The future of Submarine simulations

[Hinrich Schwab]

Originally Posted by Cybermat47

If Silent Hunter was sold to another company, who actually tested their games, and released betas, I reckon that subsims would be stronger than ever.

I say that if SHO does poorly enough, have Subsim start a Kickstarter campaign to buy the rights from Ubisoft and make SH6 ourselves.

[Julhelm]

Wouldn't it be better to spend all the cash on development? I can't possibly imagine they'd sell the IP for cheap even if the games go poorly.

[the_tyrant]

silent hunter as an IP isn't really worth much I'm afraid

There are no iconic characters, and there is no original story.

[Julhelm]

Neither does Homeworld, which is another beloved IP that so happens to be owned by Activision/Blizzard and so the chance of anyone buying it and making a new game is close to zero. Unfortunately these big corporations tend to hold on to stuff forever even if they have no plans to do anything with it.

[BigBANGtheory]

Originally Posted by Julhelm

Neither does Homeworld, which is another beloved IP that so happens to be owned by Activision/Blizzard and so the chance of anyone buying it and making a new game is close to zero. Unfortunately these big corporations tend to hold on to stuff forever even if they have no plans to do anything with it.

I think you'll find that THQ owns it as it wasn't passed to Sega with its purchase of Relic.

Tbh I'm not sure I care too much about the SH brand, in some ways SHO would have benefited from not using it I think.

[Julhelm]

No Activison has it from buying up Sierra

[Schmonzo]

Originally Posted by Hinrich Schwab

I say that if SHO does poorly enough, have Subsim start a Kickstarter campaign to buy the rights from Ubisoft and make SH6 ourselves.

A Kickstarter Subsim is really needed. I think it would really pay off for the devs and the players. I'd never thought I'd use this silly frase, but: I would throw money at my screen

[Bilge_Rat]

Subsims are dead.

[Cybermat47]

Originally Posted by Bilge_Rat

Subsims are dead.

Bilge_Rat, I am very dissapoint

We should just make our own!

[Herr-Berbunch]

Originally Posted by Cybermat47

Bilge_Rat, I am very dissapoint

We should just make our own!

You're young enough, go learn.

Personally, I'm waiting for DCS to realise they need a sub sim in their repertoire.

[DedEye]

I strongly agree, any new subsim should do its best to distance itself from the Silent Hunter series.

After SH 5 I vowed I would not buy (or F2P) another Ubisoft product unless it was met with universal critical acclaim from both the press and the community.

I think it says a lot about the mindset of a company when its executive makes a statement that 95% of their customers steal from them. You seriously believe that? Incredible...... and insulting.

They release bug riddled software with broken or missing features, kick out a token patch or 2 that fixes issues that often have already been solved by modders, leave the hard coded bugs in, and walk away. Not just once, 4 times in the SH franchise alone. Cliffs of Dover worked out really well too didn't it? Glad I passed on that one.

Why would I keep supporting a company that behaves in such a way?

Btw, I feel bad for the guys on the ground who worked so hard on them.

The great thing about sims though is the fans tend to be very passionate about their hobby. I have little doubt that there is a group of people out there with big ideas for the next great subsim! Well there is here already!

I think there is still a market for a good (both quality & substance) subsim. I think if one were to appear, it would be very successful, and have large and dedicated folllowing.

I'm willing to wait, have many times

Wrt to aircraft, Rise of Flight is very good; I wait for sales to buy aircraft. I hear there's a deal in the works for a "real" sequel to Il2 as well

[Sonarman]

Originally Posted by Bilge_Rat

Subsims are dead.

I think they are only "dead" because publishers don't want to make fund/them any more due to the risk/reward ratio... it's much easier to churn out an FPS/RTS or cute puppy game.

The market for subsims is still there. Most of the SH series achieved sales of around 300,000 which was considered a healthy number for a simulation game and sims have traditionally have had a longer shelf life than most other genre games. Ubi have developed SHO as a free to play primarily because they see the PC as being riddled with piracy, their CEO Yves Guillemot quoted a figure of 95%.

Ironically I believe in the case of SH5 it was their own "always on" anti piracy DRM scheme that negatively impacted on the sales which they may have wrongly attributed to piracy of the product resulting in a premature death of the dvd-rom series and the creation of Silent Hunter Online.

[PL_Andrev]

There is another interesting project - WarThunder (http://www.warthunder.com). At this moment this game is focused to the planes, but at the future the developers plan to add fleet units.

Some core ideas which may suggest submarine simulation available in the future:

• There are some modes, and one of them is a 'simulation' (FRB) with limited ammo, view, physics model where player should control some features to avoid self-destroying,
• Long time missions (for human controlled planes is 1 hour), or not limited time mission against AI,
• Destroyers are "a light warship designed mostly to fight against enemy submarines and aircraft",

Hope dies last?


No more detailed info at all.

