Weekend Slowdown: Why subsims can (but won’t) float on consoles

Granted, the video game console is rapidly becoming saturated with the same genres: shooters, action, sports, sandbox. Innovation did happen, but a lot of it was stove-piped, locked within the genre rather than in the greater world of console gaming itself.

Brave is a title that bucks conventions and is willing to take risks. One more recent development was bringing the traditionally PC-centric real-time strategy genre to consoles, which until games like Full Spectrum Warrior and Battle for Middle-Earth II, were rather clunky and painful affairs. But now, we have Command & Conquer 3, and Ensemble is spinning Halo Wars up to speed.

In the same vein I’m taking another PC-centric game genre and looking at its chances in console gaming. Except this time, unlike RTS games, I’m less confident about its chances – not because it can’t be done, but out of the fear that just like innovation, interests in console gaming are rather stove-piped as well. And for the most part, the console is locked to shooters, action, sports, and sandbox.

Pity, really. Consoles could be a potential breakout ground for the submarine simulator.

Thar she blows up, Cap’n. Appreciation – and cynicism – for console subsims after the jump.

Granted, the video game console is rapidly becoming saturated with the same genres: shooters, action, sports, sandbox. Innovation did happen, but a lot of it was stove-piped, locked within the genre rather than in the greater world of console gaming itself.

Brave is a title that bucks conventions and is willing to take risks. One more recent development was bringing the traditionally PC-centric real-time strategy genre to consoles, which until games like Full Spectrum Warrior and Battle for Middle-Earth II, were rather clunky and painful affairs. But now, we have Command & Conquer 3, and Ensemble is spinning Halo Wars up to speed.

In the same vein I’m taking another PC-centric game genre and looking at its chances in console gaming. Except this time, unlike RTS games, I’m less confident about its chances – not because it can’t be done, but out of the fear that just like innovation, interests in console gaming are rather stove-piped as well. And for the most part, the console is locked to shooters, action, sports, and sandbox.

Pity, really. Consoles could be a potential breakout ground for the submarine simulator.

Please provide a “sub”title for this section

Why the subsim – apart from the fact that it’s practically rare-to-nonexistent on consoles? Why not? Every game takes a fair amount of skill, but a submarine-based game takes some skill. This isn’t exaggeration. A battle between two competent submarine commanders would be a true battle of wits, intelligence, attrition, and luck.

This depends on whether you’re talking about one of the two major classes of subsims, World War II and modern. WWII subsims revolve around the diesel-electric subs of that era (the most well-known among them being the U-boat), and the competition was to sink the most number of merchant and escort ships without getting counterattacked and sunk. Because of the limited capabilities of those subs, being able to pull this off – consistently – certainly was a feat.

Modern subsims, on the other hand, revolve around contemporary nuclear submarines, whose improved sonar and propulsion capabilities gave rise to the advent of true underwater combat. Here the competition is truly blind. No sub commander can truly see the enemy; with patience he has to hunt them – establishing their positions and movement through triangulating sonar signals – and to pull it off before the other guy does the same to you first. That takes brains. And balls.

What unites the two sub-genres of subsims is the unique combination of intellectual gratification and adrenaline-fueled tension bordering on paranoia that probably cannot be found anywhere else. This isn’t the rush of shooter combat, where you’re constantly scrambling to line up shots in a turkey shootout. This isn’t (strictly) the joy of sandbox exploration of a world environment or the victory throes of a sports title. Perhaps the closest is the stealth and sniper genres, which feature the same challenges of remaining undetected, executing the kill, and getting away with it.

Firing point procedures

What is the trouble with getting a subsim onto a console? Certainly the capabilities of new-gen can handle the processing demands of a submarine simulator like Sub Command or Silent Hunter. But, just like with RTS games, there is one limitation consoles face when bringing over a subsim over to Sony’s, Microsoft’s, or Nintendo’s waters: the controller.

Short of adding keyboard-and-mouse support to consoles, the controller still remains the wall to scale for any PC-centric genre looking for a console crossover. Well, except probably for the Wiimote, but even then, it’s not the same as the precision offered by a mouse. Not enough bloody precision, not enough bloody buttons.

Subsims, by their nature, are very instrument-demanding. There’s usually a plotting table of sorts: a map showing the position of your sub and (known or suspected) enemy forces. There’s a weapons room presentation to load and fire torpedoes. On modern subsims (and in WWII subsims where the submarine in real life had it), there’s a sonar display and workstation to show the direction and identities of incoming sonar signals.

