unsatisfying features that a mainstream audience more readily digests. To be sure broken doesn't work for anyone, but I believe that the progressively worse quality of the Silent Hunter series as it went form 3 through 4 through 5 was a result of them placing mainstream expectations on a niche game. They wanted fast turn over, short development, and quick bucks. Niche games don't work like that and the most successful ones usually have positive relationships between developer and community. This is most easily noticed in how Bohemia, the Arma Infantry Sim developer, interacts with its community. They basically build their game under the assumption that the community will mod it to their liking. They know who their target audience is. They also don't have to answer to a big publisher who doesn't care about the consumer, but just wants to crunch numbers til their bell curves come out with maximum profits for minimum investment looking golden.

But this kind of relationship isn't unprecedented in the history of mainstream gaming. Many major mods for mainstream games have lead to strong relationships with the original developer. A perfect example of this is the Forgotten Hope mod for Battlefield 2. Many of the developers of this mod have been hired by DICE (the original developer of BF2) and have done things like develop mod tools for them, etc. And lets not forget the meteoric rise of Valve. Even Team Fortress 2, one of the greatest and most well balanced online FPS games, was originally a mod for Quake that became a mod for HL1 that became a retail product in the Source engine from Half-Life2.

Remember Half-Life? That game was a real gem for modders and as a result some incredible titles spawned from it. One of the most popular and successful online FPSs was originally a community mod: Counterstrike. Day of Defeat Classic was a winner for a 2001 mod competition which became another title sold by Valve which was then updated, just like TF2, into Day of Defeat Source.

Modding may not directly influence specific decisions in design very often these days but there's no denying that they've had a huge impact on the growth of gaming over the last decade+, but that doesn't mean that mods and developer don't have a potential relationship outside of the Valve model either. The entire thing is about potential. Developers used to always release some kind of tool set for modders. They saw it as an investment in their project. Now however Publishers are preferring short life spans for their games so that they can maximize the profit from new releases or microtransactions over time from online games. Just look at Call of Duty. They're releasing one practically every year but the changes are incredibly minor. MW3 apparently has statics in a few maps from MW1 in it for heaven's sake!

So, what am I really saying? That modders have always been a big part of the history of gaming and only recently have publishers been trying to suffocate us out of existence as micro transactions have risen to prominence in the post Xbox world and as piracy has lead many publishers to rely on online games to protect against this.

But one thing I have to disagree with is the assertion that the consumer has no impact on the design process. Every product under the sun has some kind of consumer test group. You make a new cereal you get a bunch of kids together and see if they actually like what it tastes like.

So what does that mean for us here? It means that if the new SH Online game doesn't taste good to us, the old simmers, then they aren't trying to sell us stuff anymore. Fine, the game was less and less our cup of tea. But what have gamers always done when a game didn't meet their tastes? They modded it, but not anymore. Online precludes this, deliberately. They are trying to do an end run around our own preferences to force us to 'settle' for only whats available.

So why do I get so upset about this? Because I've always lived in my niche, letting the mainstream live in theirs. But now more and more they're chasing the niche out of gaming in favor of courting the mainstream and even trying to force reluctant buyers to have to buy into the microtrans system even if they normally wouldn't fork it over. I mean, how can you NOT buy that map pack that got released day 1 if everyone else is? Basically you're not just buying a $50 game on release day, you're also buying a $10 map pack, and probably a few more, and by the time they're done with you you're paying the better part of $100 for a game that you may or may not love to death but when you get tired of the content you have you can't even go and make your own map because they don't wnat you to anymore AND on top of it all you have to buy one of THEIR dedicated servers because they don't release server code anymore! (See: BF3).

I don't begrudge the mainstream their piece of the pie, hell they can take 99% of the pie, so why do these publishers keep trying to turn that little minority into the rest of the mainstream? Its infuriating.


OH! And one more thing if you're still reading. All those games listed as being great out of the box without any community involvement, well... how old are most of them? When was the last time a game was shipped and didn't beg for a mod or a patch or something to make it even half as good as those great games that came ready to rock and roll a decade ago?

Gaming is changing and its not for the better as far as us niche players are concerned. I don't see why thats a silly point of view.

[Sailor Steve]

Originally Posted by Hinrich Schwab

While AOD was the best subsim ever, it has its share of flaws, too. Specifically, manual control of the deck gun had to be patched in. Manual control of the deck gun trumps AI auto crew any day of the week, regardless of sim.

AOD was the most realistic subsim ever, gameplay-wise. You're saying that it couldn't be the best until they put in something that is totally unrealistic? That strikes me as odd, to say the least.

[Julhelm]

@Pfunk:

Believe it or not, I actually agree with most of your points. What I disagree with is the notion that constant bitching brings any positive change. The big publishers are publicly traded corporate shareholders who only exist to be as profitable as possible to their shareholders.

This is just the way it is now with the death of 2nd tier publishers and no amount of complaining will turn back the clock.

Bohemia is clearly an exception to the rule, but they have some more leverage by being independent. There's also Eagle Dynamics and Gaijin. The problem is that most of these new independent studios that do show up are only concerned with (big surprise) quick profits and being the next Rovio or Zynga and try to move into the casual/mobile/online market with derivative products. Apparently it must be real easy to get financial backing for that kind of stuff.

What we as a community do need is to support up and coming studios that move into this niche, and be ready to accept a 2nd or 3rd tier game. Basically forget about AAA sims for the time being.

[Herr-Berbunch]

Originally Posted by Julhelm

Basically forget about AAA sims for the time being.

If we forget about quality sims then they'll die out - out of sight, out of mind - the big money men will all shake each others todgers and congratulate themselves on being right - 'Look, they don't need sims, they're not missing sims, we'll save a heap-load of money now we don't have to cater for them!'


*edit - by sims I mean proper, nearasdamnit, simulated machinery/mechanisms - not that crappy series that seems to dominate all webstores when I click under the simulation category!

[Julhelm]

Dude, we're already there. AAA sims are dead, buried, finito. The disasters that were SH5 and Il-2 CoD saw to that. What we can have is A or AA sims like ARMA or Take on Helicopters.

[Herr-Berbunch]

Originally Posted by Julhelm

Dude, we're already there. AAA sims are dead, buried, finito. The disasters that were SH5 and Il-2 CoD saw to that. What we can have is A or AA sims like ARMA or Take on Helicopters.

DCS: A-10C anyone? Or DCS anything, if they're not AAA. . .

And there is still hope for the latest IL-2, it's not been given up on by the devs or the community. Yet.