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Adding more factions I think would dilute the prominence each faction has in the story. Take the pagans vs hammers conflict. On the one hand there's anthropocentric, modernising monotheists, and they're set against pantheistic heathens who revere nature. Far more than just extraneous fluff, these two factions play a central role in much of the Thief storyline, with the trickster driving the plot of the first game and a heretical sect of the hammers doing so in the second. The city watch and the keepers play their roles too, enforcing their own interpretations of order while this war of ideas rages on. There may be wizards, we know there are other thieves and even thieves' guilds operating in the city, but Thief's setting is murky and ambiguous, with even the city's name left to the imagination. Unless relevant to the overarching plot or a particular mission's subplot, establishing a new player in the city would jar somewhat with the very sparing but meticulously designed setting and storytelling that are a hallmark of the franchise. It could even threaten to sprawl and become Tolkienesque  worldbuilding that would utterly ruin the atmosphere and mood, for me at least. Garret doesn't know or care if there's a candlemaker's guild or a wizard's college operating in the city unless the former have invented a new, unsnuffable candle or somebody's commissioned him to steal the philosopher's stone from Hogwarts.
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Nov 15, 2014 05:56
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Have to agree that the sound design in the Dark Mod is brilliant. While the voice acting is understandably a little rough around the edges, the ambient sounds and music are strongly reminiscent of the old thief games and are far, far above the level of quality you'd expect for a fan-made effort. Overall, the level design is really very impressive too, from what I've played myself and seen from this LP, though there are undoubtedly some stinkers in the mix that I just haven't got to yet.
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Nov 20, 2014 21:44
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Brainbread posted:Watching through Bobbin's previous Thief LP's. Deadly Shadows was the first one I played (which obviously means its the best one, to me). For all the flak Deadly Shadows got, it managed to hit all the right notes to be a Thief game. Thi4f, if nothing else, makes me appreciate Deadly Shadows more.
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Dec 4, 2014 11:42
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Lol at people getting all over how the steampunk cameras couldn't possibly work, yet the big furnace robots in the Metal Age that chatter away in Karras' phlegmy voice are somehow more feasible. There's a lot of things wrong with Thi4f, but I don't think unrealistic victorian sci-fi gadgets are one of them.
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Dec 9, 2014 15:33
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Mordaedil posted:Garret stealing so many random objects that are of low value also factor into this. We don't mind that he steals, but what he steals. Agreed on that. The absolute worst thing about the nickel-and-dime loot is that the majority of it seems to appear in idiotic places. The desk bell in the desk drawer is a great example. So little of it feels unique or significant or even in context. Thief 3 had us stealing stuff like a bag of gold teeth from a morgue, making the loot tell us a story, as well as rewarding exploration. Here, the pieces of unique loot Garrett does find go into a superfluous collection. Thi4f, on the whole, just feels like it was made by people who knew the original games were good, but were uniquely incapable of realising what made them so.
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Dec 9, 2014 16:06
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It's not exactly a fail state either, since you can actually complete the game perfectly fine in high chaos. The game actually reacts to how the player solves their problems. It doesn't slap them on the wrist or punish them in any way, other than by making a low chaos run significantly less of a power fantasy. If I kill every living thing on every map in the game and depopulate the already beleaguered, plague-ridden city of Dunwall it would be helluva jarring for the game to pat me on the head, call me a shining beacon of light and give me the good guy ending. Those hookers, guards and priests I slaughtered were predominantly not bad people. It could have done with a bit more nuance, but it's a hell of a lot better than being given a series of buttons to press to determine the ending, or having just one ending that rings false because my mass-murdering psycho playthrough has me lauded as a hero.
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Dec 16, 2014 06:22
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Prenton posted:And why is Garrett immune to it if he overloads it? etc, etc, etc. New emo G4rrett's built up a tolerance. That year he went missing? Smack binge. Those dark patches round his eyes aren't guyliner.
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Dec 23, 2014 00:32
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DeusExMachinima posted:Interesting callout or possible continuity implication with the early Thief games at 15:43. Worker says she hasn't seen Lord Van Vernon for weeks. Lady Van Vernon featured in T2... sorta. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=suydUkhCWkM The more references thi4f (gently caress giving this embarassment initial capitals) makes to the previous, better games, the less I like it. It keeps piercing the comfortable fantasy I've constructed in which thi4f is in no way related to the much-beloved stealth franchise I've spent countless hours enjoying.
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Dec 24, 2014 11:42
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TDM's City Watch probably closely match early British police forces pretty well in the whole "gently caress you, pay me" regard. They really were little more than armed gangs and proto-PMCs running a protection racket, that slowly insinuated themselves into the public service role we see them in today with progressive reforms by the lords and mayors that employed them.