[Blacklight]

I seriously don't want ANOTHER Uboat sim. I'm so tired of World War II. Give me a nice Cold War subsim. I enjoy Dangerous Waters a LOT more than the Silent Hunter games and play it a LOT more. Cold War subsims are a totally untapped market! EVERYONE does World War II sims. I'm sick of them. I want my modern or Cold War era weapons systems and platforms!

My holy grails right now are 1. A new "Dangerous Waters", and 2. A new "Harpoon" (that actually works and isn't a buggy mess).

That said, I think that the game industry is only focused on "Mass Market" console games or apps for iPhones now. The tendancy now is to leave the PC's behind. PC game releases are getting rarer and rarer compared to console and smartphone games.

The other problem is, sadly, that I don't see us getting much in the way of "new blood" into the hardcore sim community. The younger people who we need to flow into the community are, for the most part, not attracted to games that are slow moving, and especially not ones where they have to read a manual to learn to play. Do you know how many people my Dangerous Waters manual has scared off from even giving the game a try? I'd love to give society the benefit of the doubt, but I just don't see the younger generation, that we need to bolster the community, having anywhere NEAR the attention span that's needed to play these games. I just don't see it.

This period that we're in now kind of feels like the way that the role playing game community dried up in the 90's. After a while, when I would go to a role playing game convention, it was just a bunch of us old guys there. There was a period where the younger people just weren't flowing in to keep it alive. Sadly, I see this happening with the hardcore sim community too. Most members are old and way outnumbers the new young blood.

In order to even get a company's interest in this, we're going to have to somehow attract new blood so that we can DEMONSTRATE our numbers and our interest.

So the question we should be asking is, "How can we attract younger gamers, and keep them engaged and interested?" and "How can we grow this community?"

The next best option would be some kind of "Kickstarter" campaign. But we're not going to get interest unless we show them that our community is large enough to maintain sales and is growing.

Maybe Subsim could become the next "Sonolysts"? I mean, we have plenty of REALLY smart people who know a LOT about modern naval stuff here. I'm sure that we have people who know how to make great game graphics here. Maybe Subsim should become a forum, AND a subsim creation collective?

[Kaleun_Endrass]

Originally Posted by Blacklight

The next best option would be some kind of "Kickstarter" campaign. But we're not going to get interest unless we show them that our community is large enough to maintain sales and is growing.

Maybe Subsim could become the next "Sonolysts"? I mean, we have plenty of REALLY smart people who know a LOT about modern naval stuff here. I'm sure that we have people who know how to make great game graphics here. Maybe Subsim should become a forum, AND a subsim creation collective?

I have a very similar thought of this in my mind for a long time now. I think that we won't get another sub sim game from a game studio (independent or publisher-bound) because we (submarine playing PC gamers) are a too small niche for them to start a financially risky project. After experienced SH3 to SH5, SHO isn't a sub sim gameplay-wise for me and I think for most of the other members too.
So the only solution is and will be: "develop our own sub sim".
There are just 3 options to do that:
1) just start the project (open-source or behind closed doors, doesn't matter)
3) start a crowd-funding project to hire a game studio
2) start a crowd-funding project to buy SH5 (what wouldn't work because of Ubi and SHO, so there are actually 2 options only)

Each option has pro and cons and I strongly believe that none option will work all alone. But i think that a good mix of 1) and 2) with the constant influence of our community and under the patronage of SUBSIM, which would for instance allow new members fill gaps where dev-team members quit, will work. Such a project should be SUBSIM-based because here all the flotillas and the submarine communities around the web are participating and can bring in man-power. SUBSIM-based would definitely bring in more support. Using a public part of the forum for reports of the development process, binding the community to the project and attract "new blood" and a closed area for the devs only would be working great (I experienced such a method back in my 9th-flotilla times, a german subsim forum, when we were doing SH3 mods and it worked very good).

Unfortunately I have to disappoint you Blacklight. A Uboat subsim should be the first goal to approach because with this theme we know the most technically. We have countless more resources for uboats, PTO submarines and the whole WW2 era than for modern warfare and modern naval weapon systems.
I have to admit that a cold war era and modern subs tempt me and one important feature of our self-made subsim game has to be a modular architecture where you can do campaign-based content and systems (DLL, scripts, assets, etc.) So it would be possible to create a cold-war campaign later on or parallel by enthusiasts.

As I mentioned above I have that thought of building an own submarine simulation for a long time now (to be honest since half year after SH3 was released). Over time there were similar threads like this one but the necessarity to stick more to this topic was never greater than now, because few years back SH4 and SH5 were in sight. But now there is nothing comparable anywhere, no projects like Danger from the Deep, no total conversation mods whatsoever. It's good to see that more people are interested in keeping our genre alive and start such forum threads.

I've backed and am following the development of Star Citizen by legendary Chris Roberts right now and over there I've got some pretty good ideas for how to do a SUBSIM sub sim.
And right here the very important question is raised: Will SUBSIM (Neal Stevens) support such a project?