Digital Nightfall on 29/6/2011 at 07:49

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Let's play fantasy development team. Your project is Thief 4. How will you keep your publisher AND the Thief fans happy? You can assemble your team from any real game developers (or FM authors!), even retired ones.

Crazy, right? ;)

electronic pest on 30/6/2011 at 21:06

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Oh how cute :cheeky:, lets play imagination land.

Well i'd employ some of the audio production and graphic art staff from the original Thief TDP team (the living ones) as advisors for the current audio and visual design staff.
OH and i'd employ Lady Rowena, Saturnine and some other Thief FM big shots as level designers.

As far as gameplay goes, i'd just tell everyone to play and research both Thief 1 and 2 vigorously in order to get a feel for what they have to design: a good successor to these games that can appeal to both fans of all 3 pre-existing games and the new generation of gamers.

Now we all know that the big publishers of today want a game that can be can be successfully ported to all the major consoles (if possible within the time frame) so the team would have find ways of adapting the gameplay of thief to work on the consoles as well as PC.
We all know what happened when Warren Spectre and the team of thief 3 tried this, it turned out alright but not much of a successor to the first 2 games so we could ask some of the older thief fans what they thought was wrong with Thief 3 so we could improve on that.
For the console version some specialty features could be designed and programmed such as a third person cover system and aim-assist for the bow (these could be optional for the PC version.)
Also texture-resolution and special effects would be turned down for the console version so they can still put up a good framerate.
A multiplayer mode would also go A LONG WAY in helping the popularity of the game so various multiplayer game modes could be designed for the game such as co-operative thieving based off the single-player campaign and maybe a thieve-off based off that old concept for T2.

Since the old fans would probably beg for it, an SDK could be realeased for the PC edition.

For the story, Garrett would probably have to be the player-character again and he could face off against a group of necromancers, who don't necessarily have to be cruel, unethical bastards like the Mechanists but perhaps just adventurous Mages who wanted to explore the astral planes or sook (SP?) out immortality.
Necromancers would be a good direction to go since the main developers never explored that side of Thief much.
Maybe we could have more undead enemies such as different kinds of Haunts, like a keeper haunt who would hunt Garrett down ironically in the same way he hunts down guards for black-jacking.
If we're talking about more enemies, some intelligent enemy thieves would be an interesting challenge, especially compared to the downwinder thugs, they could make use of flashbombs and elemental arrows like Garrett.
Of course, not all the necromancy themed enemies would have to be undead, there could also be other extra-dimensional lovecraftian inspired demons similar to the stuff from the Maw of chaos (craymen anyone?)

And as for levels and their design, just make the more typical levels in a similar visual fashion to Thief 1 but obviously in terms of modern graphical capability.
Since the free-roaming structure for T1 and T2 worked out quite well, that should be brought back instead of designing another open-world structure or what COD fans seem to think is 'more modern', a linear cinematic structure.
Necromancy themed levels could have the more powerful undead affect the environment through telekinesis or making interpretations of their emotions (change in lighting, animating paintings, etc), an active zombie-making script would be nice in which killed or unconcious guards and such turn into zombies and haunts, T2X did something similar in which a soul would fly around the level and re-animate corpses.
A more unconventional level could be designed in a similar vein to that Eclipsed FM in which Garrett would steal stuff from a deserted town until a horde of undead would raid the place and you have the choice to escape or keep stealing and then escape, which would reward you by giving you more gold for the next level.

Can't think of much more than that, it would make a hell of a thief game thats for sure :cheeky:.

Brian The Dog on 2/7/2011 at 10:14

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My two-cents would be to aim for a game that is not a AAA-title, since that would require a AAA-budget. I'd go for a lean-tech story-driven game. Most of the great things in Thief are in the level-design and story, a reasonable-quality engine that can cope with shadows and audio-propagation shouldn't be too hard for a professional team to knock-together in a few years. I would definitely release the SDK, it has helped keep interest in the series alive over the years and so as a business decision it's a no-brainer.

Having a "smaller" game with a lower budget would be fine since it wouldn't require you to sell as many copies to break even - and the publishers wouldn't push design decisions onto the developers.


This made my day, thanks malau :D

Edit - After reading electronic pest's post above, one other thing I would ask for is a highly configurable engine. I understand that if you're going to port to consoles, or try and attract newbies, then you may want to include things like third-person, arrow-trails, auto-blackjacking (yuk), etc. But if so, PLEASE give us a way to turn these things off via an Options menu or a config file. Even something as insignificant as head-bob is able to be turned off in the game I'm currently playing, Deus Ex, which is v old now.