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Decline The new Thiaf game is MASSIVE decline - Eidos Forum Refugee Camp

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Thanks for the review unkillable cat. Pretty insightful. Have my kudos :shittydog:
 

masterridley2

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Aug 7, 2015
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Wow, so I just came to this after playing 1-3 in quick succession and still having withdrawal symptoms.

Here are my impressions, from someone who has no nostalgia whatsoever of these games.

Thief 1:
Definitely the tightest of the series. Had exactly the right mix of undead, pagan and hammerite missions. The lore was strongest in this one.
Pagans are underground cult instead of occupying whole parts of the city (!) like in thief 3. Hammerites are a declined faith that still believes
and fights horrors of undead, pagans etc, which no-one takes seriously any more. I love that Garrett becomes involved in this stuff organically
and not out of some heroic desire to save the city etc. As for gameplay, this is the most anti-popamole game I've played. I was actually lost
several times in the bigger levels, e.g. Bonehoard and Haunted Cathedral. And navigating is NOT easy, you HAVE to use the compass and
reason about your general direction.

Thief 2:
More of the same, but lost all the horror aspect of the first game. I thought plot was much weaker too. Is it just me or does Karras
sound retarded? And his plan is retarded too. Anyway, mechanically it's exactly the same as Thief 1 and it even has possibly the best
mission ever created (the one that combines a whole level of roof hopping with the infiltration of the Mechanist tower, holy shit).
I also loved the submarine mission with the pirate hideout etc. All in all, I enjoyed this the same as 1, though.

Thief 3:
Ok, that was a serious initial shock when I went from 2 to 3. The movement of Garrett was suddenly awful, to blackjack opponents
you had to be RIGHT beside them, and other stuff that I don't remember. However, after the first few levels, I got used to the new
mechanics and actually found them to be only slightly dumbed-down. The rope arrows were replaced with climbing and yes, the
game was much easier now, e.g. I never had to use moss arrows, cause there were no levels like Constantine's house where
every surface was tile! Some levels though were amazingly atmospheric e.g. Moira House, Robbing the Cradle (which I started/stopped
3 times before I got the nerves to finish it) etc. IMO, a worthy conclusion to the series.

Thi4f:
I pirated this today and played 3 missions before I had enough and uninstalled. I can NOT understand how they managed to fuck up even
the most basic of things. For example, thieving is now a chore instead of an addiction. Why? Because every room has a desk with between
2-4 drawers that you have to open in succession for hidden loot! Great design guys. Then, you have the breaking-into houses through
windows where you have to mash the right-button to open the window both on entrance AND on exit (what?). And most of these cases
are "houses" consisting of a single room with non-functioning doors. Then, you have the navigation. It's literally impossible to get lost or even
slightly confused unless you're a total retard. The game almost guides you to the target through an "all roads lead to rome" architecture.
And let's not talk about the shadow system. They royally fucked this up. Now it's just an on-off thing. You're either in light or in darkness
and it's not even consistent, some areas seem lighted but are darkness and vice-versa. Difficulty-wise, it's popamole to the extreme.
You can easily defeat opponents with your blackjack(!) without taking any damage (I'm talking about head-on attacks). I literally can't
think of any area where they didn't fuck up. Only the graphics (obviously) are better. Such a waste..
 

udm

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Don't know about Thi5f, but I bought Thi4f recently just because it was on sale for $4, played up till the point where nuGarrett meets nuBasso, and then uninstalled and refunded. Now at least I can tell people it's shit and my word is good because I've played it. :smug:
 

Spukrian

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So I played through Thief 2014. I had very low expectations. Everyone told me it was bad... and I hated Deus Ex Human Revolution. But I just had to know, I needed to know, by playing it myself.

Good:
+I kind of enjoyed the story between Garrett and Erin.
+I liked Basso
+Visually the City does look like I feel it's suposed to look like. I also liked the freedom of running around exploring and doing sidemissions.
+The Asylum level was sufficiently spooky, I was spooked.

