[mystery meat]

Gamespy has posted its impressions of Silent Hunter 3. It details the campaign with good and bad news. The good is confirmation of multiple patrol theaters. Then comes this devestating sentence:

"Not surprisingly, missions require you to destroy boats. Specifically, you'll be required to sink a certain tonnage of enemy vessels."

Horror! The campaign will be like Silent Hunter 2! You know what, I will STILL buy this game for the atmosphere and graphics and hope that our esteemed mod community can go about its work.

Here is the article:
http://pc.gamespy.com/pc/silent-hunter-iii/515863p1.html

[america person]

damn it yet another crappy campaign, ohh well, hope fully it wont be TOO shity eh? anyway i found this intresting:

"As you progress through the game, your crew (assuming they survive) will become more experienced and efficient in their jobs. The missions you're provided and your resources will also depend on how well you do as a U-boat commander. Do your job well and you'll be rewarded with better subs and experimental weaponry like acoustic torpedoes. Do your job poorly, and you'll find yourself depressingly short on your precious torpedoes. "


the part about not enough fish scares me hope i do well when it comes out

[mystery meat]

that's interesting though. If you do poorly you wont get torpedoes, but that means the game will ALLOW you to do poorly, right? Circumstantially, this contradicts the idea of having to sink ships on pain of repeating the mission. It's a mystery.

[CaptJodan]

My "guess" would be that it would be tallied similar to SH2, in that you'll have a primary objective of X tons to sink. Once you've sunk that many, and if you turn around there and go home, then you're "Not very good". Then you have secondary and tertiary goals which you either sink more tons, or sink some special ship, and that will give you more of a high ranking among your superiors.

Just guessing, but I doubt very much that they'd put this requirement for sinking of tonnage there unless they intended to hold you to it somehow. I suppose it IS possible that that tonnage count is there simply to show you where you should reach in order to have a successful patrol, and that I certainly wouldn't object to. You'd then have an idea of what command wants from your patrol.

Too much speculating, not enough factuating. It's maddening.

[Elder-Pirate]

america person, you may want to cool the sh*** word or you may find yourself in a little hot water here. By using it it does not show any inteligence whatso ever either.

[Thunderhorse]

Oh Lordy.....here we go again.....sounds like we'll have to sink 25,000 tons and the destroyers Silly, Rediculous, and Crazy to proceed in the campaign. :nope: Why, why, why do they do this....I'll never understand. :nope:

-Thunderhorse-

[Sea Demon]

I liked SH2, but this feature of having to sink a defined tonnage always stopped me from completing the campaign. Fact is, I've never played it through. I get bored repeating the same mission because I don't sink enough. It won't stop me from buying SH3 but I, like the first post, would hope for some work from the modding community.

SD

[Thunderhorse]

I'm with ya, Sea Demon. I admit I'll be one of the first ones to go and buy SH3. It sounds like one hell of a sim. But if the campaign is indeed set up to where we have to complete tonnage-based objectives to continue with each mission, then I hope it's open ended enough to allow us to alter the mission objectives at least in the campaign files or however it's set up. I never did like the tonnage-based primary objectives in SH2, because it wasn't realistic and I too lost quickly lost interest in the game because the targets were always in the same position, at the same times no matter how many times you played the mission. Now in SH3, they may be randomly placed each time you play the mission so as to not appear the same each time, but still....you're forced to sink xxx tons or a particular vessel(s) to advance to the next mission. Even with randomly placed contacts, it will still get old after a short while. I dunno....we'll have to wait and see! Hopefully since the program is still in alpha, they will read all of our postings here and seriously reconsider the tonnage-based objective approach...which in my opinion, and I believe every one else's here, totally ruins the reality of being a sub commander and participating in a simulated war, which this sim is supposed to be based on.

-Thunderhorse-

[wamphyri]

I'm with all of you and feel that the setup of the campaign isn't what we want .. however, look at it from a different point of view. I think the makers of SH3 had to go with a design that wouldn't make ppl new to the WW2 submarine games get annoyed with how "easy" it is to finish the campaign.

