A New Interview With Realism Consultant for SHO

[Sailor Steve]

Originally Posted by Julhelm

What's the difference?

You'll likely get a different answer for that with every person you ask. It isn't really about the nature of the game itself, but rather the nature of the person playing it. A person who likes games usually likes to play a huge variety of things, because he likes his entertainment. A person who likes sims isn't interested in playing anything. He wants to imagine he's in the middle of his favorite subject period, reliving the actual experience, for good and for bad. The ultimate example of this is probably Falcon, in which the player becomes the pilot of an F-16, and nothing else. It's only one step below an actual training simulator.

The hardcore sub-simmer wants to experience being the captain of a submarine, and nothing else. The gamer wants to play a submarine game. The complaints about SH5 stem mainly from the fact that the devs seem to have tried to make a game that both simmer and gamer would enjoy, and failed at both. It's too labor-intensive for the casual gamer, and lacks what the hardcore simmers want. Of course the hardcore simmers are slaves to what they already think of as "definitive sims", which were Aces Of The Deep and Silent Hunter 1. The argument against that is that those two games weren't necessarily "definitive" so much as just first. Anything, when you look at it, could be better, depending on your point of view. It really hinges on what the individual expects of the experience.

The letdown of SH4 and SH5 stems from the fact that SH3 had some extreme flaws, and its two successors didn't fix those, and in a couple of cases made it worse by getting rid of things we did like about SH3. Now we have SHO, which is getting rid of even more things that the hardcore simmers loved about the originals.

I'm not complaining about it, because it's aimed at a different market than me, and that's fine. I'm just trying to answer your question and explain the percieved difference between a game and a sim. I say "percieved", because of course the perception itself hinges on what each individual player expects of the experience. In reality it's a no-win situation for everybody, and there are no real answers. We all have to compromise in one way or another.