Either way, that’s a lot of knobs to twiddle, buttons to push, and touchscreens to activate. One early attempt at a console subsim, Electronic Arts‘ 688 Attack Sub for the Sega Genesis (itself a port from the DOS/Amiga version), did what many early console RTS titles did: pin the D-pad to a cursor, with certain button combinations to switch between instruments. Clunky, very clunky.

The bigger picture is the one you usually can’t see

But as it was argued in “The Gospel of Strategy Games According to Consoles“, limited perspectives don’t make for innovation in games. If anything, EALA‘s mindset behind console RTS – make the game around the controller, not the other way around – proved that it was possible to adapt traditionally PC-only genres and make them work on a console setup, if one would try.

As with BFME II and C&C3, trigger-bound popup menus could collapse detailed speed, depth, and course orders (and all the other orders as well) into something that can be given by D-pad and analog stick. Another potential solution is something the PS3 and Xbox 360 already implemented: voice command. Some PC subsims incorporated voice command to both streamline control and make the game that much more immersive.

More challenging wold be getting a controller to twiddle knobs, push buttons, and work with touchscreens or cursors of an instrumented subsim. A stick-controlled cursor would probably end up becoming unavoidable in those regards. Maybe. Yet even here, it’s not too hard to play with the imagination and experimentation, and to think of how to exploit even half of the available buttons, bumpers, triggers, and shoulders of a controller to streamline the process.

As it was with console RTS titles, the objective is not “to put a mouse and keyboard in your controller” but to be able to deliver streamlined commands without hassle.

Flooding in the engine room, abandon ship!

As it stands, getting submarines to run silent, run deep on a PS3 or Xbox 360 (or, for that matter, the Wii) isn’t much of a technical challenge. And the road less traveled (relatively speaking) would be fresh ground for both consoles and the genre to explore. But like I said in the beginning, it’s probably not going to work.

Even in the PC world the subsim is a niche genre. It doesn’t capture the gamer’s attention (and their budgets) unlike the shooter, action, sports, or sandbox genres. Its virtues are admirable: tactical analysis of signals and of situations, the suspense of hiding from an enemy that you can’t see, pitting your wits against another submarine skipper who faces the same dilemmas as you do, being able to command a weapon of war and strike unseen.

But its virtues are not the traditional virtues of console gaming. The patience of submarine warfare, which emphasizes slow and quiet movements, trying to locate the enemy, or positioning for the surprise attack, becomes a liability in a world dominated by the instant gratification of point-and-shoot FPS and TPS titles. And while gamers argue – and with good reason – that gaming isn’t “dumb”, and provides venues for intellectual challenges, not many gamers, it seems, will go for that kind of intellectual challenge poised by subsims.

This isn’t supposition. This is Sparta the market. Electronic Arts here is instructive: they published two of the finest modern subsims around, 688(i) and Sub Command, both developed by Sonalysts. But Sonalysts’ sequel to both, Dangerous Waters, was published by Battlefront.com (Steam) and Strategy First (CD-ROM). EA made it a point some time ago to “get out of the simulator business”, letting go not only of subsims but of flight combat sims as well (e.g., the Jane’s Combat Simulations brand).

Money talks, the cynic may say. Hence, all the shooters and sports and sandboxes consoles have to deal with year after year.

We all live in a yellow submarine

So why the sterile conjecture? And not just because it’s the weekend. I don’t know. I personally love subsims. I love the patience where some look for the gratification. I love racking my head where some rack up the frags. Maybe I’m just doing this for fellow subsimmers (and there is such a community out there; hit this link to visit them).

And maybe I’m also doing this because of that subtle criticism, that console gaming is rapidly becoming SSDD (same ****, different day – or was it “developer”?). It would be refreshing to see something new, or at least relatively untried, on the PS3, Xbox 360, or Wii once in a while. Even trying to imagine how a subsim would work on a console is a refreshing challenge. Something different, you know.

And more than just the novelty value, subsims also “give back”, in a way. WWII subsims can serve historical education purposes when it comes to discussing that turbulent period in our history, and the men who served beneath the waves then and there. Modern-day PC subsims like Sub Command and Dangerous Waters in fact emulate so much of their real-world counterparts, some have suggested it could be used as a training tool for real-world navies.

It’s not meant to be the thrill ride that other games are. Submarine simulators appeal to something else in the human psyche, one less concerned about dominating the frag count and more concerned with dominating… period. It’s supremacy of thought and command, of analysis and imagination as well as combat and destruction.

Unfortunately, it seems that – perhaps like in the real world of the silent service – only few can stand up to wearing the dolphins of a submariner. And we’re talking about the gaming world here.

Pity, really.