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

[AlexOfSpades]

The problem is not just that Garrett grabs it with his hands, its how the camera zooms tremendously when doing so. Honestly it feels like he's biting the loot, specially when pickpocketing.

 

[SmartCheetah]

The problem is not just that Garrett grabs it with his hands, its how the camera zooms tremendously when doing so. Honestly it feels like he's biting the loot, specially when pickpocketing.

Yeah, reminds me of Aliens vs Predator 2, Alien biting animation. LOL.

 

[Azazel]

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/zero-punctuation/8891-Thief

 

[Jaedar]

There really is a good middleground: I remember tons of games where when you loot it sort of 'flies' into your chest. That's something, but having the arms appear would be fine too. The thing that seems shit in thiaf(I haven't played) is that it takes control away from you for 2 seconds every time you loot. That is dumb on so many levels, especially for forks worth 2 gold or whatever.

 

[J_C]

Shamus is a pretty fair critic. He tends to rail on games if he feels they are just bad but he always expresses his opinion in a pretty articulate way. I believe him when he says Thief has moments of greatness and shows a lot of potential underneath the lack of polish and weird design choices, and honestly I'm not sure we would gain much from yet more bashing of the game. Everyone knows the state of it, up to and including the developers most of all, I'm sure.

He might write articulate opinions, but he is still talking shit.

1) Bank Mission

Dear Eidos Montreal: You know that Bank level? The one people got for pre-ordering? That was proper Thief.

Yes, too bad they fucked over their customers by making it a pre-order bonus.

2) Sneaking Mechanics

The new game kept the focus on shadow that the old games were known for. And I think the new Thief improved on it in a few ways.

I can't find one element in Thiaf, which was an improvement on the sneeking mechanic. Swooping was laughable, focus was just cheat mode, leaning, jumping became a contextual move etc.

In the old games, the player would sometimes run into a massive room of marble tile. The choice was to hurry over the floor and make enough noise to piss off every guard in the city, or spend several minutes creeping imperceptibly from one side of the room to the other.

Yeah, this is the same lame excuse as the "people were bunny hopping all the time in Thief, because there were jump in it". No, people didn't spend minutes creeping around in marble floors, they used moss arrows, or just noticed that they can mover around faster, because there are no guards near.

3) Grabbing Animations

In this new game, Garrett no longer steals things by looking at them. His hands reach out, grab the thing, and then put it away. If it's really valuable, he might look at it for a second or two and say something about it.

NO, and FUCK this guy. Giving everything a stupid animation is just boring, time consuming and takes away the control of the player all the time. And constantly leaing forward for a grab just makes me dizzy.

4) Romano Orzari

Yes, we all made a huge fuss when you replaced Stephen Russell with this new guy as the voice of protagonist Garrett.

Meh, I can get used to him, not a bad voice. Of course it is nowhere near Stephen Russel.

5) Basso

In the previous games, Basso barely got any screen time, but that's because hardly anyone got screen time, because the game was light on cutscenes. But this new version had to flesh out a lot of long-standing characters and ideas that were only hinted at in the original. Most of them aren't interesting, but I really like what you did with this new Basso. His relationship with Garrett works and his character design has a certain sloppy, disheveled charm. He's arguably the most interesting man in the Thief universe at this point.

Meh No2. If he wants cutscenes about Basso, let him have it. I can deal with it.

6) The Claw

The climbing claw that Garrett acquires in the tutorial is actually pretty interesting. It gives him a lot of vertical mobility.

Climbing claw was near useless in DS, and it is useless here.

7) The "Platforming"

This stuff had "cut content" written all over it. Three or four times in the game, Garrett gets the chance to crawl up walls and pipes like Nathan Drake. It's interesting, since it gives observant players another way into a building.

Yeah, do you know what would have been even better? Making platforming more interesting by letting me jump, use rope arrops, pulling myself up on ledges. (and not just at scripted places).

8) The Stairway Puzzle

The old library was obviously supposed to be a keeper library, and maybe it was even explicitly so in some earlier cut of the game. In any case, the puzzle with the rotating steps was a really good one.

Ok.

9) Difficulty Options

This was pretty amazing. Players have the options to turn off individual features of the game. Want to turn off focus mode? Old-school movement speed? Make it so that guards can only be knocked out when taken by surprise, as in the other games? It's all options!

