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Skilleddk posted:First game is still my favorite of the series. It features the biggest levels which you can get completely lost in. And obviously it has the best level of the series, The Haunted Cathedral. I still haven't mustered the courage to completely check out the flooded basement. Thief still has the most terrifying zombies in any game. It also has some absolutely bananas level design. The Bonehoard, and Constantine's Sword are good examples. Not only are the levels huge and sprawling, but they subvert the normal flow of rooms and corridors that you get in most games. Surfaces are sloping and uneven, spaces alternate between being wide open and incredibly claustrophobic and vertical spaces can be traversed almost as easily as the horizontal. It all contributes to creating a weird sense of unease. If you've ever had to camp out on a mountain, you'll know what I'm talking about. There's something very strange about an environment that's missing the flat surfaces and 90 degree angles that we spend most of our time in. I think most games these days eschew that kind of detailed level design. There's a focus on adding detailed textures and shaders, which looks great, but takes up a lot of memory, leading to smaller, less grandiose level design. That's not necessarily a bad thing depending on the game though. I remember being lost for hours in the Bonehoard. If it was an fps, and not an exploration-based stealth game, I would have promptly quit and looked back. Still, I wish more developers took inspiration from Thief. It's 2012, and we're still running endlessly through the same corridors and randomly generated wilderness, just with bigger textures.
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Dec 25, 2012 20:12
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Thief inspired me to tranquilize targets in Hitman and toss their unconscious bodies off the nearest building/cliff. 
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Dec 26, 2012 23:58
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I see a hand-to-hand takedown in one of those screenshots. Not a big surprise really, coming from the team that did Deus Ex. Apart from that it looks pretty good. Thief-like.
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Mar 5, 2013 17:18
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Fintilgin posted:It's not tiny or split levels I worry about, but the actual design. There were a lot of Thief levels, particularly in II that were almost totally non-linear and allowed all sorts of exploration routes and achieving objectives in different order, etc. Modern game design tends to be way, way more linear. Like Human Revolution, while good, you'd generally play your way through a small 'open' setpiece, and then move on to the next little open setpiece. What made Thief 2's design special was that the levels were built first, and then missions were designed around them. That's why Thief's architecture actually make sense, unlike almost every other game out there. It was pretty innovative and the only other game that really came close was the original Deus Ex. Of course there are large-scale open world games now that were built upon basically the same principles, but their design only works on a macro level. You can't walk into just any house in Assassins Creed or GTA4. Even if you could, the interiors would have to be randomized because of the world's sheer scale. Next-gen consoles won't necessarily encourage better design. I imagine a line manager at a game studio today would probably be having panic attacks at the mere thought of a workflow where no mission/story work could be done until the levels were finished.
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Mar 5, 2013 19:08
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Super Slash posted:So what's the soundtrack gonna be then; Skrillex? Linkin Park? You do remember the metal song that played in the Thief intro, right?
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Mar 5, 2013 20:02
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Well poo poo.Mr.Citrus posted:So in other words, this is a thief game made by the human revolution team. DX:HR had the same exact panicked cries before it came out, over takedowns and art style and such. I'll be looking forward to the game personally Yeah, it's probably gonna be good for that style of game. It's just not the Thief I was hoping for, and certainly not worth full price.
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Mar 5, 2013 20:30
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Fintilgin posted:There area bunch of the screens that have what must be specially animated 'hand on predetermined point' peeking out animations. Now I want confirmation that the game uses actual shadows for stealth and not line-of-sight like Human Revolution/Dishonored. quote:"He crouches behind a few crates and a dark tint cloaks the edges of the screen, signifying that Garrett is safely hidden from the guards' view." From the article. Honestly it sounds like a fun game but the resemblance to Thief is largely cosmetic. Mechanically and spiritually it's a sequel to Deus Ex:HR and Dishonoured.