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Jan 2, 2015 23:07
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Antistar01 posted:Welp. I guess it just didn't occur to me that they would make a reboot with principle characters with the same names, roles and relationships as in the earlier games, but then also say that those earlier Garretts and Bassos also existed in the same continuity, doing all those broadly similar things, only a few hundred years ago. See, in the Thief universe they're trapped in a warped cycle of eternal recurrence, in which Garrett is constantly reincarnated as a shittier, more compromised, focus-grouped and altogether less interesting version of himself. It's their version of entropy. Instead of heading towards the eventual heat death of the universe, the City and it's denizens are headed towards a singularity of AAA-game design mediocrity, where their universe begins to slide into Assassin's Creed, Dishonored, Tomb Raider and other titles and all becomes a homogenous mass-market mulch which gets released for $49.99 with pre-order bonus skins that render Lara Croft, Ezio, Nathan Drake, Corvo and Garrett utterly interchangeable.
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Jan 10, 2015 12:29
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Next level's a haunted asylum? They're defiling the corpse of one of the best Thief 3 levels? It's gonna be bad, isn't it? Like, really bad. It's not enough to poo poo mightily all over the whole franchise, they've also got to deliver one final coup de grace by making their own lovely version of the Shalebridge Cradle? Oh god, it won't even be the final blow, will it? Thi4f is miserably full of wasted potential in every possible way to the point where it's not even fun to rubberneck at the resulting trainwreck. It's just depressing.
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Jan 13, 2015 01:37
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LoonShia posted:We should really call NuGarrett something different. How about Gary? G4rrett. EDIT: Garr4tt looks sillier, so I'd go with that. TomViolence fucked around with this message at 20:08 on Jan 13, 2015 |
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Jan 13, 2015 20:03
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That was pretty sphincter-clenching. Can't wait to contrast it against the ersatz Cradle that's supposed to be coming next in Thi4f.
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Jan 15, 2015 20:28
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The whole Session 9 wheelchair sitting starkly in the middle of a hallway thing is a nice, evocative reference that seems to get run repeatedly into the ground throughout the entire level. The jumpscares felt really unearned, like no time had been spent to build tension in between them. With the cradle, even when you know what's coming it hits you with a sense of oppressive, ominous dread. Here they've shown their hand way early, having some goblin creature scoot harmlessly past you in full view, robbing the unexplained noises you hear of any ambiguity. Everything's relatively well-lit and clear cut and there's no malicious atmosphere to charge the scripted scares with actual fear. It feels sterile, like it's just going through the motions, like a haunted house level was some requisite on a design brief and so they set out to make a thoroughly derivative horror experience and brought no passion to the form. Maybe I'm just biased, but the whole thing just feels really weak.
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Jan 19, 2015 21:50
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Neruz posted:With regards to the knocking being the combination for the safe I figured that the knocking was just a pattern of noises the pipes make because pipes and then the guy whose safe what was deliberately made the combination the sound of the knocks for funsies. Yeah, my explanation for it was that the guy who wrote the note about the rhythm of the knocking getting stuck in his head was the same guy who made it the safe combination. To be fair, it actually makes decent sense. Doesn't make the game or this level any less of a  piece of poo poo though.
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Jan 27, 2015 18:36
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HnK416 posted:Considering the notes that can be found that mention a "master sneak thief" being locked up here and the fact that in the original games it's stated that the eye was made specifically for Garrett....yea, it's supposed to be his. Sadly. I wouldn't be surprised at this stage if in a later chapter you're sent to exhume old Garrett's remains and piss into his empty eyesocket. To be honest, that's pretty much Thi4f's MO summed up perfectly.
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Jan 28, 2015 03:23
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Comical hyperbole? On my humour forum?!
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Jan 28, 2015 19:07
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Bobbin Threadbare posted:The Hitman series is pretty big into using disguises to sneak in places, and that's despite how the protagonist is a giant bald white man who often travels to countries where any one of those things would make him stick out like a sore thumb. The thing I really loved was mission 1 of Hitman 2: Silent Assassin, where donning an identical suit to your own, but with a different-coloured tie was considered a sufficient disguise to infiltrate a mafia don's mansion.
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Feb 7, 2015 05:29
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bhlaab posted:I think the problem is that Garrett is just a dumb non-entity. It's not really clear what he cares about or why he's doing anything. I guess he want to get to the bottom of the Erin thing, but even that seems be an "eh might as well" sort of thing. OG Garrett worked perfectly as a cynical, misanthropic and reluctant anti-hero. Garr4tt, on the other hand, seems to attach some sort of his identity to his master thief persona, rather than have his ego just be window-dressing to the greedy, selfish and ultimately anti-social person he is in the proper series. There's no believable motivation for nu-Garrett unless we're to assume he somehow gives a flying toss about Erin - who, from what we've seen, no sane person would. If Thi4f had a better team of writers I'm sure some exposition would go into explaining the relationship between the two, or at least establishing them as people that give a flying taff in a high wind about one another, but all we get instead is a grating master/mentor relationship that revolves around non-violent principles Garr4tt may or may not have, depending on playstyle. And as for revolutions, I'd love to see a game where the populist/socialist revolution isn't revealed in some clichéed twist to be just as bad as the established order, if only because it might cause people to think about something for once. Any student of history knows this poo poo always ends badly, but more because of flawed people than flawed ideas. And, christ, we don't know poo poo-all about Orion, so we can't even figure out whether the revolution's inevitable souring is down to him or just a critique on populist revolutions themselves, because the writers never gave a poo poo about doing anything beyond ticking the necessary boxes for "whatever's in this year." Gah, Thi4f provokes an irritation in me that even vast amounts of whisky can't placate.