Ok. Wow, the guy wrote to non-idiotic things in a row. Here, have a cookie.

10) Upgrades System

I really liked being able to upgrade Garrett's toolbox over time. The wrench, the razor, and the wire cutters were interesting and useful. The focus upgrades were appealing. It was nice to have something to put all that money into. And I really liked that it's impossible to get everything in one play-through. It means choices matter, and it adds replay value.

Give me back that cookie, and please just die. I hate that devs feel forced to put upgrades in every game now. Great, as a master thief, I have to develop skills, like a rookie.

 

[Lyric Suite]

It lacks immershun.

The amusing thing is that it actually brakes immersion. In real life, you just pick stuff up without being too self conscious about the process, and this is how it should be in games. You don't need visual feedback for every mundane action, because in real life nobody takes notice of that shit.

 

[Unkillable Cat]

To be fair, the original Thief games could have let the loot count light up or something when you picked up loot, instead of just bringing up the loot counter to show you that something has been added to it.

Also, Yahtzee didn't curse non-stop for 5 minutes like I predicted, am disappoint.

 

[sea]

He might write articulate opinions, but he is still talking shit.

Okay.

 

[J_C]

To be fair, the original Thief games could have let the loot count light up or something when you picked up loot, instead of just bringing up the loot counter to show you that something has been added to it.

It also had a sound effect, which notified you.

 

[Azazel]

To be fair, the original Thief games could have let the loot count light up or something when you picked up loot, instead of just bringing up the loot counter to show you that something has been added to it.

It also had a sound effect, which notified you.

You could also bring it up in your inventory and check your total at any time.

 

[AlexOfSpades]

I didn't like how in the original Thief games, it selected the "gold" item in the inventory. Sometimes it took a while to fade away, and i had to manually scroll out of the inventory to get it away from the screen. If Thiaf wanted to improve, could've just added a counter to the corner that appears when you loot something (no animation) and plays a "ding!" sound, and then the counter quickly fades. For rare/special loot, there would be an animation and comment, preferably quick and not restraining your body movement to not lock the character in position.

 

[Unkillable Cat]

To be fair, the original Thief games could have let the loot count light up or something when you picked up loot, instead of just bringing up the loot counter to show you that something has been added to it.

It also had a sound effect, which notified you.

You could also bring it up in your inventory and check your total at any time.

Yes, but in a few cases you weren't just stealing to fill the loot count, you also had to steal X amount of a specific loot, be it gold, jewels or goods. Sometimes it wasn't quite certain which kind of loot you were grabbing, and unless you already had the loot counter up and were watching the numbers like a hawk, it was very easy to miss which loot type, or how much loot you, you grabbed. Having the number flash briefly would have made a positive difference.

But it's a minor nuisance, nothing more.

 

[DeepOcean]

Shamus is a pretty fair critic. He tends to rail on games if he feels they are just bad but he always expresses his opinion in a pretty articulate way. I believe him when he says Thief has moments of greatness and shows a lot of potential underneath the lack of polish and weird design choices, and honestly I'm not sure we would gain much from yet more bashing of the game. Everyone knows the state of it, up to and including the developers most of all, I'm sure.

I would agree with you if he hadn't said on his last show that getting rid of the diferent surfaces with diferents levels of sound system for broken glass everywhere was a good idea because the old system was boring. I just stopped listening and was in shock that someone would come with such bullshit.

 

[sea]

Shamus is a pretty fair critic. He tends to rail on games if he feels they are just bad but he always expresses his opinion in a pretty articulate way. I believe him when he says Thief has moments of greatness and shows a lot of potential underneath the lack of polish and weird design choices, and honestly I'm not sure we would gain much from yet more bashing of the game. Everyone knows the state of it, up to and including the developers most of all, I'm sure.

I would agree with you if he hadn't said on his last show that getting rid of the diferent surfaces with diferents levels of sound system for broken glass everywhere was a good idea because the old system was boring. I just stopped listening and was in shock that someone would come with such bullshit.

Distilling that decision to a smaller trade-off that doesn't take several minutes is, while not necessarily an "improvement", an interesting decision to present the player. I can't say I agree with him on that point 100% but I get what he's saying and I don't think it's "stupid" for him to have that opinion.

