By Jim Rossignol on December 6th, 2009 at 9:18 am.
This Silent Hunter 5 trailer reveals the new game engine in action, and it’s pretty damned spectacular. There’s not going to be any debate about what the best looking naval sim is after this hits, at least. Whether the rest of the game lives up to the legacy of the series remains to be seen, but we’re feeling fairly optimistic. Anyway, this is worth taking a look at, even if you’re not a naval sim type. It has excellent waves.
Anyone else find the stereotypical American accents ironic?
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Where would these be?
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Ah, in the website’s video, not the embedded one here.
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This looks absolutely amazing, as you say I hope it lives up to the legacy of the franchise. I own 3 and 4, and really need to go back and play both a lot more than I have. Honestly, it’s one of the highest stress games I own, and “scares” me far more than any horror game I’ve ever played.
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Looks excellent
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Looks shiny. The script for the trailer is remarkably naff, but I shouldn’t hold that against it.
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Ooooh submarines
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Hasn’t that demo been out for a while?
Anyway, I hope there’s going to be an option to use German voices. The trailer starts out great with Lili Marlene, but then the American voice over ruins the rest. It’s still pretty, though.
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The last time I gave them money I couldn’t play the game. Have they changed their copy protection?
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I think they actually removed the copy protection for SH4 in one of the patches, because it was (surprise surprise) causing so many problems with legit customers. So fingers crossed that they’ve learned their lesson.
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Both SH3 and SH4 are DRM-free at this point, there’s not even a disc check.
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You guys must be watching a different trailer to the one I’m watching here, which contains no dialogue and simply dramatic music. The waves and lighting are certainly pretty, but the explody stuff looks a bit dubious. That’s the trouble with raising the bar in one area, you start to expect the rest to match it.
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It’s the trailer on the SH5 website. I just hate it when German soldiers speak American. I hope they just did it for the trailer, so anybody who doens’t speak German knows what is going on. And I will only think about buying this if the sailors speak German. Either on launch or later modded in.
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The language is called english btw, unless you overheard a tom-ay-toe.
Any chance of a defcon 1 nuclear sub mission, where you nuke poland?
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Well, I did overhear a “get ready to dahhve!” in what I think is a characteristically American western accent.
Hopefully, like SH3, they’ll give us the option to listen to our crew in German. Unfortunately, we can’t use the more recent SH4 as precedent, since they were actually speaking the correct language there.
The promising factor is that Ubi doesn’t even have to put extra effort into including the German voices, since I’m sure they’ll be making them for the German release anyway. So either we’ll get them as an option for all UI languages, or obviously someone will find a way to take the German voices and mod them in over the English ones.
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Gah. I really can’t watch any more. “This could be a street in Berlin”, maybe, but only if its full of american tourists. I could never buy a game where the nazis were from brooklyn.
And a 3D engine demo coupled with an FMV trailer? jesus, I love the idea fo this game, but I will show sod all interest in it until they show me what the GAME will look and play like. I wish everyone who worked in FMV and PR for games would fuck off to the movie industry where they belong and leave people who understand fun and gameplay.
I feel sorry for all the developers working on this who see their gamer promoted exclusively with PR fluff probably done by a different company.
/rant
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One of my pet hates about the modern gaming industry is that there seem to be a lot of people who assume “cinematic = better”, and sometimes this can affect a game. Perhaps we need people to recognise that games are not cinema, and that the “game” part is more important than a few FMVs.
In this case, the trailer gives me zero idea about how such a sub sim would work, if it’s a hardcore sim or something a newbie like me could try (my last was 688 attack sub, and I found that a bit bewildering, but I was young then).
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Heliocentric: Why Poland, exactly?
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This is gorgeous.
I sank (heh) a lot of time into SH3 in particular. Let’s hope this rekindles the flame.
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Vid on official website is terrible. Fancy waves or not.
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I must say, it’s pretty spectacular how fast video games adopted Finding Nemo level water effects. This looks damn near perfect.
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I think I played Silent Hunter 1 many years ago and had some fun with that but while this one looks ok it’s not for me.
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It would be nice if Ubisoft allows the devs to finish the game before releasing it. SH 3 and 4 were very buggy when launched and took a long time to get patched sufficiently, especially the latter.
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You can bet your hat they won’t. Ubi has time after time shown themselves to be full of Vision and lacking the nerve to steady their hands when it comes to letting out quality productions. They always fumble it up. Always.
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Nice waves and rail trails, but the rest of the engine looks iffy. The fires look sub-2006 to me.
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God, that was AWFUL. Who wrote that voiceover? It sounds like Resident Evil 1. I kept expecting him to hands keys to helmsman “master of unlocking.” What, is English their fifth language?
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Ohhhhhh, there’s a video in the post. If you have noScript, and haven’t added “giantrealm.com” to your allowed list (whatever that is), there’s no indication of an embedded video. I was trying to figure out how anyone who watched that intro on the linked page had anything positive to say at all.
