What didn’t though was the knowledge that you can delegate most of these more fiddly tasks to the Officers. Take combat for example, a core component of the game that’s done in real time: once you’ve found your target, you need to plot a course, mark it on the map, calculate torpedo trajectories… and a whole host of other technical bits and bobs that honestly went right over my head. Everything in the game can either be done manually, or you can ask the relevant officer do it for you. A feature the team were keen to highlight were the 'Officers' – each section or major task in the running of your submarine has an officer assigned to it, sort of an AI-controlled posse. The key thing about Silent Hunter Online is that you don’t need to have previously been a budding amateur sub-commander to actually get into the game and play it.
#SILENT HUNTER 4 CONTROLS KEYBOARD FULL#
At its core, you've got the main submarine interface, which is a static 2D interface and fairly low-tech but with a periscope that gives you access to a full 3D rendered view of the outside (using the Silent Hunter 5 engine we believe). Whilst it’s very stripped down (there’s no walking around the sub like in Silent Hunter 5, for example, although you can go out to the observation deck), it’s more of a sense of going ‘back to basics’ then running on a skeleton crew. Oddly enough, this kind of thinking fits perfectly for a game like Silent Hunter Online.Ĭombining the drawn-out, patience-requiring set-pieces of submarine warfare with the need to offer gameplay segments that can span over several days, Silent Hunter Online offers as much of the core Silent Hunter experience as they can fit into a flash-based browser product. Given then that there's only so much content you can prepare for a release, it's vital that this content lasts for the maximum amount of time possible. The more cynical browser-based products like FarmVille etc all want to keep you hooked and paying up as long as possible, but even the more 'serious' offerings realise that (much like their older MMO Cousins) they are in it from the long haul. It’s generally accepted that ‘massively’ online games, by necessity, have to have longer pacing than most other games.
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