Bad:
-I always felt like I had to "fight" Garrett to get him to do what I wanted him to do. I changed the controls but it didn't help. A few examples: if I dropped a body near a corner then I couldn't pick it up again, because Garrett would insist on "Peeking" around the corner instead, there were many times when I wanted Garrett to jump but he instead decided to fall to his death, at other times he would jump when I didn't want him to, leading to him falling and dying, etc
-The entire game feels like the developers played the Thief games but not understanding what made them great and then them playing the Dishonored games and not understanding what made them great, and just put it all together in some kind of mess.

Neutral:
*Collectibles? Why would Garrett ever keep anything? He would just sell everything IMHO.
*The voice actor for Garrett isn't Stephen Russell, but he does a good enough job
*With all that said, this game was less tedious and less annoying than Human Revolution.

Yeah... whatever.
 

udm

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Yeah I really like the design of the city. Everything else is a dumpster fire.

But since The Dark Mod also has many FMs with fantastic looking gothic city architecture, there's just no reason to even bother with this POS.

In fact, just talking about TDM makes me want to boot it up again, so I think I will tonight :obviously:
 

toughasnails

Guest
The game really felt like the devs only ever played Thief 3, understanding some of its shortcomings that needed fixing without really getting what made it good. The hub was a massive improvement over the one in Thief 3 which eventually felt more like a padding and I wouldn't mind seeing the return of meaty hub area if or when there is another Thief game. What they did with movement, making the jumping and mantling contextual & automatized, also felt like an attempt to "fix" Thief 3's notoriously clunky movement only they went in completely wrong direction... and the result was still clunky & alienating. Dishonored came out few years earlier and gave the freedom of movement you had in early Thief games only making it smoother and faster.
 

Unkillable Cat

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Today I learned that a comic book was printed alongside the release of this game.

Written by Terry Pratchett's daughter.

It's as bad as the game itself, four issues trying to tell an origin story about the game's main characters, and maybe featuring Garrett for about 6 pages in total... and they can't even keep him in character.

It's all Basso moping about Erin, how rough she had it, how much she suffered, how he should never have introduced her to Garrett, blah blah blah...

It's as if Rhianna believed she could create her own little Discworld with Garrett instead of Rincewind.

Sadly she would have needed some of her father's talent. Anyone could have written this drivel.
 

thesheeep

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I completely forgot this game even existed.
And I played it, finished it even!

If anyone asked me yesterday how many Thief games there are, I'd have said 3 (and not ironically).
Just... entirely erased it from my memory, until I saw this thread :lol:
Looking at some screenshots, I think the game just melded together with Dishonored in my mind.

Fascinating.
 

jebsmoker

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it's been over 9 years since thief 4 was released and i can hardly remember anything about it. it had the art style and sound design down, but there's hardly anything memorable about it beyond that - it is completely forgettable

all i remember is that there's some bad guy... doing a thing... for some reason.. and Garrett.. has to do a thing... in order to stop him, or whatever.

meanwhile, i vividly remember all of the important characters from thief 1 and 2. Karras is still one of the most terrifying characters i know of: a broken genius that was pushed to complete misanthropy. you can only guess what made him like that. sure, his Droopy-sounding voice is probably part of that, but you can easily tell that there was far more to that
 
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The thing is, Thief 4 is not only a mediocre game, it's badly made too. Sound production feels bad, some cutscenes are badly cut/transitioned into proper gameplay scenes, etc. Everything feels as if it was rushed through at the last minute, and you are left with a mess of a game that feels like a hongkong-ese attempt at mimicking Dishonored. Thing is, at least Dishonored was more than playable, it was fun. I had fun completing it, ghosting it. It wasn't hard or anything, but it did its thing and it presented options. I'd replay it, even. Someone else mentioned Human Revolution, I feel the same thing for that game. It's Deus Ex as done by someone who watched a video essay on the first game and then tried to recreate what he heard from memory, but it's a decent entry in the series and a game worthy of the Deus Ex name. I can't say Thief 4 is Thief. It's simply not. And unlike other posters, I can't simply forget this game exists.
 

Melan

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Reported for shameless Equip the Ring harvesting.

In the end, this is how it always goes. They can gin up the hype for something entirely forgettable, but hype can't make a dud have staying power. It is the same with games and movies. Nobody even talks about Rings of Power anymore. Nobody talks about Thief 4 anymore. Hell, nobody talks about Bioshock: Infinite anymore, and that was a critical darling among the game journos. People still talk about Thief and Deus Ex and Blood, because those games are rock solid.
 