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Mar 5, 2013 21:27
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Sniper Party posted:The combat in all the previous games was absolute dog poo poo, and that honestly sounds miles better. As long as you're not forced into combat and it's almost impossible to win against more than a couple of guards at the same time, the combat part in that article honestly sounds almost good to me. The combat was supposed to be dogshit. It was a game about sneaking and stealing stuff.
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Mar 5, 2013 23:12
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Giggily posted:Garret is significantly less badass in the example they gave than in any of the Thief games. He doesn't even kill the guard he fought. He doesn't even have a sword. It's mentioned that the Focus ability is mostly used to push past guards to escape into cover, not fight them. It also mentions that doing what they did, i.e. actually incapacitating a guard in a fight, uses a significant amount of focus, so the player would not be able to take on multiple opponents, which is something you could do in Thief. Uhh, you're taking a lot of liberties with the source material just to prove a point. The magazine describes Garrett chucking a smoke bomb, crushing two guards to death with a chandelier and then going into a slow motion focus mode to perform a chain attack on a guard, breaking bones in the process. The attack is explicitly compared to the brawls in the recent Sherlock Holmes films. That's fairly badass.
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Mar 5, 2013 23:30
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Geight posted:So in the previous games, there's areas where you're encountering undead and/or monsters, right? Are those forced combat areas, or do you sneak past those things too? You could sneak by all the supernatural monsters although zombies had a tendency to wander and turn up unpredictably. They also couldn't be knocked out by a blackjack and would get up after being killed (unless holy water was used), although their slow movement meant you could take them down them in a number of ways so long as you had space to maneuver. There's no forced combat in the first two games at all, although the missions are designed assuming you don't mind knocking out the occasional guard. Even that's optional, although a pain in the rear end if you're a beginner. Fruits of the sea fucked around with this message at 23:40 on Mar 5, 2013 |
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Mar 5, 2013 23:36
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Giggily posted:I really didn't like the combat in Thief 1 and 2. I thought it was out of place in regard to the rest of the game. This system seems significantly better - as in, completely streamlined, barely combat, the entire point of which is to allow the player to return to the stealth gameplay by avoiding confrontations with guards. Yeah, it sounds like that's exactly what they are aiming for. It could be good, but it's substantially different than the previous Thief games, where being cornered by guards lead to frantic "oh gently caress" moments and frequently death. I would argue that part of what makes Thief special is the tension and fear. It's a punishing game, and if there was going to be combat, I would prefer it had more in common with Dark Souls than Deus Ex:HR. That sort of gameplay can be frustrating (seriously, I'm surprised you don't hate Thief if you regularly got into swordfights thoughout 1 and 2) and often gets derided as bad game design, but it has it's place. Dishonoured is a good example of a game that really lacked that tension and fear of death. Fun game, but it encourages a very different playstyle.
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Mar 6, 2013 00:16
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Jarate posted:Not even twelve hours into a game announcement and some of you goony fucks are already actually saying "will not buy." Hey now, I only said I wasn't going to pay full price for it  It looks like it will actually be very similiar to Deus Ex:HR. That's cool, but the gameplay will be fundamentally different from the previous games. Why does a game called Thief have an emphasis on combat and empowering the player while the original games were all about sneaking and tension. Not the worst game ever, just not... Thief. Being able to pick and choose from combat-stealth games is pretty awesome though. We've come a long way from having to choose between Splinter Cell and uh, Splinter Cell.
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Mar 6, 2013 02:06
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My beef with I'd much rather have combat that relied on skill and timing. I mentioned Dark Souls earlier, but hell, even the sliding and punching from Mirror's Edge would be acceptable. The Game Informer article mentions that Thief is supposed to empower the player. That's all wrong, it's a game about being vulnerable and keeping to the shadows where one has the advantage. The player is supposed to feel outmatched, not like McAwesome Badassdude.
