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

[Infinitron]

http://sneakybastards.net/stealthreview/thief-design-analysis-part-3/

Our level design-specific analysis of the Thief reboot begins with a look at the Jewellers and road to the clocktower in Chapter 1: Lockdown.


You start this chapter in a small yard off the bridge through which you entered the city via cart in the preceding cutscene. The only way out of this yard is to use the claw you stole from Erin during the events of the prologue. Once you have climbed to the first ledge you need to use it again to climb up and over to the street beyond. A simple antepiece space, this area serves to confirm that you understand how to use the claw to climb using ladders and gratings.

Two members of the City Watch are sealing shut the gate at the end of the street beyond the starting area. With their task complete, they’ll begin to patrol along the street passing your position and moving around the corner. The obvious route is to climb up onto the pipework and use this to move across the street, though it’s also possible to drop down to the ground level and explore the street itself. However, the area that you have access to only extends as far as the corner the guards walked toward. Once they have reached this point, they will turn and retrace their steps back toward the gate.

Despite its small size, there are four discrete means of entering the Jewellers

Only one of the buildings on this street is explorable. Despite having previously seen a civilian at the door when the guards were locking the gate, the only part of this building you can enter is a single uninhabited room directly off the street.

Either across the pipes, or over the walls at either end of the short stretch of street, you’ll find yourself in another small yard, with a guard and a climbable ladder beyond. This lone guard doesn’t present a challenging stealth encounter, but this space does serve to indicate that, despite what the audio feedback might suggest, using the claw to climb is noiseless.

Through a soft transition, you emerge overlooking a larger section of street on the far side of which two members of the City Watch can be observed looking through the windows of a Jewellers. With this section of street also locked down due to the curfew, going through the shop is the only way forward.

Despite its small size, there are four discrete means of entering the Jewellers. The front door is the most risky, as there are patrolling guards on both sides; the open window on the floor above is the most obvious and the one the level is structured to lead you toward. There is also a back door to the basement, and a way to climb up onto a series of pipes that the lead inside and run just below the ceiling of the entire ground floor, including the showroom at the front of the building. These different means of access provide scope for the preparation phase; the selection of ingress point an act of intentionality and player expression.


The Jeweller himself can be found in the basement penning a message for his friend, and leaving a clue to the combination of the safe at the same time.

Though compact in size, the density of objects and NPCs within make for only a few spaces where you will not have to engage directly with NPCs. The showroom at the very front of the building is a good example of the style of encounter design possible within a small space. There are multiple items of stealable loot within the showroom, including pieces within cabinet and drawers that require unlocking. The patrol route of the lone guard takes him past all of these valuables, including stops at certain points that grant you a few extra moments in which to act while his back is turned. There are four ways into the space; two interior doors, the locked front doors, and an opening near the roof level that will allow you to walk along the pipes running just below the ceiling. This pipework can also be accessed from the ground level by climbing up the cabinets against the wall.

The showroom at the very front of the building is a good example of the style of encounter design possible within a small space

The position of the locked drawers relative to the patrol route of the guard is such that you will be exposed by the light if you choose to unlock them. You can try to work the lock while his back is turned but if you take too long you risk detection and may have to abandon your attempt, resetting the lock.


The escape along the street to the Clock Tower takes place in a part of the City that you will be free to explore later, though it can be difficult to recognise when you revisit it in the less restricted City hub.

The Jewellers is a form of “tutorial in-situ” a space of limited size within which are a variety of different stealth encounters, basic examples of the various styles of problem you will face over the course of the game. It can hard to make informed judgements about the level design of subsequent chapters from this opening area as the encounters are limited in scope and complexity. It’s a good, if overly brief, opening that provides a more contextual introduction to the systems of Thief than the heavily scripted prologue.

​

 

[Excidium]

http://www.tracking-board.com/tb-exclusive-gem-collectors-beware-a-thief-movie-is-in-development/

Vertigo and Prime Universe are developing a movie based on THIEF, the seminal stealth action video game from Looking Glass Studios and Eidos Interactive. Adrian Askarieh and Roy Lee are producing.“Thief” is not the first stealth game that Prime Universe has adapted.

Askarieh produced the 2007 film “Hitman,” starring Timothy Olyphant and Olga Kurylenko, based on the video game of the same name. A reboot entitled “Hitman: Agent 47″ is currently in production. Vertigo, meanwhile, is coming off its own successful adaptation, “The Lego Movie,” which grossed almost half a billion dollars worldwide and met with enormous acclaim from audiences and critics alike.

