Platinumoxicity on 2/7/2009 at 19:26

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Imagine playing "The Sword" in 3rd person. Those very narrow and low hallways where you barely had room to get past anyone? It's impossible to use 3rd person in those situations. And a 3rd person that switches to 1st person when you enter a different kind of room is IMO trying too hard.

Many houses in the medieval times, mine shafts and other spaces were very cramped spaces, about the size of those hallways in The Sword. They were easier and cheaper to build, and in a medieval city without a city plan, it's best to construct smaller hallways to make space for rooms. The buildings and caves in TDS had wide, unrealistic-looking spaces and the furniture were farther apart from eachother.

My suggestion is that the devs should make the levels so that they play well, then make them look good and somewhat realistic, and lastly try them out with 3rd person. If they would have to make the game switch to 1st person when the player is entering a smaller room, they need to conclude that it's simply too much work to get the 3rd person mode to work comfortably. When you have a fancy engine that makes it possible to create beautiful, lifelike architecture, it can only be called stupidity if you make everything bigger to allow a minor game feature that less than 50% of the audience wants to use.

Dia on 2/7/2009 at 20:21

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Or not.

mcnils on 2/7/2009 at 22:36

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I think it is funny how its taken for granted that the TTLG community even remotely represents the true scale of the consumer base of a game it hosts a poll of. Lets face it, we are - some more, some less - hardcore affictionados, remainders of a long lost time where people enjoyed their games raw, uncut, shaken, not stirred and on the rocks. We deeply care about the things that have drawn us here in the first place, and some of us will go on the fences for them to never change. EM will have to modernize Thief as we know it, as ISA already did back at the time, they added the option to play with a third person perspective, personally i liked it greatly, and delightfully switched over to it without any regrets, i dont see why we would have to get back to the old ways, i agree that one should have the OPTION to, but lineage may vary.

To answer the tall rooms & wider spaces vs not so tall rooms & narrow spaces argument brought up over and over, from a design point of view its an interesting observation, but from a gamer perspective, i honestly dont see the big deal about it. The most narrow spaces i can remember in TDP were totally uninteresting and gameplay-wise unimportant side products of the level architecture, like in Return to the Cathedral, where you can walk around the backside cloister between the inner compound's and the outer wall. Or the hammerite monastery in Undercover and Strange Bedfellows, where again around the central structure there is a lot of narrow space to walk down only to turn & walk it back up again cause it leads you to nowhere. The lower ceiling thing inside rooms was not noticeable at all to me, but pheraps i'm not as attentive or sensitive to certain details. The furniture thing, i'm not counting or anything, but i'm most sure that the object density in TDS is higher than in TDP & TMA combined.

The gargantic & empty burrick caves in TDP, i forgot about these, too. TDS caves were far better IMHO, and they had 3rd person perspective.



I seriously hope that EM doesnt end up percieving us like this :cheeky:

Chade on 2/7/2009 at 23:28

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There's a lot of unsubstantiated statements being made about third person camera here.


1) third person camera caused the architecture in T1 and T2 was different to T3

(Whatever small differences there were in architecture might easily be stylistic.)

2) the architecture in T3 had more room between objects, wider rooms, etc ...

(This is an objective statement. If it's true, you can prove it.)

3) third person camera is the sole cause of various other technologies not being available in T3

(Other games feature third person avatars properly leaning, climbing ropes, swimming, etc etc ... don't deliberately discount the terrible development situation in ISA.)

4) Having third person camera in small spaces, or switching between first and third person, is just too hard for the devs.

(It's true that in general, it is common to hear people complaining about "camera issues" in games ...but there are also many games which have tackled these issues successfully. It's certainly not without precedent.)

5) Less then 50% of fans (LATE EDIT: oops, that was meant to be "audience") want third person perspective.

(Where did this figure come from?)


My own perspective from playing T3 with both first and third person perspective, is that the different viewpoints are good at different things. My preference would be:

1) If playing a level that focussed on thievery as a tense and dangerous experience, I would choose first person. First person emphasises the distance between yourself and the guards (when they brush past the avatar, they brush past you!), and makes evading guards a very personal affair.

2) If playing a level that focussed on thievery as skillfull act by a master thief, I would choose third person. Third person emphasises the spatial relationship between yourself and the guard in the context of the surrounding environment, and clearly shows the technique you are using to evade a guard.

Chade on 3/7/2009 at 00:35

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I mispoke. What you actually said was 50% of the audience, which obviously has nothing to do with that poll.