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Feb 8, 2015 07:03
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Gorilla Salad posted:The originals had so many ways of dealing with enemies. Apart from your regular tools like flashbombs, blackjack, oil, mines and sword, you could do all sorts of things to kill the AI. Like throwing hammers at them to cause damage. In Cragscleft you could even pick up blessed hammers and throw them at the undead to kill them. You're forgetting the joys of moss arrows, at least in Deadly Shadows, where you can give out choking fits. Also, oil flasks on stairwells or near bodies of water. Slapstick murder at its finest.
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Feb 9, 2015 11:03
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I'm putting a fiver on the table right now says that you do a mission to get the other hand and it's inexplicably also a left hand, only made out of gold this time.
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Feb 16, 2015 19:26
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That sign collection is a bit like Nu-Garrett's plaque collection, except for one important difference: each of the signs is unique, colourful and mildly interesting to look at. If the Thi4f devs had gone for something like that instead of going the lazy, asset-reusing route of having you sieze upon generic brass plaques like a leather-gussetted magpie, the collectibles in the game might have been actually worthwhile.
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Feb 28, 2015 23:26
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ChocolatePancake posted:I know it's been discussed to death, but I found it highly amusing that you could toss an unconscious man off an ~20' high wall and still get 'no kills' . But it wasn't Bobbin that killed him, you see, it was the fall that did that!
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Mar 19, 2015 21:04
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Bruceski posted:I once had an extended conversation with a guy who had a very heavy Scottish accent. When he found out my last name he asked if I was from the English or Scottish line. Of course by that time my reply (English, no Scots at least as far back as any of us have tracked) was in a perfect accidental mimicry of his accent. I always cringe when I hear about a Scotsman that takes that kind of poo poo seriously. As for the accent thing, I catch myself doing that all the time. Whenever I go to Ireland it's downright impossible not to pick up some of the accent, which probably winds up the locals no end. EDIT: VVVVVVVVVV No change from the usual, then. TomViolence fucked around with this message at 11:14 on Apr 3, 2015 |
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Apr 3, 2015 11:05
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FinalGamer posted:I can confirm as a Scotsman that this is true. Glasgow's great fun. I'm not even sure if weegies can understand each other which is possibly why the place has such a tough reputation. Try to apologise for knocking over someone's pint and they probably think you're saying you hosed their mum. And by "redneck Scots" do you mean teuchters? I'd totally take offense at that if it wasn't 100% appropriate. In fact, that probably explains why I soak up other people's accents like a sponge; my own accent's downright cringworthy, especially when I have to say "post office" or "land rover." Back on topic, it was really weird to have the co-commentary on the TDM video this time around, but it was a pretty cool change of pace. Kind of a shame noone mentioned that Jim Beam's brothers put in an appearance early on. Also loving the nod to the original thief games what with the bribing Benny with booze. I like to think that's the very reason he's perpetually hammered. And that the reason he's so thick is that he's permanently brain damaged from getting blackjacked all the time.
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Apr 3, 2015 20:48
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the worst places in terms of accentual thickness are Glasgow and...just basically don't go to Glasgow, go to Edinburgh instead.
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Toma posted:
Like any competent thief, Garrett was just checking for a false bottom.
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Apr 7, 2015 17:43
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paragon1 posted:I hate when stories have their better characters sacrifice themselves for the douchebag protagonist just so they can get some cheap drama. But if they kept those characters alive longer, then the writers would have to challenge themselves by continuing to write likeable characters! Won't somebody think of the poor writers?
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May 4, 2015 21:18
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Bluemage142 posted:...you know, it really says something when a character can have stiff posture and the most wooden acting I've ever seen in a game... and still be the most interesting character there. He also happens to better resemble OG Garrett than anyone else.
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May 6, 2015 22:24
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anilEhilated posted:Well, considering that OG Garrett is a sack with a face painted on it... Huh, I thought the model was more like a plank, but yeah that was what I was stabbing at.
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May 7, 2015 05:00
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I dunno about detailed, but the environemnts in this game sucked as far as I'm concerned. The same drab, greyish-blue colour pallette applied throughout the entire game and it was largely impossible for me to distinguish one area from another both in missions and in the overworld. Granted, the original trilogy wasn't exactly a riot of colour due to the nature of the game, but there was still more variation in both environments and colour pallette. The quality of the writing was completely appalling, but it was the environmental storytelling and the all-too-serious and self-consciously downbeat tone that cemented Thi4f as a bad, bad game in my mind.
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May 19, 2015 00:11
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