The “Thief” games follow the sarcastic antihero Garrett, a trained, well, thief. Garrett lives in the unnamed, medieval/steampunk City, which is controlled by three competing factions: the chaotic Pagans; the order-obsessed Hammerites; and the Keepers, who try to maintain the balance. Orphaned and taken in by the Keepers at a young age, Garrett later strikes out on his own as an unallied thief. The first game in the series, “Thief: The Dark Project,” details Garrett’s attempts to procure a mystical gem called The Eye for a mysterious Pagan collector.I’m not a big gamer, but “Thief” is one of those games that makes me wish I were. When the first game was released in 1999, it was praised for its expansive and unscripted setting, its innovative use of sound in gameplay, and the suspense created by its emphasis on stealth over fighting. Since then, it has remained critically and commercially popular, earning spots on several gaming industry “best of” lists. But the challenge with video game movies is bridging the gap between what’s interesting to play and what’s interesting to watch. Hopefully, with the right creative team, “Thief” can make the jump.

"Releasing this Thursday, Thief is the story of Garrett (played by Mark Wahlberg) a single father trying to earn money any way he can to pay for his child's chemotherapy treatments."

I didn't know there will be a reboot of Hitman. Two stealthy rapes incoming, prepare your 3d glasses!

lmao they probably expected the game would be a hit.

 

[Azazel]

So it's based on the actual Thief games then and not Thi2014f?

 

[Storyfag]

Still, the Hitman adaptation was shit beyond imagination. I wouldn't expect these guys to do better with Thief.

 

[Cadmus]

Still, the Hitman adaptation was shit beyond imagination. I wouldn't expect these guys to do better with Thief.

It was The Room of game adaptations.
Dunno why people complain about Uwe Boll, I liked the Postal movie

 

[Infinitron]

http://sneakybastards.net/stealthreview/thief-design-analysis-part-4/

Chapter 2, the first non-tutorial mission of the Thief reboot, sees Garrett infiltrate a foundry used to dispose of The City’s plague corpses.

Find a man and steal his ring. Straightforward enough, right? But there’s one problem: the man is dead, and he’s being carted off to be incinerated along with masses of other plague dead. You have a simple objective, with an unsettling and thematically appropriate complication. Though Thief will struggle to concisely explain what your goal is over the course of the subsequent chapters, this is a conceptually strong start to the main portion of the game.

There’s ash everywhere, drifting through the air and piling across the floor; they have been burning bodies here for sometimes. It’s difficult to tell if it’s day or night, the clouds are thick above but there are still patches of light in the sky.

The yard you begin in is flanked on both sides by brick structures, but only those on the far side are accessible. Predominantly made up of tunnels running just below ground level, fully exploring this route requires that you have purchased the wrench; without it, only a small part of these tunnels are open to you. The low wall to the next section of the level is on the same side, and once you have climbed over you will not be able to return to the starting area. This is a common conceit in the reboot; in only a few instances are you granted the opportunity to return to previously explored sections.


This is the only level where its location relative to another place you will have visited is made explicit; across the river stands Northcrest Manor.

Over the wall, the foundry stands ahead of you across a barren patch of ash covered ground. Crossing this will trigger a violent vision of Erin. Though not directly relevant to the events within this level, these flashes become more frequent in the following chapters.

Approaching the foundry there is no clear way inside using the abilities available to you, though one of the pipes attached to the wall shimmers with the blue highlight that indicates it is an object you can interact with. When you start to climb it, the camera abruptly pulls out and up. In order to reach a point from which you can enter the foundry, you will need to climb the facade of the building in third-person using a movement set and tools that you are only given access to under specific circumstances.

Third person climbing sequences occur in all but two of the following chapters. Your path is always indicated by objects ahead and above you shimmering with an artificial blue glow. Only in one instance are these sequences optional, and only in the final level do they begin to develop in complexity. They serve to show Garrett’s athleticism in a way that highlights how relatively limited your movement abilities are the rest of the time. Confusingly, sometimes these sequences are your only means of traversing a space that you could ascend with a rope arrow, or your standard climbing abilities, in less time.

The inside of the foundry is a series of spatially dense stealth encounters connected by sections that serve as soft transitions in ways that feels obviously restrictive. The main objective calls for you to “follow the conveyor” when it means for you to hook onto it and let it carry you where you need to go. Going forward, Thief will use a variety of means to conceal the streaming transitions between areas, though it’s rare that they will be as obvious as in this chapter.

This conveyor line running through the building provides a strong thread to follow. However, despite exploring what is presented as a large portion of the building, you never see where they hang the bodies on the conveyor or where they take them off. The bodies exist either hung on the line or as corpses on slabs being prepared for incineration.


