Solabusca on 17/12/2007 at 16:34
I'll say this: for all it's faults (clunky movement, load zones, irritating Pagan-speak, etc) I find that TDS is actually a good game - with some of the most memorable levels in the entire franchise.
It's unfortunate that there were so many problems in the development phase; it's a good game, but it could have been a great game.
.j.
New Horizon on 17/12/2007 at 18:20
Quote Posted by qolelis
Sorry, that was what I meant. I would still say, though, that you have to rely more on sounds with the HUD removed, which is what made it more fun (for me).
As I said though, the HUD is completely redundant. I tested this by playing
'without sound' before removing it. :) The hands give you ample feedback if you watch them carefully. They go into a very distinctive positions when you reach the sweet spot.
Jack Sheppard on 17/12/2007 at 18:53
Thief 3 is now available on the Sold Out label in the UK - that is, £4.99 or three games for £10.
qolelis on 17/12/2007 at 19:14
Quote Posted by New Horizon
As I said though, the HUD is completely redundant. I tested this by playing
'without sound' before removing it. :) The hands give you ample feedback if you watch them carefully. They go into a very distinctive positions when you reach the sweet spot.
OK, I never payed much attention to Garrett's hands. Without the HUD, I focused on the sounds instead. Now that I know about the hands, I will have to turn off the monitor when lockpicking so as not to spoil the fun :) (If I ever get the time to
play again, that is)
jay pettitt on 17/12/2007 at 22:29
A combo of .ini file tweaking to slow the default speed to walk (which stops you being able to use direction keys to pick locks) and ditching the HUD is awesome - lock picking suddenly becomes a skill and a challenge, which is how it should be. It's not quite true that the HUD is entirely redundant - lock picking in the dark is difficult without it - but it happens rarely and it's not necessarily such a terrible thing when it does.
Silver-ONI on 18/12/2007 at 01:15
Thief III just sometimes seems like a different series than the first two. I actually liked the lockpicking well enough, and I could tolerate the loading screens after playing the Sims 2, which takes hours to load. I found it easier, but I have it for the Xbox, and I can't play PC games for the life of me (my hands are too small to play games with the snap reflexes needed to play Thief on a keyboard) so that might be it. Anyone know if you can use 360 controllers connected to your computer on Thief 1 and 2?
All in all, I'm glad you're enjoying Thief 3. It was my first Thief game and I loved it.
mol on 18/12/2007 at 11:28
It's got some really neat moments, but the game's hampered by a horrible movement implementation, a sense of linearity, and a lack of sense of freedom, brought on by the omission of swimmable water, and rope arrows for vertical dimension to the exploration. T3 felt constrained, not free-form. And the loading zones are just wrong on so many levels -- and the climbing gloves must've been a brain fart. Nothing can explain them.
Having said that, I experienced some neat moments in it, and occasionally it rose to the level of its predecessors.
It's an ok game, but deeply flawed, and only a shadow of what it could've been. To me, Thief II: The Metal Age is still the best of the bunch (I prefer its shift of focus from the supernatural to humans and real buildings and The City - more actual thievery for my tastes). Not that I don't dig the hell out of TDP, too.
Beleg Cúthalion on 18/12/2007 at 12:28
Before we start another gory discussion; does anyone know what the team would have done if there had not been the technical constrictions like the power-intensive per-pixel-lightning or the limited xBox memory? After DXIW they were aware of these flaws, I read somewhere, and had more time to adjust the game, so I fear that the "better ideas" would have developed the same way as the less-than-ideal solutions did in the end, but have there been tangible statements about what they would have done differently? Apart from the story, don't know if the rather strange tower thing and the blood vial were done intentionally.
mol on 18/12/2007 at 13:03
Quote Posted by Abysmal
Yet rope arrows are explainable?
At least they make a bit more sense than stickygloves. I'm not looking for realism here, it's a game ffs, but come on - how tacked on are the climbing gloves? An obvious panic replacement for the ropes which they could never get working like they wanted to. And the end result is awkward and rubbish.
intruder on 18/12/2007 at 13:46
TDS is a great game, no discussion on that, but a game with lot's of unfinished features and the technical limitation of the XBox.
There are two major things I critisize on TDS:
1. Missing links to the story of Thief 1 and Thief 2:
In Thief 2 there where lot's of books, scrolls and NPC talk related to the events in Thief 1. But in TDS there are only some notes on Karras and the mechanists, but no hidden places of them (like the pagan village or graveyard in Thief 2). While playing TDS I was under the impression, that the "Metal Age" never really took place...
2. Unfineshed levels:
Just take the second mission as example. There were several places in the castle, where you could climb onto the castle wall and even towers. And then you looked into the void. Sometimes you only saw the skybox, sometimes "flying" buildings and often the background-billboards (the city, house, towers...)
That left a feeling to me, that the levels were done in a short time.
In Thief 2 this happend only one time (mission "Partytime!") to me, that I saw things like these...
