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

Just woke up, saw the new subforum, said to myself, "Whaaaa?" :hmmm:

Now, I am seeing a lot of vitriol here, but I'm not sure if it is because Subsimmers don't trust Ubi to actually pull it off and make it a total success from a gameplay standpoint, or because people are objecting to the very concept of an "online" (MMO?) subsim. Clarify please.

A bit of both.

With all of the very verbose posts, I figured the answer would be obvious. To make a long story short, The objection to the MMO format is because that MMOs are casual by nature. Subsimmers, excluding those who do admit to preferring a more casual experience, want as real and historically accurate experience as possible. Ideally, a sub sum should be so real that the only thing a player needs to provide is the stink of the engines and crew.:D The MMO format cannot supply that experience because of one core incompatibility; death is cheap in MMOs. In a true sub sim,when you are dead, you are dead.*

Without going off on a tirade, Ubisoft has consistently proven that its only care is trying to become another EA Games. It has consistently shown that, at the executive level, they do not care about the gamers that purchase their products. Silent Hunter 5, for many was the last straw. SH5 is barely 2 years old, the last official patch came out after two months of release and support officially cancelled in a year. Dan Dimitrescu stated in a recent post that he tried to convince the suits at Ubi to exclude its stupid, intrusive, broken DRM and they would not listen to him. Ubisoft has proven repeatedly and consistently that they do not care about anything except developing a "cash camel" franchise to compete with Call of Duty or World of Warcraft. They want zero-effort profits.

That means screwing the grognards of the subsim community, who demand high quality, historically accurate products.



*I know that one can save scum in even the best subsim, but the grognards do not. :)

Well said! Both parts, but especially the first, very well said. :rock:

Both, but moreso Ubi's hankering for a quick buck over an extremely loyal fan-base.

Finish any of the previous SH series to the promise and potential and people might finally have a reason to believe in, and further support, Ubi. :yep:

I think Ubisoft trying to simply move on without any recognition of their past crimes is what grates me most. The lack of care and communication to their customers can only be described by words which break forum rules IMHO.

I hold no grudge with the new dev team, so long as they don't pull the weak graphics vs. good gameplay card as I don't want to play this on an iPad.

The message is simple give us a simulation superior to SH 3, 4 & 5.

...what happens if its an amazing success?

Well I hope it is - drag 'em in to subsims and convert 'em to the rest of the series (and all the other games around here) and pray (note to Ubi chiefs that word is not prey) that Ubi will finally realise what they've to do.

I'm not holding my breath.

Define success. Financially? Game quality?

Where does the measure of success exist? We all know that its subjective. The question of success goes to the very core design principle being applied to the game itself. Sims have a very different messure of success in both the financial and quality categories compared to more mainstream casual ventures. Its a fact that sims are a niche product while online games are almost always targeted towards casual mainstream gamers. There are obvious exceptions, Eve Online being one of them, but thats the exception to the rule.

If you look at the history of Silent Hunter you can see that even a dedicated sim product doesn't easily satisfy its target audience and is only truly realized with heavy modification. Online games however are by their very nature unmoddable. This means that we only get the product we're sold and there's little hope that this online game will be in any way better than any release of Silent Hunter since the last one was far from complete even when it was dropped as a supported product.

So, can it be a success? Sure, I guess. But the odds are so bad that there's basically no chance. The fact is that they shat the bed on SH5 and the suits probably read from that that you can't rely on the simmer base to be a loyal customer (igoring the fact that they sold us a lemon by our standards). So they decided to try and expand their audience to the mainstream gamer. They will of course use the IP to try and tempt the old market but withou a doubt they're going to be aiming to grab a larger one.

Personally even if the game is a perfectly good sim it doesn't interest me to have to pay recurring fees to properly enjoy it. Even if its a one time payment to unlock the full feature list you can be sure that #1 they will be adding more content at a fee and #2 that you will never be allowed to mod the game since it lives in an online format.

So, whatever the final quality of this game it will not be in any way like our vision of Silent Hunter. It will not allow us to mod it which is for me a deal breaker. I have become increasingly disenfranchised with mainstream gaming. What games I do pay for I almost entirely enjoy via mods and play amongst those people. Without mods I can't say I expect to play this game much if at all. Even a single stupid feature cannot be changed without mods, and yet we all know how much we've come to love here the incredible list of innovative changes modders have made over time breaking the puzzle of these games' code.