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Mar 6, 2013 19:05
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SNARF SNARF SNARF posted:I just want to make one thing clear here. There is absolutely no doubt this game will be incredibly scripted unlike the other Thief games, this is just something we have to accept. It'll be interesting to see how this pans out. The game explicitly encourages loving with npcs, exploration and sneaking into places where you aren't supposed to be. That's basically inviting the player to try to break as many scripted events as possible.
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Mar 6, 2013 19:11
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Calling the new Garrett an assassin is a bit of a stretch. It would be more accurate to say he resembles a thief in the same superficial way Jenson resembles a "pacifist" (man with a grudge and a tranq gun) in Deus Ex:HR. Whether Garrett kills people or not is kind of besides the point so long as the missions and gameplay are designed to put the player in combat often. I'm just going off the Game Informer article though, which puts a lot of emphasis on action and escaping from "impossible situations". Rereading the article, I'm disappointed to see the game has objective markers. The hand-drawn, inaccurate maps from Thief 1 and 2 were absolutely brilliant. "Here be dragons..."
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Mar 7, 2013 15:43
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Bugblatter posted:Where do these statements come from? This does not describe Thief 1-3 at all. Combat was difficult, but it wasn't an automatic game over. You could almost always fight your way back into the shadows, and I certainly recall slaughtering quite a lot of undead ghouls and robots. Game was scary. There were lots of ways to survive combat, but it always felt like you were going to die. Exception being the pathetically slow zombies, but they could be creepy in their own way.
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Mar 14, 2013 17:12
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Megaman's Jockstrap posted:Yeah actually I didn't expect to ever see Garret again. His story is over. That and a grudge against authority figures. Definitely not a hero or believer in a cause, but if he can find a way to embarrass the wealthy and powerful, he'll do it. It all ties into the "regular guy" persona. Sort of a thiefy John McClane (ignoring the last two movies). Fruits of the sea fucked around with this message at 18:41 on Mar 14, 2013 |
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Mar 14, 2013 18:39
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Rime posted:
Well that gif is a pretty good argument against unbreakable animations
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Mar 14, 2013 19:19
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A list of things missing from the trailer: -Sexy nuns -Inception sound -CGI HUD -Sicknasty takedown -wubs I think it might turn out ok guys  Hakkesshu posted:And no Stephen Russell 
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Apr 2, 2013 00:07
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HUD waypoints have already been confirmed and talk about Garrett's hand-drawn maps has been conspicuously absent, so at least from a level building perspective it's going to be a much more streamlined game. There certainly won't be any levels like the Bonehoard or Trace The Courier where getting lost was a real possibility. Cul de sacs or areas that don't contain an obvious reward for exploration won't be present, since they would disrupt the game's "flow". I think that's good game design in general, but it isn't suitable for a series famous for subverting the fps genre's gameplay. Of course the navigation aids in Deus Ex:HR could be turned off and I don't see any reason why that feature won't be present in Thief 4 either. Unfortunately DX's levels also seemed designed specifically with the player's actions in mind, and as such it wasn't very rewarding when one discovered the "stealthy" path. The illusion of player agency can be broken pretty easily if the multiple paths are presented too obviously. As a sidenote, there was a funny quote in the Gameinformer article a while back where a designer was talking about how he loved the idea of a bunch of guards standing around an air duct and wondering how the hell somebody broke in. Yeah bud, we remember the police station level in DX too... (and Thief, not relying on line-of-sight stealth, didn't even need air ducts as secondary routes, instead relying on vertical spaces. The last level of Thief 2 is, I think, the only instance that has anything resembling an excessively convenient ventilation system.) Edit for typos Fruits of the sea fucked around with this message at 15:38 on Apr 2, 2013 |
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Apr 2, 2013 15:30
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Giggily posted:I don't think HUD waypoints have been confirmed or talked about. They've talked about their Focus system, which I believe shows a temporary path for the player and highlights loot and objectives alongside a slew of other things, but that's it as far as I've read about player guidance. Apparently it's also completely optional, so if you don't want to turn on easy mode for baby then you don't have to. Yeah, that's what I was talking about. Specifically, focus highlights all usable objects (examples are climbable pipes and candles as well as objectives such as drawers that contain evidence.) Focus is essentially a HUD. Ladders and fingerprints don't highlight themselves. Waypoint was a misleading word, I don't see any mention of floating arrows anywhere. Highlighting the path to an objective is arguably just a more accurate method of waypointing though.