Despite being called the Vale Street Ironworks, nothing about the foundry in Chapter 2 serves to clearly identify what function it once served. Conveyor lines run through the building, but to what purpose?

Past the first conveyer ride, the second interior section is more open than the first, featuring a range of NPCs and paths to discover. This area still feels tutorial-like, with red lights over grates and some heavily-signposted secondary routes.

Within the space of two rooms this level sees the introduction of a new environmental hazard that it then undermines by using in a space where a lack of NPCs renders it inert. Broken glass, and its effect on the sound of your footsteps, is introduced shortly after you detach from the conveyor for the first time, only for there to then be a patch of broken glass in an empty room beyond the next door. When traversing broken glass you need to be mindful of the increased sound of your footsteps. This is only a concern if there is an NPC close enough to hear them. In an empty room, broken glass on the floor is meaningless in terms of the impact it has on the world and your likelihood of being detected.

Visibility and audibility – these are your primary inputs into the systemic model of stealth. Governed by your choice of where, when, and how to move you alter the degree to which your are detectable. These inputs are processed by the antagonistic force within the level that then reacts with identifiable outputs: NPCs move to investigate suspicious activity or, in extreme cases, to attack. With no antagonist to process and respond to your inputs, there is no system; your actions are without consequence. Too frequent are the examples in the subsequent chapters of systems operating in isolation, stripped of tension and threat by being rendered systemically impotent.


That you can climb over the filing cabinets in this area to avoid the glass, despite there being no NPCs within hearing range, creates the impression that this room was once designed to be populated.

One of the unique loot items in this level requires locating the combination to a safe within an abandoned office by finding the numbers stencilled on the heads of three automatons that can be found scattered throughout the office and nearby rooms. These automatons are an element that is used briefly in a number of chapters and never fully explored. They, along with the Thief-Taker General, feel like elements that once played a much larger role in the narrative.

Progress further into the foundry interior is blocked by a locked door, the first example of a door with an actual key needed to unlock it. Additionally, this is the only example along the critical path of an objective that can be completed by picking the pocket of an NPC. It’s also possible to find the key inside a locked chest, which requires you to avoid the broken glass on the floor lest you wake the guard sleeping nearby. This is a clear goal with multiple solutions that require intelligent use of your core abilities; a simple problem, but a smartly designed one.


This is one of only three locks within the game that require an actual key to open.

Another conveyor rail ride and you are transported to the final section of the interior. This marks the first appearance of the Thief-Taker General outside of the prologue. A pantomime villain, instead of coming across as menacing the “kick the dog” approach to his character development erodes any sense of threat he might pose, making it difficult to take him seriously as an antagonist. After he has left, you are free to make your way to the office beyond the furnace and locate the ring he took from the body. There is little scope for exploration here; the sharp flashes of light every time the furnace door opens create tension, but each of the tables arranged in front of the furnace are a swoop’s distance apart. Getting through this area undetected is a matter of timing.

For no reason that is ever explained, the ring is locked in a chest that requires you to solve a block rotating puzzle to open. The moment you grab your prize the Thief-Taker General appears forcing you to make your escape into the backyard of the foundry. Dense with guards and spatially constricted distraction, or direct engagement, prove the best means of ensuring your escape.

With a floor plan that covers only a portion of the building interior and no clear functional purpose to the locations you explore, the spaces within the foundry are hard to parse. Rooms connect to others for reasons not governed by the logic of how such a building would have been constructed. A room aesthetically presented as an office with desks and filing cabinets is reachable only through a vent with no reason presented for why this space is otherwise inaccessible.

Built to a structure that supports all three phases from Preparation to Escape, the divisions between those phases are enforced by the game and remain beyond your control. There is no action you can take that will prevent the Thief-Taker General spotting you and eventually sounding the alarm. Still, the new concepts introduced in this chapter, such as keys hanging from belts and glass strewn across the floor, provide options for engaging stealth problems. Unfortunately, these concepts will either be implemented in an undeveloped fashion, or completely abandoned, in the chapters that follow.

 

[otsego]

http://www.tracking-board.com/tb-exclusive-gem-collectors-beware-a-thief-movie-is-in-development/

Hopefully, with the right creative team, “Thief” can make the jump.

Heh heh heh heh...

 

[Carrion]

Has anyone made a decent Let's Play of this yet? There were some YouTube videos linked to this thread around the time of release, but I take it that those LP's were abandoned almost instantly, similarly to Shamus Young's "plot autopsy". Must be a horrible game.

