Silent Hunter Online Beta Free To Play

As always with free to play, the balance is between the premium players feeling like theyre getting special treatment against free players feeling like theyre being intentionally inconvenienced.

Youre utterly alone, trapped in a long metal tube with just your crewmates for company, and its like being in a sensory deprivation chamber, with almost every other sense cut off, especially when you want to go undetected; popping out a quick sonar ping can mean the death of you.

Its a social sea, and one that, up until now, has only been inhabited by somewhat dim-witted computers.

Silent Hunter Online is Ubisoft Blue Bytes attempt to both bring Silent Hunter to a more casual audience while simultaneously bringing in hundreds of other players, all taking on a Wolfpack of submarines (up to four) to carry out missions to sink Allied ships while not getting too banged up in the process.

But when the whole point of being on a submarine is claustrophobia, being trapped underwater, you dont have to wander around some cramped insides to know theyre cramped.

And so long as theres the telltale creak of metal under pressure as you dive, I dont think Blue Byte are going to have trouble selling the atmosphere.

Theres plenty of atmosphere elsewhere, too, with your control of the other submarines in your pack falling to an abstracted map interface, reinforcing the idea that youve got limited communications, especially when running a mission.

And its here that your crew comes in, each of them able to handle a system like weapons, sonar, or communications, effectively automating them for you so that you can deal with the actual strategy of the thing.

They level up as theyre used, and its one of those cases where its looking like new players will benefit from the stabilizers, but experienced Silent Hunter vets will immediately be able to do away with them and freewheel it all the way to the Pacific Theatre.

Instead of capsule missions that are entertaining in their own right, theyre aiming at creating something persistent that will make you want to keep coming back to defend, attack or ambush in an ongoing conflict.

The whole game is done in real time, and crossing the ocean will take, at the longest distance, probably a day, or a little more.

Stefan Alutti, the Live Producer on Silent Hunter Online, tells me.

Maybe you start in the morning and you know that by lunchtime youll have your boats in the right location, and you can play a mission.

Well you are. Youre in a metal tube in the middle of the ocean, but the point is that there are lots of other metal tubes with lots of other players in that same ocean, and you can team up with up to three others to head into missions together.

That, along with the way that the campaign dynamically shifts to the performance of players, so that the blockade of Britain, given as an example, shifts from isolated merchant craft to armoured convoys over the course of a campaign.

It means that players feel like they have an impact, and also that they can band together to really change things in the game that theyre playing.

If Blue Byte can keep up with the player demand for content by expanding on campaigns and coming up with new, exciting missions for players to join up together on, theres no reason that Silent Hunter Online cant be hugely successful.

Its really only limited by the appeal of that pressurised hunk of metal floating serenely through the depths.

Silent Hunter Online Beta Free To Play

With it being a browser-based Free to Play title, though, there are inevitable caveats that extend beyond a somewhat limited graphical palette.

Microtransactions are in, and while they dont give you an outright advantage, they are going to make your life as a player much easier.

You have the opportunity to buy certain items for your ship, and these items can be upgraded by the player.

But you can also buy upgraded items.

Things like reduced waits for repairs and travel, along with new hulls for your subs are all on the menu for paying players.