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Apr 2, 2013 16:25
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I think that level in particular hasn't aged very well, partly because zombies simply aren't as creepy as they were ten years ago and also a good part of the tension comes from being disoriented. It becomes a bit of a slog on multiple playthroughs.
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Apr 2, 2013 17:24
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Rime posted:http://www.gameinformer.com/b/features/archive/2013/03/25/the-world-of-thief.aspx They better give Garrett some monster quads since he'll be spending so much time crouching behind poo poo.
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Apr 2, 2013 21:12
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Neo Rasa posted:I'm conflicted on this. I did a playthrough recently for the first time in like ten years and the Bonehoard and the Haunted Cathedral ended up being two of my favorite levels in the game. They also point to the confidence of the design in that they didn't limit themselves to "just" being about steampunk or just fantasy or whatever more narrow scope a lot of games are designed in now. The Thieves Guild is brutal if only because of the casino area which is quite possibly the hardest part of the game if you are try to steal everything in sight without getting into a fight with the guards. Also, getting lost in the sewers.
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Apr 3, 2013 15:20
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Giggily posted:Garrett parkoured in Thief 2, and quicksaving is an awful system that shouldn't exist in any game. That's uh, umm. What? Like, wouldn't it be easier to just argue that what Garrett does in the new Thief isn't parkour? Is this some sort of clever ruse to get people to say that Garrett didn't do parkour in Thief 2 and then out them as hypocrites when they say parkour is in the new game? You should totally start a thread in /games about quicksaves. Make a poll, it'll be fun.
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Apr 4, 2013 17:44
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Rime posted:So they've replaced Taffer with gently caress. Yeah, that's really disappointing. The weird Monty Python vibe the guards gave was really funny and charming. As for good news, the author mentions in the comments that darkness based stealth is going to be a big part of the game. It'll be possible to hide in plain sight so long as there are enough shadows. It isn't a cover-based system like in Deus-Ex where the player has to crawl between objects. DeepQantas posted:Garrett did parkour in Thief 1, not Thief 2. Yeah, that wasn't really intended behaviour though. I suppose you could interpret parkour in the loosest sense possible as running and jumping while on a rooftop, but in that case you have to acknowledge basically every fps/tps ever made. Lotta parkour in Counterstrike and Call of Duty. Skyrim too, for that matter. Fruits of the sea fucked around with this message at 18:00 on Apr 4, 2013 |
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Apr 4, 2013 17:55
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Sniper Party posted:Garrett was plenty agile in the originals, being able to jump across gaps to grab ledges, mantle on things, and jump off ropes and stuff. He was also a faster runner than the guards. I don't see how making him more agile and able to vault over things is breaking the spirit of the old ones, where it felt really silly to not be able to climb over a small bench without making a ton of noise by jumping. I don't have a problem with Garrett being agile. He isn't driven to do extreme feats of strength and agility like Batman or whatever, but if the easy way in involves some climbing, why not? Maybe we have a different definition of parkour? Is there some sort of miscommunication going on here, because I thought parkour meant extreme athleticism, like sprinting and making 20-foot jumps and backflips and poo poo. If it's just normal fps movement, then great. Lichtenstein posted:Honestly, I'm expecting something loosely resembling Deus Ex system. It's the mention of button allowing you to instantly jump from shadow to shadow that makes it sounds like a "follow the breadcrumbs" kind of stealth. RPS posted:On the latter point, that’s not the case at all – shadows are cover. It’s even possible to stand in the shadow a guard casts and hide in it. The entire stealth system is based around shadow, light and fog, not just cover. Fruits of the sea fucked around with this message at 18:14 on Apr 4, 2013 |
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Apr 4, 2013 18:11
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Rime posted:HOW DO YOU UPGRADE A GODDAMN BLACKJACK?!?!? With a billiard ball?  Alternate option: Keep hitting them until they never get up again.
