Silent Hunter III E3 2004 Impressions

Ubisoft is showing off Silent Hunter III at the show, and, to be frank, it’s the best-looking submarine simulation we’ve ever seen. It looks really good. Silent Hunter III will take advantage of the graphical features found in DirectX 8- and 9-compliant video cards the same way the next-generation of first-person shooters do.

In Silent Hunter III, you’ll command a German U-boat from 1939 to 1945. In a new twist, the designers have created the insides of the submarine in 3D. You can poke your head into the sonar man’s little closet or climb up to the tower and watch as your U-boat rides the swelling seas. It’s a stunning visual experience, because the programmers have been able to re-create the white caps of the waves and the motion of the water perfectly.

The game will also completely model the 3D world both above and below the water. We watched as a U-boat skirted an iceberg, only to find the Royal Navy battleship George V emerge on the other side. The U-boat executed a crash dive and from close range was able to target the engineering compartment of the battleship. Though heavily armored, the torpedo broke through, and secondary explosions ripped through the King George V, bringing it to a halt. But a nearby destroyer bent on revenge charged toward the U-boat’s location. From the periscope view, we saw the destroyer among the sea swells, and it fired its cannon at us. It almost rammed into the U-boat but barely missed before it began to drop depth charges over the area.

Another cool part of the game is the crew resource system; you can call up a screen that displays all the compartments on the U-boat, as well as their status. It also shows the number of available crewman and tells you if any of them are dead or injured. With it, you can quickly organize damage repair teams and dispatch them to a damaged compartment.

The gameplay will be very scalable; locking on to a target and firing torpedoes at it is a very simple and easy process and is accessible for beginners, but if you’re the kind of submarine fan who wants to calculate a firing formula, you can do so also.

Ubisoft promises a full campaign that stretches the length of the war, and you’ll experience the ups and downs of the Kriegsmarine as it triumphs early and then is hunted nearly to extinction in the latter part of the war. Multiplay will support up to four players over the Internet and 16 players over a network. You can also play cooperatively, so you can mimic the wolf pack tactics that U-boat captains used to prey on Allied convoys.

The game looks amazing, and we can only hope that Ubisoft takes its time with this one. We still remember the fan-made patches required to enjoy Silent Hunter II properly, but if Ubisoft can ship Silent Hunter III with no bugs, there’s little doubt it’s going to be a sub fan’s delight.