What i'm refering to is that if it were set so that you only had to get to your assigned patrol area and back to port to pass the mission then ppl who haven't played every sub sim like us might do just that not knowing that the thrill of the hunt is the reason to be playing!! (longest sentence i've ever writen) So i think that SH3 is setup in this way so new sub commanders will be forced to hunt for the tonnage required to pass the mission.

But this is just my 2 cents .. i'll only be annoyed by this if it's hard for me to pass the missions :huh: .. but PA at the moment is kickin my arse so i don't expect to pass any


Wamphyri

[Drebbel]

This sounds really bad to me

[Thunderhorse]

I'm afraid you're right....sounds like they've designed the campaign to cater to all audiences (i.e. newcomers to the subsim world that may be so new to the genre that they don't appreciate the time it takes to detect a convoy/merchant, stealthfully sneak up on it, get into attack position, and launch at attack trying at the same time to avoid any escorts that may be accompanying the convoy/merchant). The very first subsim I ever purchased was Silent Hunter, and I admit the first time I played it I was discouraged because everytime I tried to sink an enemy merchant, the AI was so good (or I was so bad) that I was bombarded with escort depth charge attacks, and usually they were successful! I thought to myself....this is ridiculous! Then I began researching into how it really was for submarine commanders during WWII, and I found out that that was how it really was...lol I think they should have a "casual campaign" option to where the tonnage requirements/specific ship sinking requirements would apply to action-oriented players who wanna blow stuff up and advance, and a "hardcore campaign" option to where the objective would be to sink as much enemy tonnage as possbile and to return to base....based more on reality, as well as the campaign structure of Silent Hunter....maybe this is already how it is, I dunno....more specific information would be requried on this. This would at least satisfy both the casual gamer that may be entering into the genre as well as the hardcore subsimmer.....we would have a choice as to what level of realism we'd like to play. We all know that outside of us "hardcore" subsimmers, the usual person that see's a new susbim on the shelf thinks..."a submarine game.....hmm...I can blow up as much as I can and get medals and if I rack up enough points, maybe they'll be some special celebration screen at the end of the game...or maybe I can unlock new levels". We've all been there at one point or another. I think that if they are trying to make the game/sim accessible to all types of gamers, then they shouldn't forget about us "hardcore" subsimmers that like our subsims to be historically accurate and true to what the real u-boat commanders of yesteryear faced. Sorry to ramble on, but it's how I feel.

-Thunderhorse-

[irishred]

[sergbuto]

[Thunderhorse]

Perhaps your right Sergbuto.....it certainly makes sense. Perhaps they should rename it "Scripted Hunter III".

Maybe I'm going too far with that , but still, if the campaign is similar to Silent Hunter I, then they should realize that Silent Hunter I is still being played to this day.....just because you have an open-ended campaign style, like Silent Hunter I, doesn't mean it will scare away causal gamers. I dunno, I'm going crazy thinking about this. I think I'll sit back and see how it pans out....I'm sure (hopefully) we'll be getting more detailed information on all aspects of the campaign (and the sim for that matter) in the coming weeks.

-Thunderhorse-

[JJ]

What I really don't understand is why every single game has to be made "easily accessible to new-comers"?

I mean.. if I'd suddenly have an elightment that I must proceed to the "simulator world" (which I've already had ) with my computer gamings and head down to the game shop to grab a title called "Blah blah blah SIMULATOR", I pretty damn right expect it to be simulating it's real life counter parts as realistically as possible. And I expect it to be inhumanly difficult at first if I don't possess any previous experience/knowledge regarding to that particuar category. Whether it'd be racing, flying, sailing or whatever. But what I'm NOT expecting is that it's made "easily accessible to new-comers" with some ridiculous arcade-like features that kills all that there is for a game to be a simulator. At least there should be a huge selection button, clearly visible for arcade- and hardcore-modes. And when in hardcore-mode, game shouldn't give you(the player) any mercy what so ever. And then, when feeling wussy or maybe don't have too much time, you could switch to Arcade-mode and just hop in for a quick battle, race or flight. But these two modes shouldn't be mixed in the same gameplay. It does sound strange if new simulator is stripped down from it's simulator features in the favor of new-comers? I'd imagine that new-comers to sims are interested in simulators, eh?

But what comes to SH3 I won't say a thing, this way or the other until I've played it myself and seen what's it all about.

-JJ