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Apr 4, 2013 18:35
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The environments in all the screenshots look very bright, so complaints about the stealth system and AI are probably going to pop up a lot as time goes on. Darkness based stealth can work, but it's going to seem silly if the environments are filled with atmospheric lighting and fog instead of, well, blackness. So yeah, homes for the blind surrounded by incredibly lush textures. Sounds like the devs are trying to have their cake and eat it too. Graphics vs. gameplay. Incredible environments and darkness aren't exactly compatible. At least not without a much more minimalist style of art direction. Fruits of the sea fucked around with this message at 21:27 on Apr 4, 2013 |
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Apr 4, 2013 21:21
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Stabbey_the_Clown posted:The idea that they can't use Stephen Russell because they want to do facial capture is ludicrous. It's not a live-action movie. What kind of stunts is "Garret" going to be doing while talking at the same time? Are the cutscenes where Garret is quipping while doing badass action hero stunts so much more important than the old characterization? The Incgamers article summed it up pretty well :quote:Let’s also ponder the implication that the majority of Garrett’s lines will now, apparently, be delivered while he’s performing feats of circus athleticism. “Lord Bafford” (hops off table, leaps to hanging banner and wall-runs up to balcony) “it seems that your sceptre” (dives across to chandelier, swings to rafters) “has been … inter-scepted” (tosses firebomb, flips Bafford the bird, backflips out of window.)
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Apr 5, 2013 16:06
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Giggily posted:quicksaves I actually agree that quicksaves can ruin tension (having played XCOM and way too many roguelikes), but it depends on the game's genre. Checkpoints suuuuck if the player has to wait for a scripted scene or travel from one place to another. Open-world, plot-heavy games are really bad at this. It also discourages experimentation and risk-taking. Sometimes I'll replay a scene in Deus Ex or Hitman 3 or 4 times just trying different approaches or trying to break the physics engine. Having to wait through some canned dialogue or run around for a couple minutes is infuriating. Anyways, if saves are checkpointed, then there have to be actual repercussions for there to be any suspense. Currently, all we know is there's a slow-motion takedown/resource management minigame if caught by guards. The saves may not be an issue at all.
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Apr 5, 2013 20:02
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I've heard so many horror stories about working in the game industry that I wouldn't assume any dev was a loser just for working on crappy games. Also it's really creepy when goons fixate on one person working on a game and start calling them by their full name in every post. Can we please avoid that?
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Apr 7, 2013 05:53
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the black husserl posted:Well hey if no previous experience in the specific design area isn't a problem, they should hire me! Yeah! I have no experience either, but I am qualified to say that you would do a great job!
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Apr 7, 2013 20:47
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The talk about toning down the mystical elements is a bit silly considering Garrett can now slow down time and has a sixth sense that detects valuable objects. He can even see fingerprints.Giggily posted:But I guess there's still stuff unannounced dealing with "why people were in love with this franchise". The producer can't talk about it, but we should totally be able to figure out what it is on our own! I'm not sure I can. They've already covered the basic gameplay elements. Some sort of plot fluff like the Hammerites perhaps? That's hardly the big reason people love the franchise though. I haven't seen anybody complaining about the lack of robots.
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Apr 9, 2013 15:25
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Not only is the writing terrible, but all the footage is spliced together from previous trailers. Some poor dev was probably ordered to create something new for E3 without any budget and this is the result.
