[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.