 

[Baron Dupek]

Has anyone made a decent Let's Play of this yet? There were some YouTube videos linked to this thread around the time of release, but I take it that those LP's were abandoned almost instantly, similarly to Shamus Young's "plot autopsy". Must be a horrible game.

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLuQI8b1yePWgBFKY3pIdJMr7yQOxyGtVH

Maybe there is more but only brave will try.

 

[JarlFrank]

Has anyone made a decent Let's Play of this yet? There were some YouTube videos linked to this thread around the time of release, but I take it that those LP's were abandoned almost instantly, similarly to Shamus Young's "plot autopsy". Must be a horrible game.

FenPhoenix does one, and he's a veteran Thief FM LPer (90% of his LPs are Thief FMs).
He often gets annoyed by THI4F's features, it's a p. cool LP. I have no idea whether he'll actually finish it (he does spend more time on new FMs than on this thing).

 

[Carrion]

FenPhoenix does one

Cool, I thought he had abandoned it after a couple of episodes.

 

[Infinitron]

Sneaky Bastards analysis part 5: http://sneakybastards.net/stealthreview/thief-design-analysis-part-5/

 

[Infinitron]

Part 6 - things turn to shit: http://sneakybastards.net/stealthreview/thief-design-analysis-part-6/

 

[argan]

So apparently this is "slam posting" and earned me an infraction.

"This is EM right now:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iwGFalTRHDA "

 

[skacky]

These guys will defend that turd to the very end.

 

[Drakron]

FenPhoenix does one, and he's a veteran Thief FM LPer (90% of his LPs are Thief FMs).
He often gets annoyed by THI4F's features, it's a p. cool LP. I have no idea whether he'll actually finish it (he does spend more time on new FMs than on this thing).

That was fucking awful.

 

[Infinitron]

Part 7: http://sneakybastards.net/stealthreview/thief-design-analysis-part-7/

Don’t mention the Cradle, don’t mention the Cradle, don’t mention the… dammit.


Shrouded in a thick fog, the horrific events inside the Moira Asylum are concealed from view. The isolated island containing the institution is accessible only by water, and is therefore one of the few locations that benefits from the hard transition between it and the City. By its very nature, it stands disconnected and apart.

Rowed ashore by Basso, you take a path inland which quickly takes you out of sight of the docks where he left you and up to the front gate. With the gate locked, you will need to climb the wall and drop over it in a one-way manoeuvre. The doors to the asylum are locked and boarded over when you approach, though exploring the small area of grounds between the gate and the building will cause the doors to open with a sudden bang.

Though your perspective remains in first-person for the entirety of this level, the camera is granted a rare freedom to rotate along its axis as you move, giving the exploration of the Moira Asylum a Dutch tilt that enhances its uneasy dreamlike quality.


Comparisons to the Shalebridge Cradle are rife throughout. Though the basement door that you used there is sealed shut, exploring this side of the building will cause the main doors to open behind you.

Built to a symmetrical layout, the asylum’s two wings have been converted into wards for the male and female patients, while the central span houses administrative facilities. The women’s ward is where you will find the information you are after regarding the fate of Erin. Sealed by one of the Baron’s locks with a key to be found in the men’s ward, the entrance to the women’s ward is only the second door in the entire game that actually requires a key.

Though this first section is initially empty of anything that can cause you direct harm, obtaining the key from the men’s ward will initiate the arrival of an invisible creature known as the Night Warden. Patrolling around the cells of the men’s ward, the Warden will attack if you get too close. If caught, you will sustain damage and blackout briefly. The creature will then dissipate for a short period, allowing you to escape.

A vent between the wards opens into the women’s shower room which connects to the dining hall, and through that to the women’s ward itself. By going this way, you can bypass the men’s ward entirely.


With turmoil writ large across the environment in blood stains and overturned furniture, the first section doesn’t play up the idea that this was, until very recently, a functioning asylum; the destructive events that occurred could easily have been years ago.

A soft transition takes you into the Treatment Centre, where some of the patients are “still alive”. Reaching the room in which Erin was experimented upon will require restoring power so you can unlock the doors on this floor. It’s another moment that recalls the journey into the Shalebridge Cradle from Thief: Deadly Shadows. In what is clearly a design conceit rather than a logical procedure for such a facility, the doors cannot be unlocked individually; you will need to unlock all of them at once, allowing the inhabitants to escape.