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Jun 7, 2013 17:21
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Snidesworth posted:Sneaky Bastards posted a hands-on preview of the E3 demo. Calling it negative would be an understatement. They go on to interview one of the producers and really break down how the game is fundamentally different from that of previous Thief games. If it's all right, I'm going to quote the most interesting bits here Edit-Bolded some text: quote:our major concern with the demo – one far greater than the insipid, dated nature of the burning bridge sequence. The “ingredients” that featured within the level did not feel general-purpose and consistent. They were not systems; they were hand-placed, hard-coded points of interest. It feels sort of odd to call the Thief series sandbox games, but in a way that's what they are. The player is given a bunch of tools, a big level and free reign to experiment with the game's systems. I can understand that playtesting and iterative development must be hellish in those circumstances, especially when dealing with console limitations. Still I also get the sneaking suspicion that all that time and money was instead dumped into the QTE escape sequences, which are so different they might as well be taken from a different game. This is Deus Ex's boss fights but on a larger scale. quote:“With the next-gen, with the smartphone, with the tablet, with the indie developer, it’s really, really cool because now we have a lot of different types of players. There is a type of people that like to have that kind of indicator, because… they don’t want to fight with all these mechanics. They enjoy the story, they want to progress, they want to feel that they are good, but at the same time they like to, you know, ‘let me help you a little bit’. There are some pretty weird underlying assumptions here and a bit of elitism. He mentions next-gen, smartphone, tablet, indie... there's a conspicuous absence. Oh right, PC gamers. You know, I'm pretty sure all people like to be challenged in games, regardless of what the device is. That's why most games have difficulty levels, or in Thief's case, a semi-open world where the player is encouraged to develop their own challenges suitable to their skill level. There isn't some magical fairy dust in a 15-year old Thief jewel case that turns you into a *hardcore* gamer. Smart phones and Facebook games don't make people weak-willed either. This 'us and them' attitude is really insular and I hope it dies out with newer generations of developers. quote:You can play this game from A to Z without killing anybody. You can even finish this game in a non-lethal way. All these layers will be there. But if it’s story and stuff like that, we’ll give you Focus, indicators, to just make sure that you enjoy the experience.” He must get kicked out of movie theaters a lot. Fruits of the sea fucked around with this message at 18:54 on Jun 21, 2013 |
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Jun 21, 2013 18:50
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Jblade posted:Also I'm going through Thieves Guild and it's a bit of a chore - are there many more levels like it in the game? I don't mind the odd sewer but so far I feel like I've just been walking through brick sewer after brick sewer. No, the thieves' guild is a real slog, and probably my least favourite mission. There's a fun bit at the end though.
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Jun 27, 2013 21:55
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Looking forward to reading >80% reviews by journalists who never played the original series, and bitter rants by those who have.
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Aug 16, 2013 16:48
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Do you have run speed toggled on? Running makes a lot of noise, even when crouching on carpet.
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Aug 16, 2013 16:55
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Inepta Lacerta posted:Having said that, I'm... skeptical about certain changes - lack of jumping and rope arrows in particular as that might cut down on exploration. On the other hand this thread makes me think people remember the old games as perhaps more open than they were without resorting to abusing the jump/mantle mechanic. Sure, there were some extremely open areas that clearly allowed for such but a lot of them seemed such more (in my opinion anyway) due to environment layout (interconnecting rooms and passages) rather than... ahem, non-standard ways of going from point A to point B. I guess what'll bug me most about that part is not being able to climb up into the rafters in some houses, though that was often true for Thief 3 too. I think the worry is that the devs aren't comfortable creating an environment where the player can roam and explore at will. Complicated levels with dozens of interconnecting routes are also going to be discarded, since backtracking, becoming lost or confused is regarded as immersion breaking, even more so than bunny hopping. This is all pure speculation, but I expect the levels will consist of a series of set-pieces, with two or three possible routes connecting them. Carrying objects hasn't been mentioned in any of the publicity, as far as I know.
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Aug 18, 2013 15:22
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