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Out of interest, I’ve never played a Silent Hunter game, though I’ve been curious – would it be better to get 3 or 4 if I wanted to try it out? 3 is seriously cheap right now (especially on steam) so I’m certainly tempted by the idea. I’ve also heard some people prefer 3, though I might be wrong…
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I’ve played neither, but from the hardcore subsimmers I talked to when I was thinking about playing it, 3 has the most community and mod support and is less buggy.
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SH4′s bugs area largely worked out (and SH3 still has its share), and there are plenty of good mods for 4 as well (Trigger Maru, for example). Granted, the Grey Wolves expansion for SH3 is one of the greatest pieces of fan mod work ever, but considering that 3 and 4 are set on different sides of the world and involve different sides of the conflict, I think it’s pretty easy to justify owning and playing both.
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The game-breaking SH4 bug for me is when it suddenly won’t let you do silent running for the entire rest of the mission, with no warning until you actually need it.
No matter how you work it, you simply can’t escape destroyers unless you’re running silent. I tried going extra deep and just cranking up time compression, but eventually one lucky depth charge lands too close and it’s game over.
Hours of effort down the drain due to a small, inescapable bug. Happened a few times before I just gave up.
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Make sure you research their DRM before you pull the trigger. The last time I tried the series, I got bitten by hardcore system-crippling malware, but I don’t recall which entry that was.
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Again, both SH3 and SH4 are DRM free at present. SH3 had Starforce originally, but it’s been patched out. SH4 was never all that bad, but doesn’t even have a disc check anymore.
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This sort of game has never been my cup o’ tea but that trailer is exceptionally pretty, even by modern standards.
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If you do buy SH3, download the Grey Wolves Expansion mod for it, it beefs up graphical quality and AI behaviour to seriously improve the game.
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Do you know if those mods you mentioned would work with the steam versions of the game?
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I’ve read that they’re supposed to, but can’t vouch for it personally.
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All the mods work fine with Steam, yes. Steam just puts the extracted game files in the ‘common’ directory and leaves it at that.
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My minor gripes about the movie:
I’ve never liked when games try to spice up rain by having full-screen rain-on-glass effects. It’s absolutely fine if you’re looking through the periscope, sure. But when I’m a disembodied camera looking at my sub externally, I’m not even supposed to be there, let alone be collecting rain on my non-existent camera lens.
(Granted, it’s even worse when you’re a character in an FPS and you’re not wearing glasses or goggles of any kind. Simulating rain on my eyeballs? Shouldn’t it be a lot bigger and more blurry? Are we going to simulate blinking now? Or have we just replaced my head with a movie camera? Way to kill immersion by showing off.)
Also, on a more technical note: Due to Adobe being chronically incapable of making a decent Flash player for Linux that doesn’t putter and stall every few seconds, I had to actually snoop my browser’s net access (using Firebug), discover the internal video URL (a long “bitgravity.com” URL) and download it in order to actually watch it properly.
I notice the interface was fairly well RPS-branded, so I’m hoping this isn’t the planned route for future videos on RPS, unless the service is to eventually offer a download-and-view-offline option like Viddler or GameTrailers, or like YouTube if you have the “clive” tool.
In any case, the graphics look fantastic. It’ll be interesting to play a Silent Hunter game that actually looks that amazing before you apply all the third-party graphics-enhancing mods.
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No, you see, all characters in FPSes are wearing glasses. It’s the only reason it works. If you see them in third person cutscenes without them, they’ve taken them off because they have self-esteem issues about them.
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The video somehow stutters really badly on my PC… even when playing SD and the movie is fully loaded…
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Oh those waves…..
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For me, the most impressive thing is the terrain in the background, actually. I remember SH3′s immersion being somewhat compromised when terrain was little more than a grey muddy mess with no real geographical features visible; understandable considering it was all about the nautical action, but this really adds to the believability of it.
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Probably gonna buy this, SH3 was great. They’ve never been the most good-looking games around, but they are good-looking enough.
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I REALLY hope they remember to put a 4 player co op in. I would buy a copy for that…and a red light bulb :D
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“There’s not going to be any debate about what the best looking naval sim is after this hits, at least.”
It’s Battlestations: Pacific, right?
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I really, really hope this is as fun as SH3.
Whoever asked whether they should try SH3 or SH4, try SH3 with GWX mod. It really is phenomenal.
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You’re right. Those are awesome waves.
May I also recommend y=Sin x, y=Cos x, and the ever-awesome y=(Sin x + Cos x)^3.
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According to the Q&A http://forums.ubi.com/eve/forums/a/tpc/f/1121062387/m/8591082387 the game will be shipped with both German and English voices.
Maybe there will also be wolfpack tactics to engage convoys!!!
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That Q&A is very exciting indeed. Thanks for the link.
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Everything looks spectacular apart from the fire on the ships.
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