Lyric Suite

Converting to Islam
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Mediocrity is less tolerable when it is following up a 10/10 series like Thief, and from what i've seen of Thiaf it goes past mediocrity into outright garbage territory. Thief 3 was the mediocrity, Thiaf is just plain shit.
 

Dave the Druid

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Dec 29, 2022
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I subjected myself to Thief 2014 a couple of years ago since I figured that I can't really, properly complain that it's a complete piece of shit without actually playing it first. Yep, it's a complete piece of shit, don't know why or if I expected anything else. Not the worst game I've ever played but possibly the most aggressively mediocre game I've ever experienced (and often times it manages to just miss the mark and is below-mediocre.) That said I came across something that I've never seen anyone else on the internet complain about, including Unkillable Cat's long-ass writeup from a few years back: The AI isn't just shit, it's completely broken.

I was legit stuck in one section (because I wasn't spamming focus like an epileptic I didn't notice the actual route the game wanted me to take since it's near impossible to tell what's actually interactable and what's environmental clutter in this shit game) and unable to pass this one guard, so I hatched a plan. I got one of those distractable bottles and threw it near him into this little room with a pressure plate trap on the floor. Step on the plate and arrows shoot out of the walls (which managed to kill me once since, again, I wasn't spamming the focus button because I wanted to play a fun video game not have a fucking seizure.) The idea was he'd investigate the noise, trigger the trap and hopefully either die or get hurt while I slipped past. Pretty standard immersive sim type shit (...honestly it probably predates immersive sims, wasn't something like that possible in Dungeon Master?)

So I throw the bottle into the room, guard investigates, steps on the trap, I can clearly hear the arrows shoot out the walls and hit him (didn't get killed sadly, just a bit of damage) when suddenly the guard turns around, says some variation of, "There you are!" runs to my exact position and proceeds to bash my head in with his sword until I die. Weird, that's not what I expected would happen. What the fuck is going on with the AI?

I kept experimenting with this, throwing a bottle into the pressure plate room and then swooping an increasingly far distance away. Every time (where it didn't bug out and the guard would just become aware of me for no goddamn reason) the guard would investigate, stand on the trap, get hit and then suddenly as he became alerted (not fully alerted, just one stage down from it, he'd only go on full alert when he made line-of-sight with me) he'd somehow know my exact position on the map and start running towards me.

Eventually by the end of my experimenting I'd managed to get 2 guards to investigate the noise, at which point I'd swoop halfway across the map, around a corner and even though there's no earthly way the AI could've known where I'd just gone they'd then both run to my exact location the second they got damaged. To be fair to the game they only knew where my exact location was on the moment they got hit, in the time it took them to get there I could swoop to a nearby shadow/the other side of the map. That said they'd always go to where my exact position was when they got hit. Also I couldn't swoop to the literal other side of the map because there seems to be either some kind of range thing going on or maybe the AI just stops working when you're far enough away from them. I don't know nor care but it stopped working after I had got past around the halfway line of the map.

For all the games other issues I actually thought the AI had some degree of intelligence since they occasionally managed to catch me. They clearly still had a bunch of flaws and oversights but it did seem like there was a little bit of care put into them, enough where they even took me by surprise once or twice. Turns out... NO. They're actually completely fucking borked and all those times that seemed like actual intelligence was just the AI breaking some more. This also explains certain things about the level design, like how there are barely ever pressure plate-style traps in areas near guards. The mechanics literally don't work with each other and that means that the levels have to be designed around hiding how fucked everything is to the player, rather than having a bunch of cool systems interact and react with each other in cool, possibly unexpected ways and then designing the levels around that. It's literally the opposite of Thief: The Dark Project. It's literally the opposite of a Looking Glass Studios game. How do you fuck up that completely and totally?

TL;DR: Thief 2014's AI isn't just bad, it's completely broken. If an AI stubs its toe by accident they'll suddenly start running to your exact location even though you had nothing to do with it and you're currently so far away you're almost in a different time zone. Because the AI has barely, if any, actual awareness and is held together by sellotape and glue. Only reason why you possibly didn't notice is because the level design compensates for this by being complete shit.
 