It's a matter of perspective - Shamus is simply not the kind of guy who likes it when games "waste his time" and I guess to him he feels that something that's too slow-going is just tedious.

 

[spekkio]

All I have to know about Thi4f:
http://www.videogamessuck.com/review525.html

 

[Cowboy Moment]

Shamus is a pretty fair critic. He tends to rail on games if he feels they are just bad but he always expresses his opinion in a pretty articulate way. I believe him when he says Thief has moments of greatness and shows a lot of potential underneath the lack of polish and weird design choices, and honestly I'm not sure we would gain much from yet more bashing of the game. Everyone knows the state of it, up to and including the developers most of all, I'm sure.

I would agree with you if he hadn't said on his last show that getting rid of the diferent surfaces with diferents levels of sound system for broken glass everywhere was a good idea because the old system was boring. I just stopped listening and was in shock that someone would come with such bullshit.

Distilling that decisions to a smaller trade-off that doesn't take several minutes is, while not necessarily an "improvement", an interesting decision to present the player. I can't say I agree with him on that point 100% but I get what he's saying and I don't think it's "stupid" for him to have that opinion.

It's a matter of perspective - Shamus is simply not the kind of guy who likes it when games "waste his time" and I guess to him he feels that something that's too slow-going is just tedious.

Come on sea, it's pretty much straight up dumbing down the mechanic, which honestly isn't particularly complex to begin with. His point is also just plainly bullshit, as there's no point in Thief where you need to slowly walk over a marble floor in earsight of enemies.

 

[tuluse]

Distilling that decisions to a smaller trade-off that doesn't take several minutes is, while not necessarily an "improvement", an interesting decision to present the player. I can't say I agree with him on that point 100% but I get what he's saying and I don't think it's "stupid" for him to have that opinion.

It's a matter of perspective - Shamus is simply not the kind of guy who likes it when games "waste his time" and I guess to him he feels that something that's too slow-going is just tedious.

If that is a reviewer's perspective, I would say they're not qualified to review a Thief game.

 

[Melan]

I was watching the videos RPS was doing with Greg LoPiccolo and Randy Smith (with a cameo by Tim Stellmach). Interesting how they think about their games so many years later. Some standouts that grabbed my attention - mostly smart, occasionally self-justifying:

• Musing about how "player-unfriendly" and "inconvenient" their level design might look like compared to modern streamlining. But Thief's roots in a swordfighting game and its multiple design stages had also made it broader than how a focused game about thieving might have turned out, and this has made the game better.
  
• Thief's designers, aside from drawing from D&D and the Ffahrd & Grey Mouser stories, were also familiar with Thieves Guild, the late 70s thief-centric D&D clone made by Gamelords. That's kinda amazing - Thieves Guild is seven kinds of awesome, but I never thought anyone but really old people or collectors knew about it.
• Dramatic tension arising from ambiguity, being on a knife's edge between being in control and your vulnerability when exposed as a core part of playing a thief.
• "The word 'taffer'. Why?" "'Cause you don't want to swear... (...) swearing is sort of déclassé."
• Thief 2, made in response to fan criticism, took things a bit too far in the "normal" direction. A certain lack of coherence in level design (which was part of that period in gaming) is to the game's benefit. Thief was more a product of several individuals and a few fortunate accidents than a top-down design, and this individual character helped it stand out. It also grants it some believability - too tight direction ends up feeling artificial, limited in perspective.
• "If you are in a position to take chances... take them."
• "You should trust the simulation. You build the simulation, but never try to make it do specific things like ... what we want is for the player to do something cool in the world, and not tell them 'You can't do that right now'. ... Trust the system, put the player on stage was a pretty big [part of the design philosophy]."
• There was a conscious effort to trim the interface down - instead of training tips, they preferred in-game ficition telling you how to play. And you learn a lot by blundering through things.
• Dishonored has been the game in the last few years that has been most faithful to the LGS tradition.
• High fidelity puts a lot of strain on design groups in a way that does not benefit gameplay.
• Rope arrows were cut from Thief 3 due to time/budget constraints. Climbing gloves seemed more logical (coming from D&D and other ideas about thieves), but in the end, they felt less satisfying. The decision to cut water was a fully conscious design decision, though, since they felt water was played out in the stealth context.
  
