I had been looking forward to the latest release in the Silent Hunter series, Wolves of the Pacific. UBISoft’s track record in the past has been very poor, but I was still somehwat hopeful SH4 would be least mildly release quality when it finally hit the stores. Sadly, such is not the case. It appears SH4 is a complete and utter failure, yet another beta game shipped by UBISoft. I cannot say I am completely surprised.
Many of the issues are hard to fathom. SH4 shipped to stores without support for the imperial system. All measurements are in meters unless you know to install the latest patch, available so soon after the game hit the shelves it screams beta release. Embarrassingly, the game does not support anti-aliasing with any graphics card, which is almost unimaginable. Further the graphics are stuck at 1024×768 with no higher resolution option available for in-game graphics at present. And, there are phantom polygons! Words cannot express my disappointment.
Aside from that, we run into gameplay issues. There’s still no functional player death cam, an obvious omission. The U.S. Navy medals are all wrong, which is laughable. The game ships with no clear description of the torpedo load out, so you’re left to your own devices to determine what each type is. Strangely, save games can mysteriously fail. I can’t imagine why you might want to save your progress. (And UBISoft Silent Hunter titles have been having various save game issues since the ones I clearly recall from SH2!)
In fact, just to demonstrate the extent to which Silent Hunter 4 is abortion-ware, the community has setup the sh4bugs Web site to track game bugs and issues. The community has all the tools in place to perform the game beta testing UBISoft didn’t bother doing in the first place. The community is so desperate for a decent subsim, they’ll do almost anything.
I can completely understand that. I personally spend four months working on the Improved Convoys mod for SH3. I wanted those convoy encounters to be so good… I really did. Just like I want to believe in Silent Hunter. Truely, I do.
But SH4 is too colossal a failure. I am far too busy with other projects in my life to help fix yet another UBISoft abandonware-ware release. I really wish someone else would just buy the rights to Silent Hunter and save it!
Fortunately, there’s DangerDeep, which is already impressive and someday will probably easily eclipse Silent Hunter in terms of quality.
All I ask is a release quality build, a decent medal system, a functional damage model, and the abandonment of the pointless and broken crew management paradigm. Honestly, SH2 got most of these things correct! It’s amazing this is so much to ask for, especially the release quality part!
Sigh. *goes back to BF2*
10 Comments
Thanks for the head’s up. I was looking forward to making career mods for this game but I decided to forget it. The art looks like crap compared to SH3. The interior shots actually have a comic book texture to them. They seem flat and lifeless. The thought of going through another year of game-hell to make this game worth while is just too much.
I know that Ubi never put out all the patches that we players needed for SH3. They quit early to move to SH4. I keep an eye on the SH4 game boxes at several stores near me. They are not moving. If that signifies that sales of SH4 do not meet Ubi’s requirments, that means Ubi will give up making patches for SH4 even quicker than it did for SH3. So until I see significant patches that work ( and Ubi has a history of making patches that screw up other sections of a game) I do not intend to buy a broken game.
I am working on an SH3 mod to replace SH4. Sure it will lack much graphic detail etc. but at least the game will play more or less smoothly.
Fortunately I decided to hack it before buying it. It’s shyte… map stripe errors, crashes out and the crew goes into 2d mode after 3 minutes playing. Total bag of shyte. Not to mention all the technical issues. Damn shame.
@Billy
The 2D crew is widely known to appear only in cracked copies. The instability is probably as advertised, however.
my copy of SH 4 goes all the way to 1600X 1080. you did realize there is a slider bar on the side of the resolution list to access higher resolution, right?
If a game crashes consistently when a documented shortcut is pressed, I’m about done with it. As is the case with SH4, clearly no QA took place. I’m bored with Ubisoft Romania. I hope the next Subsim title is developed by a competent company. Thankfully I’m still busy with Battlefield 2, which at least doesn’t crash constantly, even if it has plenty of balance issues and a virtually useless server browser…
Sorry to turn on the light in your eyes here but i dont know what system you run but i had no problem with anything, running at 1280×1024 85hz, No crashing at all and ye the 2d crew is in cracked versions.
SH4 offers improved misisons plays and looks better, dunno where the hell you been for the last few years but ya might wanna upgrade your win95 system mister
Another SH4 apologist? Recent patches resolved bugs such as crashing when using some of the common shortcut keys, so I shall forgive you for being unaware.
SH4 shipped without any competent QA; the measurements were all in metric when it shipped! SH4 fails to offer any sensible damage management model, a step backwards even from SH3! In fact, SH2 more correctly modeled many things than either of its successors.
SH4 was dead on arrival for anyone serious about subsims. That’s par for the course for Ubisoft, though. They seem to be spectacularly incompetent at software development.
hello
i agree, i played a lot sh3 but sh4 lack of a charming,
the medals are wrong because of the us navy copywriting them
You can set the resolution in the Options but it doesn’t change the ingame graphics. It only changes the apperance of the instrument shortcuts. If you zoom in with binocs or scope, the ships are jaggy, and can’t tell a destroyer from a fishing boat. My son got a copy for his birthday but didn’t like it and said it looked bad, I didn’t believe him and took his copy and I have to agree with him. Best part of the whole game is the intro.
Also I need to mention that I have had nothing but problems with Ubisoft for years. It appears that every title they ever put out is beta at best. With nothing but promises for a fix later. I WON’T buy a Ubisoft product ever. I would consider this title, but after 5 patches, it’s still crap, I’m back to Crysis. Pretty bad when Crysis plays and looks awesome but Ubi can’t get a destroyer to look right sitting in an ocean.