Quote:
Originally Posted by drEaPer
Since I m grinding anyway, because the process of doing so is fun, where is the problem?
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The bigger issue appears to be a matter of how it's perceived as handled.
When you play SH*, your goal isn't to, for instance, rank up to a new submarine. Not directly, at least. Instead, your goal is to survive and destroy ships, and you happen to get upgrades somewhat coincidentally as time progresses. By comparison, when you have a grind system that uses XP to unlock, it shifts the focus away from sinking ships and surviving to progressing to the next newer, better submarine.
It won't happen to some people who prefer to not notice such details, since they're still playing the same game (operating under an assumption here). But, the majority of a community will most certainly not make the distinction, and it certainly becomes a matter of getting the next newer, better thing, whatever it is.
Using World of Tanks as an example (PVP instead of PVE, mind), even if the gameplay is fun, the purpose for playing often appears to strictly be progression to the next tank in a progressively longer somewhat linear grind. The gameplay is fun, but the end-goal is always the drive, and that is the fundamental disconnect that will happen when you very obviously throw a grind on top of a game that, by nature, can be construed as a grind due to its somewhat repetitive gameplay.
It's not the repetition that's the problem, or the gameplay. It's the focus of why you're doing the gameplay, and it can become overbearing and take over the community as a whole.
Granted, on an individual basis this may not be a problem, and depending on the communities that develop within the game, if you find your niche community this shouldn't be an issue.
But, what really does concern me is the somewhat heavy handed comments about how the game is going to be casualized.
I don't know about everyone here, but I'm fairly certain a number of us all play at different levels of difficulty and desire different forms of "simulation", from competency of the enemy AI, realism of behavior and routes, and so on, to difficulty of placing shots and finding targets and so on and so forth.
I, personally, play SH5 at the 40-50% mark since, for example, I don't like dud torpedoes and can't handle the TDC at all, nor do I have a desire to do so (among other things). But, I know a lot of people here, since I've perused here often, prefer the game moving so close to simulation that it may as well be analogous to real life during WW2 as a captain. I'm more concerned with how Ubi is going to handle the situation, since this is PVE, so that a player like me, who wants the game to be easier and more of a turkey shoot, but doesn't mind handling logistics such as fuel consumption and finding convoys and the like, versus another player like these boards seem to have, who want to handle all that I do but without a free-floating camera, with dud torps, using the TDC manually, and trying to find ships with active sonar intentionally trying to find
everything in a given area.
It can be handled Bastion style, where it's a choose your own difficulty for enhanced rewards...or it could be handled as a one size fits all system...but it seems like, depending on how it's structured, this could be incredibly off-putting to a number of people, especially the more hardcore fans of the simulation aspect of the game.
Either way, I'll need to keep an eye on this, but I am not a fan of a browser-based 3D game...at all...