Body awareness - TTLG Forums

Bakerman on 23/9/2009 at 06:06

I certainly see where you're coming from - and while I discovered Thief well after TDS was out (though I played them in the correct order), I also felt it was a letdown. I guess that's not the same feeling as those who waited for it for years.

Quote:

But first, I feel like I need proof that they can handle Thief at all before they go tacking on shiny new features....

It's a good point, but I think EM are either going to get Thief, or they're not, and I don't think body awareness will play into that. If they get Thief, they'll make a satisfying game, and if the add body awareness on top of that, I guess it will be what they make of it. If they don't get Thief, nothing they add on top will salvage it for fans.

BrendaEM on 3/10/2009 at 03:19

I like the Thief Minimalist Project First Person--with body awareness: arms legs weapons.

Tony Ayalew on 12/10/2009 at 14:48

Hello everyone,

I'm a 100% fan of first person games with full body awareness (FBA), as long as game makers do it right.

Examples of games with FBA: Fear (2), Mirror's Edge, Condemned (2) , Arma (2), the chronicles of riddick (EFBB/AODA).

Reasons for FBA:
>I'd like to be more than just a camera and an arm.

>FBA allows the player to have realistic shadows and reflections about the body.

>Some actions cannot be done realistically without FBA: For example: You can't climb a ladder with your back turned in real live, but you can in games without FBA, which is STUPID.

>Some indications cannot be done without FBA: For example: If I want to make a game without any HUD, my health could be indicated by looking at the amount of blood on my body. without FBA, this would be impossible.

>Games without FBA usually have a unrealistic headbobbing.

>If I look down, I see my body. If I look down in games without FBA, I see nothing.

>With FBA, third person is implanted eadier because both modes have the same body (and same animations when done right).

>And lastly, for me personaly I rarely play first person games without FBA. I think that the use of FBA in Thief 3 is a great plus. I also think that the use of the city is also a great plus. Too bad none of those two elements were done with much attention, but that's fault of lack of attention, and not the FBA

Regards,

Tony W Ayalew.

Tony Ayalew on 12/10/2009 at 15:00

Quote Posted by Wormrat

Yes, you can.
Almost as stupid as posting without even pretending to have read the thread.

No, you can't - unless the joints of your shoulders can move 360 degrees and more without any problem, which is quite a handicap.

I read the thread. AND DON'T CALL ME STUPID, YOU WORMRAT (very apply named, by the way).

Tony Ayalew on 12/10/2009 at 17:05

Quote Posted by Wormrat

I don't know what kind of crazy rotational voodoo you're imagining here, but I have personally done all of the following in real life:
One of the main arguments in this thread is that the human body is capable of a wide range of awkward contortion that is difficult to simulate in games, so "invisibly" simulating the effect is often preferable. See: telekinetic frobbing vs. all the imaginary stretching, leaning, and balancing that you can think of to justify that in-game capability.

I guess you've got a point there. But I hope you understand: I don't like it when I don't see my own shadow& reflection (unless I'm a vampire), let alone that I don't like that I can't see my own body (unless I'm the Hollow Man).

Regards,

Tony.

PS: "Wormrat" was just a joke.

New Horizon on 12/10/2009 at 20:25

Quote Posted by Wormrat

I don't know what kind of crazy rotational voodoo you're imagining here, but I have personally done all of the following in real life:

1) turned 360 degrees while clinging to a ladder
2) climbed up a ladder while facing away from it
3) climbed down a ladder while facing away from it

All of these require unusual hand/foot switches and aren't as smooth or quick as, say, Half-Life would have you believe, but yeah, they're all possible.

One of the main arguments in this thread is that the human body is capable of a wide range of awkward contortion that is difficult to simulate in games, so "invisibly" simulating the effect is often preferable. See: telekinetic frobbing vs. all the imaginary stretching, leaning, and balancing that you can think of to justify that in-game capability.

I agree 100%, and your examples are all things I have done as well. I had to laugh when I read "You can't climb a ladder with your back turned in real live". Having grown up on a farm, you quickly learn a wide range of what is possible with the human body. Climbing a ladder, turning around and coming down facing the opposite direction is one of the easier things I've had to do. lol

Quote Posted by Tony Ayalew

As I've pointed out a number of times, it's not whether people personally like a feature...it's whether that feature serves the game in question. I like third person, and I have also enjoyed body awareness 'in other games', but those features don't serve what Thief is at all...they detract from it, distort it and change it. They turn it into everything else that is out there.

Thief has always been about Minimalism. It's not a cinematic, flashy type of game. A minimal interface and control scheme serves it best.

jtr7 on 12/10/2009 at 22:40

Yep.

:(

Neb on 15/10/2009 at 01:39

So, how would swimming work with body awareness, anyway? I think jtr7 also asked this question earlier in the thread.