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Unkillable Cat

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I subjected myself to Thief 2014 a couple of years ago since I figured that I can't really, properly complain that it's a complete piece of shit without actually playing it first. Yep, it's a complete piece of shit, don't know why or if I expected anything else. Not the worst game I've ever played but possibly the most aggressively mediocre game I've ever experienced (and often times it manages to just miss the mark and is below-mediocre.) That said I came across something that I've never seen anyone else on the internet complain about, including Unkillable Cat's long-ass writeup from a few years back: The AI isn't just shit, it's completely broken.
Thanks for reading it through, I hope you enjoyed it.

While I never experienced the precise AI-quirk that you described, I did encounter (and mention) a similar one, the one with the bottle and the lights; get a guard to investigate a noise, and the AI won't register any other changes in the room that it normally should. Sounds like the AI is coded to only recognize Garrett as the source of all damage, and briefly gains omniscience when it takes damage from any other source.

But good observation on the fact that the game seems to be designed around hiding the incompatibility of the two elements (guard's behavior and the environment).

BTW, as for the TFix-guy, some years back I just happened to be playing through the original Thief Gold-campaign when he released a new version of TFix, and I noted down all the bugs that I came across along the way during my playthrough, and sent them to him. I can't recall when he got around to fixing the bugs, but it was years after the fact.

Finally, on Thief 3... there's an update out there that merges the smaller levels together... and yet it doesn't feel right to play Thief 3 that way. It's due to something else, can't really put my finger on it.

But Thief 3 allows me to nail Widow Moira's cat to the floor with an arrow, so that's a big plus.
 

Dave the Druid

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Thanks for reading it through, I hope you enjoyed it.

While I never experienced the precise AI-quirk that you described, I did encounter (and mention) a similar one, the one with the bottle and the lights; get a guard to investigate a noise, and the AI won't register any other changes in the room that it normally should. Sounds like the AI is coded to only recognize Garrett as the source of all damage, and briefly gains omniscience when it takes damage from any other source.

But good observation on the fact that the game seems to be designed around hiding the incompatibility of the two elements (guard's behavior and the environment).
Yeah, I actually read it a couple of years back before playing it. I just skimmed over it before to see if you'd mentioned the AI issues but I must've missed your example of, "a guard that lost his shit because I turned off a light two rooms away," since that's basically the same thing. My example was just so fascinating to me because I could consistently watch the AI break right in front of me and even run experiments to see how far I could further bork them.

But yeah, really good write-up mate. Pretty much sums up most of my thoughts. Kudos.
 
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I still remember that hack lead writer that was the face of almost all of the development and pre-release promo videos for Thiaf. The guy was obviously clueless about Thief, untalented and awfuly pretentious. To this day, his long and dramatic freestyle rants about some retarded story and character concepts are some of the most awkward video game promo materials I have seen. Never heard of the guy afterwards, I wonder if Thiaf ended his career in video game writing. "I steal to survive…and I survive to steal" was that guy‘s idea of profound writing.

The whole team was basically illiterate, I remember a screenshot with a shop that had "Shoemaker shop" written on its sign instead of "cobbler".

Aside from the great gameplay in Thief 1 and 2, it is still amazing to me how a bunch of MIT nerds delivered some of the best video game story telling, characters, lore, cut-scenes and atmosphere in any game ever. Take the Hammerites and their shakespearian way of talking, that actual takes some knowledge and skill to pull off! Almost like people back then were well read and not basing their entire cultural context on vidya games and MCU movies.

Thief 3 did (mostly) a competent job at not butchering the world and backstory and delivering a satisfying conclusion. This is why I can‘t be too harsh on the game even if the gameplay was a major downgrade. It still had some nice levels too.
 

NecroLord

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Take the Hammerites and their shakespearian way of talking, that actual takes some knowledge and skill to pull off!
Stephen Russell is an awesome voice actor, perhaps one of the best.
Voiced a lot of characters ingame, not only Garrett. I think many of the voice actors in the game also worked on the development of the game, Dan Thron, for example, voices some of the guards (he worked on the cutscenes).
 

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