Dave the Druid
Educated
- Joined
- Dec 29, 2022
- Messages
- 193
Decline fags like you lot led to the steep decline of the Immersive Sim. When their most successful and popular game is also one of their most unambitious and was a fucking medieval bow shooter up until the last six months of development, well that's just how the world works. You're all the lowest common denominator demographic the genre could reach at that time.
NOT TO SAY IT'S A BAD GAME. Calm yourselves. But have any of you idiots even looked at Ultima Underworld? So much promise for the future, but as always compromise is a necessity.
So I'm sorry that I'm... Jesus, 7 years late to the party but I just read through the entire Thief development diary off the old Looking Glass website (available here and here) and I couldn't help but think of this thread. The dev diary runs from January 1997 - July 1998 of Thief's development (Thief released in December of 1998) and almost all entires were written by Tim Stellmach. Here's the literal first entry, bold emphasis by me:
January 31, 1997
The programmers pushed the game to a new milestone; we can now save off objects, AI paths, and most other elements of the game that are in yet. Before, we could only save physical geometry, and had to re-set all that other stuff each time we loaded up.
Briscoe's gotten the AI stuff, especially the enemy detection code, into shape far ahead of schedule, and now we've all got to test it to hell. Sneaking around and avoiding detection are key elements of the game, so we need to make sure his algorithms are sound.
The artists have been re-structuring the textures for our new texture regime, wherein we can use any number of texture or texture groups we want. Before, you could only use one texture "family" at once, so if you were making catacombs, you had to make sure all the textures you wanted were in that "family". Now we can cross-match as we see fit; this means the levels will look a lot more realistic look than they already do, since we're not tied into artificial groupings. Objects are also popping into the game -- full bipeds real soon.
On the design end, we're busy going over the levels, making sure they flow together right and have the right amount of "coolness". We're also checking for the right "ramping up" of game events -- don't want to top-load all the good stuff and have the rest be dull. We also want to make sure we're teaching all the skills at the right rate, so that you don't have to keep looking at the manual during your first hour of play.
Robb's been taking our pictures for promotional material. This involves going to our A/V studio, turning off all the lights, and sitting right over a spotlight pointed at your chin. Don't look down -- damn, you're blind for minutes!
Here's another really early one, this time from March 1997:
March 14, 1997
...
We've moved on to nailing down our design of the creature list and stealth systems. Since we're concentrating on a thief as player-character that last bit is going to be particularly important, and we've been putting our heads together over AI models, audiovisual cues, and a number of game rules to bring it all off. There's not a lot of precedents for a game concentrating so much on stealth: I told a friend of mine that we had a two-hour flame comparing our game to a submarine battle. She said she didn't understand how I got paid to do this stuff.
Hell, there's even an explanation as to why all the early gameplay footage relied heavily on bow combat:
December 12, 1997
...
Plenty of stuff going on since the last update. Mark has started working up some new interface screens, with cool clunky-looking steam-punk machinery. Doug, Mahk, and I are strategizing about inventory, using objects, damage models, and suchlike gameplay goodness.
Chris, in his guise as physics guy is getting doors in this week, much to the joy of designers everywhere. Tom is in the final stages of getting our scripting language together, which will really unblock our upcoming (mid-January) gameplay prototype. Many correspondents have noted that our current "gameplay" movie is heavy on bow combat and light on thievery: the simple reason is that bow combat is just about the easiest part of our game to implement. The next month or two will be when we really get into the meat of the gameplay, with lockpicking and pickpocketing mechanics coming on line, plus hand-to-hand combat, and AI and scripting support for more interesting creature behaviors.
So it turns out nearly everything Ash said about Thief in this thread is just, plain, flat-out incorrect. It's not really a "valid opinion" when you are just objectively wrong. Or to put it more succinctly:
tl;dr: Ash is a solid modder but possibly retadred
GMDX is still cool though