Would we end up with something like the horse riding in Daggerfall - where you can see its head bobbing up and down right in front of you with no friction while turning - or would it lie somewhere closer to an underwater shopping trolley simulator?

Fafhrd on 15/10/2009 at 07:15

Quote Posted by New Horizon

Thief has always been about Minimalism.

This is the shit that pisses me off. You're making an absolute statement about the design philosophy of the game based on fuck-all. If you'd said 'To me, Thief has always been about minimalism' you might have something (though you'd still be wrong. See below.) But the idea that your and jtr's opinions on 'what Thief is about' are somehow the only correct ones and are the gospel that EM needs to follow to make a proper Thief game is laughable and retarded.

And it wasn't about minimalism, it was about immersion. While there are arguments to be made about whether body awareness serves immersion or not, the idea that LGS didn't even consider it is dumb. If they'd had the technology to pull it off in Thief 1, they would have. They thought they had the tech to do it right in Thief 3 and they went for it (lest you forgot, the majority of ISA's Thief team was from LGS).

jtr7 on 15/10/2009 at 08:50

As if immersion is contrary to minimalism. A convenient cop-out set of generalisations from one who hasn't paid attention to what fans have been saying they love and hate about Thief and why for all these years. The older titles did a lot more with less, and made a big impact with us that the extra-detailed TDS failed to match. If you deny that, you could at least spell out why. Your pissy statement is not more informed nor founded on more fact than ours. The evidence is overwhelming that TDS failed to bring the immersive experience the older titles did. The overwhelming evidence is denied by those who think more is better, regardless of how wrong it is. The minimalism of the older titles in what was on-screen let the imagination seize onto the world the way watching a play, the audience can forget the minimalist scenery and become more intimately absorbed. TDS's mistakes, as deemed by the majority, are directly connected to the things you want added in--and I'm not talking about the jerky 1st-person view. Listen to the oft-spoken complaints by hundreds of posters here over the last five years and see the patterns. Trace those complaints back to the root of them, and you will find us confidently standing against ever seeing that crap demean Thief's best qualities.

If you can't hear how wrong the following is, more than it is right, then the flames will continue to burn and rage:

Quote:

Warren Spector: Man, was I dead set against third-person. Personally, I've always been a first-person guy. And I could hear the screams of anguish from the Thief fan community at the merest mention of third-person. But the decision became trivially simple when some team members started with our first-person "body awareness" system, hacked in a third-person mode by simply repositioning the camera, and then forced me to sit down and play it. Even in its earliest, most hacked form, third-person was intensely cool.

More important, without making any other changes to the game design, it gave Thief a very different flavor. Once I saw THAT - the fact that the tense, claustrophobic Thief experience could be transformed into a more tactical, information-based, plan-driven action experience - I was sold. We had to do a non-hacked third-person mode.

Now, I love both modes. Neither is better or harder than the other. They're just different. And given that one of ION's core tenets is to allow players to customize the gameplay experience to suit themselves, how could we NOT make third-person available?

Can you see the problems or not? You remember that Warren admitted he didn't "get" Thief, and he couldn't see the fun in hiding in the shadows instead of engaging in combat? Body-awareness led to 3rd-person, led to opened-up spaces for the camera to move around in, a deviation to increase sales, and resulted in an inferior title. Adding "cool" crap is a silppery slope that leads to more and more. It also means when questions crop up in playtesting, the devs might add yet more crap to fix what should be amputated 'cause they can't part with what they thought was a great "new" idea and worked so hard on already. This is what happened. You cannot convince me it's worth the gamble to try to make a repaired version of the things that WILL and MUST impact a traditional experience, leaving most of us out--again.

You cannot convince me the time spent is worth time away from building on Thief's inherent strengths instead. The time saved by not worrying about the unnecessary, and the time saved from playtesting and DEBUGGING the two styles, is not as important as a better, tighter, claustrophobic, intense game world that doesn't make concessions in how the 3D space is built. Less to debug, less to animate, less hand-holding, and less to build so the animations work, gives them a better chance to make the basics work solidly. Instead of a pissy dismissal that sounds like pure anger without knowledge of cause and effect in the industry and the strong division in the fandom, and apathy about further division and departure from the core strengths, act like you're aware of how the fanbase feels from one extreme to the other, and look at the middle of the Bell Curve. Thief should not become less of itself and more of what everybody else is doing over and over and over again. Mainstreaming and all the time it will consume from development of a niche market game...can go to hell. Body-awareness didn't matter much in the older titles. Can't you understand that that was a plus, that it speaks volumes for the game that fans love the older titles and they don't need all your extraneous shit? Greater love with less stuff? And you are an enemy of that? Someone needs to 'splain themselves without acting like they really don't have an argument, just throwing a fist.