Reaching the chair within Experimental Treatment where Erin was confined triggers a cutscene and the need to explore deeper into the complex. You can either use the lift to descend to the prison level or climb through the vents, accessible from the Hydrotherapy Chamber. Whichever route you choose, you’ll find yourself in the same room at the entrance to the Old Prison. The Treatment Centre and the Old Prison are the only sections of Chapter 5 to feature an active force of antagonism. They are also smaller spatially and feature fewer scripted interactions than the previous sections.


The Old Prison below the Moira Asylum is much more claustrophobic, with walls of metal and crumbling brick. There are few working lights, but many growths of bioluminescent poppies clinging to the walls.

The Old Prison is a single large room build across two levels, with Freaks (Thief’s vernacular for the asylum’s inmates) patrolling throughout. The cells lining the walls exist as doors, only with no actual rooms behind them. Blind and sensitive to light (though this information is conveyed in an easily-missable voiceover from Garrett), the Freaks stumble back and forth along patrol routes that are just as rigid as those of the guards you will have encountered in other levels. Movement presents the greatest risk of exposure; if you stay still, you can avoid detection even in situations where human NPCs would detect you.

Noise is the other means by which the Freaks can locate you. This is reinforced by the broken glass strewn across the floor and jars arranged against the walls. If you can avoid breaking them accidentally, you can instead use the noise caused by smashing the jars to distract the Freaks. Fire is your only method of hurting the Freaks, and if you don’t have enough Fire or Blast Arrows to deal with them directly, the pools of oil can be used tactically to kill several at once, provided you can lure them into the right position.

A soft transition at the far end of the Old Prison leads into a narrow corridor lined with solid metal doors. You will need to pull the switches on the wall to open the gates ahead of you. Doing so causes them to grind slowly open, rousing the inhabitants of the cells, provoking them to lunge toward you, clawing and grasping. Before you can reach the end of the corridor, the Freaks drag you backward in a scripted encounter and you lapse into the world of the Primal.

Following Erin’s trail inside the altered reality of the Primal, it is revealed that your next source of information is Baron Northcrest himself. With that information conveyed, you are abruptly deposited outside.

The Moira Asylum is not a pleasant place. Even before the arrival of Erin and the corrupting influence of the Primal, it’s clear the welfare of its inhabitants wasn’t the primary concern of those responsible for its day-to-day operations. Your journey through its wards into the the Old Prison is rife with unsettling set pieces and jump scares pulled from the first-person horror playbook; mannequins that move when you’re not looking, and ghostly apparitions are half-glimpsed out of corner of your eye. It’s all a little cliché.

Foreshadowed several times in the hours that precede your arrival, the exploration of the Moira Asylum is a format breaker. Featuring the largest location in terms of floor space, with the most documents to find, the focus of this chapter is on exploration of a hostile and foreboding environment. Its nature as a palate cleanser before the finale is undercut by having to spend large portions of the last two chapters exploring similarly empty and unwelcoming locations.

​

The Moira Asylum is not the Shalebridge Cradle, though it evokes it so often as to invite comparison; much as the Cradle recalled Thief: The Dark Project’s Return to the Haunted Cathedral. Where the scares in the Moria Asylum come from scripted moments of creepiness, mannequins moving on their own, or a creature appearing momentarily in your peripheral vision, those found within the Cradle were frequently of a less-direct nature.

The Cradle was distressing and tense not simply because of its aesthetics, but also the way it turned your own agency against you. Rooms were foreshadowed as terrifying only for the level to then create situations where your only course of action was to visit those very rooms. Our minds will always create fears greater than any scripted scare can offer, and it’s this anticipation that lies at the heart of the Cradle’s terrifying power. By hinting at something unpleasant before you ever had to experience it, your mind was given the time needed to magnify that fear to the point where it become the most terrifying thing imaginable. The Cradle gave you the rope and let you hang yourself.

In contrast your visit to the Moira Asylum progresses from one section to another in a sequence that limits backtracking and means your first encounter with a space is when you are already engaging with it. There’s no time for it to gain a reputation within your own imagination. Because of this, Thief has to rely on more directed scares to create its sense of tension.

 

[Metro]

Infinitron so is this better than Dishonored? Or if I found Dishonored boring will I hate this, too?

 

[Wirdschowerdn]

nuThief is a piece of shit period.

 

[Sonus]

Dishonored's certainly better.

 

[Metro]

Wow...

 

[Somberlain]

Dishonored is massively better, even though it's not the greatest game evar either.

 

[Dreaad]

Yeah as other's have said Dishonored is quite fun if you don't use the blink power.

 

[racofer]

Yeah as other's have said Dishonored is quite fun...

...if you don't use the blink power.

 

[skacky]

Dishonored is way better in every single aspect, no contest.