So, will it be successful? Maybe, by their standards. By my standards it can never be successful because it cannot be modded and it cannot be played offline and as a result it has shut the door on the most satisfying part of gaming for me: the community mod aspect.

No mods, no offline, no community control or direction, no dice. Simple as that.

No mods, no offline, no community control or direction, no dice. Simple as that.

P_Funk


Now that's a good line.:up:

You sir, deserve a medal for that line.

I think that line of reasoning is silly. Most of my favorite games of all time were made without community input and without the possibility of modding:

Fast Attack
Zeewolf
Red Storm Rising
X-COM
Strike Commander
Jet Fighter 2, 3
Aces of the Deep

etc.

It's interesting that all those games and sims were less complex than contemporary sims. Most simmers tend to agree that AOTD is the best U-Boat sim ever, but ironically as a simulator it is in fact less complex than SH3 or SH5.

thanks P funk for the immotive responce.
'We all know that its subjective' this is an interesting point. 'We' must include UBI. how did they come to the conclusion
that producing yet another sub- game would be succesful?

after the debacle of SH5 what were they/are they thinking?
im intrigued. whish i was a fly on the wall during the meltdown in those sh5 meetings.

i beleive that sh5 was aimed more at the casual player, so that its not so complex as its predecessors.

this would mean, perhaps, a more arcade style point and shoot set up.
i guess for me the 'success' thing would be; purely as successful as it can be at the level or individual it is aimed at - no more. and if you have to pay then the paying individual is the target. and if your not concerned about mods - then this is for you.

i think trying to understand a companies motivation to create something like online submarines can only mean arcade style gaming. i cant believe they are interested in the hard core player and modder. only last weekend my friend asked me 'are you STILL playing that game?'.....like i should grow up?
'i am STILL.' i replied. he can not see my love of it and its REAL history, and so i can not beleive that the company can or wants to take players like me and thousands of others seriously otherwise SH5 would have been finished correctly, time taken and investment added.

and who knows, maybe they would have gone on to produce
online submarines anyway. ( the market just aint big enough for the both of us!)

'But the odds are so bad that there's basically no chance.' i do not agree so readily. can you imagine sh3 or sh5 with its own wolf packs commanable by the player? maybe with this online thing there will be a possibilty if it takes off? (edit; just been to the site - saw the wolpacks stuff; not a bad idea - each has a sub and working together. it has to be one of the things lacking in the Silent Hunter series; Wolfpacks: a big part of the real history.)

'So they decided to try and expand their audience to the mainstream gamer.' why would they follow on from a damaged product with the possibilty of another failure? surely they - as a gaming company, have some idea whats out there in terms of possibility and saleability.

'So, whatever the final quality of this game it will not be in any way like our vision of Silent Hunter.' P funk, they dont need us! they want a different type of gamer. they are sick to death of our bleating and complaining and demanding - maybe they are hoping to throw it open to a whole new generation of online gamer?

who needs those old simmers anyway. let them play in the bath with their wooden u boats - we're after something new!! ( thats me, waxing!)
seems like they are trying their hand at mmo's. its probably where the future is. get everyone together playing online - then we know where they are and we can control the content. dont want those old modders messin' with our stuff, they've had it too easy.
(maybe im being cynical!)

maybe other questions are: what will happen to pc games in the future? what will happen to sims? how popular are sims and other pc games in light of consoles and online?
'It will not allow us to mod it which is for me a deal breaker.' they dont NEED us, The Old Guard.

your words are true, but i beleive the answers are in your questions. when i read between your lines i can almost see how it will 'PROBABLY' go in the future. though i may be wrong too, i hope!

'No mods, no offline, no community control or direction, no dice. Simple as that.' those of us that care dont have a voice loud enough to change it - they know that, and they dont care.

its going like television; turn it on, look at it, use it, switch it off. done.
can you imagine everyone who had a TV could change the content of each programme to suite themselves - add to it, remove stuff from it?
the TV companies would pull their hair out and then collapse. giving people such freedom and control messes with the status quo. online is where its at. our 'little community' is just that 'little.'

but you never know. there may come a group of modders who could write their own script according to the likes and demands of its community. but even then - not everyone will be happy!

cheers:salute:

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.

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.

I thought he answered that in his post. He gave a list, and AOD, which was made with no community input, is still widely regarded as the best sumsim of all time.

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".

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.

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.

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.

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

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.


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

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.