• You should separate a casual audience from a dumb audience. Casual gamers might not be super-deep into gaming, but they are not necessarily dumb people, and they may be ready for sophisticated, interactive gameplay concepts.

Compare and contrast...

 

[DeepOcean]

• You should separate a casual audience from a dumb audience. Casual gamers might not be super-deep into gaming, but they are not necessarily dumb people, and they may be ready for sophisticated, interactive gameplay concepts.

Compare and contrast...

I agree with most they said but I don't know if I can believe on this.

 

[sea]

If that is a reviewer's perspective, I would say they're not qualified to review a Thief game.

Why? Is that opinion invalid because... what, you don't agree with it? Because if someone prefers some aspect of the new game they are wrong to do so? Not this crap again. I try to respect everyone's opinion and I am by no means a fan of the new Thief, but this pointlessly edgy attitude is just annoying.

Stepping out now, see you.

 

[tuluse]

Why? Is that opinion invalid because... what, you don't agree with it? Because if someone prefers some aspect of the new game they are wrong to do so? Not this crap again. I try to respect everyone's opinion and I am by no means a fan of the new Thief, but this pointlessly edgy attitude is just annoying.

Stepping out now, see you.

I'm going to use an example from another medium.

If someone says that Star Wars is superior to Blade Runner because Star Wars cuts all the waiting out and lets the viewer get on with the plot, that person is not qualified to review Blade Runner.

If you actively dislike a core gameplay element of a game (or any type of media), and you treat it as an objectively bad trait instead of a subjective opinion, then you are not qualified to review that element. So thinking Thiaf is better because it removes waiting for guards means you are totally discounting the experience of people who liked waiting. He hasn't done the work to understand why someone would like such a mechanic, thus he is unqualified. If he did understand it and had a rebuttal for why it's bad, that might be a different story. He doesn't though, he just dismisses it out of hand.

Spoiler

I also don't believe that we have seen a good game reviewer yet. It took decades for movie criticism to get anyone near useful. So even if Shamus Young is less bad than others, that doesn't mean he's good.

 

[Azazel]

• You should separate a casual audience from a dumb audience. Casual gamers might not be super-deep into gaming, but they are not necessarily dumb people, and they may be ready for sophisticated, interactive gameplay concepts.

This stands out. I feel like too often gamers hand wave away a games flaws as pandering to "casuals", because it's more politically correct and less brutal than saying something like "the game was designed for drooling fucking retards, people too stupid to tie their own shoes."

There is a definite distinction between a casual gamer and one that is just plain stupid, and the vast majority of AAA gameplay "innovations" recently are definitely pandering to the latter.

 

[JarlFrank]

• You should separate a casual audience from a dumb audience. Casual gamers might not be super-deep into gaming, but they are not necessarily dumb people, and they may be ready for sophisticated, interactive gameplay concepts.

Compare and contrast...

I agree with most they said but I don't know if I can believe on this.

It's actually true. People who aren't much into gaming are actually more likely to enjoy something complex with interesting gameplay than a dumbed down newshit game that is all about being AWESOME and FLASHY. It's the console kiddies who spend all day gaming who are most impressed by SHINY GRAFFIX and who want to feel cool by playing the next big thing on their hip console.

 

[Infinitron]

• Thief's designers, aside from drawing from D&D and the Ffahrd & Grey Mouser stories, were also familiar with Thieves Guild, the late 70s thief-centric D&D clone made by Gamelords. That's kinda amazing - Thieves Guild is seven kinds of awesome, but I never thought anyone but really old people or collectors knew about it.

Awesome. My theory about how Garrett was supposed to be like a D&D thief was just that - a theory. I'm actually semi-surprised that it turned out to be true.

 

[Ninjerk]

• You should separate a casual audience from a dumb audience. Casual gamers might not be super-deep into gaming, but they are not necessarily dumb people, and they may be ready for sophisticated, interactive gameplay concepts.

This stands out. I feel like too often gamers hand wave away a games flaws as pandering to "casuals", because it's more politically correct and less brutal than saying something like "the game was designed for drooling fucking retards, people too stupid to tie their own shoes."

There is a definite distinction between a casual gamer and one that is just plain stupid, and the vast majority of AAA gameplay "innovations" recently are definitely pandering to the latter.

I think the distinction is that one is lazy, and the other can't help being what they are.