TheGrimSmile on 31/5/2009 at 13:54
Quote Posted by jay pettitt
ooh, where to start. First of all you not only need a whole bunch of additional character animations, but you also need to make sure everything (climbing, sword play, swinging on ropes etc etc) looks cool and coherent from the third person. My guess is that first person is a lot more forgiving in that regard, which means you can risk implementing things that would be too scary to want to attempt to implement using third person.
Scale is a funny thing too. Because third person camera tends to be viewed from a little above the player everything needs to be oversize - not just to physically accommodate the camera - but also because everything happens to look really wiered and unnatural if you view it from 9 feet in the air, which is where the camera is - so you compensate by making everything huge, as though made for a 9 foot giant. Only then you have this tiny character running around in a huge world, so you make furniture and stuff closer the scale of the character, so now you have huge rooms with a tiny character and tiny furniture all spaced really far apart. Which is apparently acceptable. Apparently.
So yeah, if you could develop a third person option without comprimising first person then there would seem to be no harm in it - but in truth I don't think 3rd person is a free ride like that and instead comes at a significant cost. So while it may seem harsh, 3rd person has got to go.
Ah, well, those are good points. Thanks for the heads up!
The animations are a part of the problem, I see. I did notice that the game lost some immersion when all I could concentrate on was the fact that Garrett's head didn't moe when he ran, and he twisted rather strangely at the waist... but can it be fixed?
I never really noticed that anything was out of scale, but now that I think about it, I wondered why the levels went up to infinity. It seems this is the reason the levels felt so.... blah. If that's the cause, then yes, I think it has to go. Scaling and funky third person animations/controls, I can deal with, but affecting the levels themselves, I can't.
So yeah, I see the game mechanic issues now. I just got whapped in the face with them @.@
So, what are the merits of third person?
van HellSing on 31/5/2009 at 13:58
Quote Posted by jay pettitt
Why biased? (admittedly giving a reason for why we should chose 1st person is a little bit dodgy, but I'm not sure it would lead to terrible bias. But then, I would say that.)
ooh, where to start. First of all you not only need a whole bunch of additional character animations, but you also need to make sure everything (climbing, sword play, swinging on ropes etc etc) looks cool and coherent from the third person. My guess is that first person is a lot more forgiving in that regard, which means you can risk implementing things that would be too scary or costly to want to attempt to implement using third person.
Scale is a funny thing too. Because third person camera tends to be viewed from a little above the player everything needs to be oversize - not just to physically accommodate the camera - but also because everything happens to look really wiered and unnatural if you view it from 9 feet in the air, which is where the camera is - so you compensate by making everything in the level huge, as though made for a 9 foot giant. Only then you have this tiny character running around in a huge world, so you make furniture and stuff closer the scale of the character, so now you have huge rooms with a tiny character and tiny furniture all spaced really far apart. Which is apparently acceptable. Apparently.
So yeah, if you could develop a third person option without comprimising first person then there would seem to be no harm in it - but in truth I don't think 3rd person is a free ride like that and instead comes at a significant cost. So while it may seem harsh, if first person is your bag, 3rd person has got to go.
You forget third person was put into Thief 3 pretty much accidentally, as a side effect of body awareness. That they botched the movement is a different topic.
Platinumoxicity on 31/5/2009 at 15:06
Quote Posted by van HellSing
You forget third person was put into Thief 3 pretty much accidentally, as a side effect of body awareness. That they botched the movement is a different topic.
When making a first person game, how can you possibly fail in the movement system so badly? I mean, the first person "actor" is usually a man-sized box that constraints the players movement according to the environment. TDS had more like a greased, elastic ball that slipped through every little hole and slided off any platform accidentally. They didn't even make the "body awareness" model turn according to your mouse movements, but the body "waited" until the actor's head couldn't turn anymore and then started rotating the body according to the player input. This caused the body to swerve to the side when the actor started moving when turned to a certain position, causing the balance to improperly shift out of place, mostly resulting in falling off ledges. Garrett couldn't even look straight up or down because the first person camera would've clipped through the third person character model. This made shooting straight up impossible and that was another nail to the coffin of the rope arrows.
Usually this kind of a game's player control system is designed to work properly in first person primarly, and if the third person doesn't work, it gets scrapped. In TDS they made a control system that supported an unstable third person mode and just jammed the first person camera inside the actor's head model. They didn't even try to make the first person mode comfortable to play. They might as well have taken first person mode out completely. At least then the game would have had a few flaws less, but also a very big and very angry group of fans.
van HellSing on 31/5/2009 at 15:15
Think of it this way: If you want to look at something to your side in real life, do you turn your whole body, or just your head first? They wanted body awareness, they didn't know where to draw the line. Third person? Someone movet the cam outside Garrett's head and thought "Hey, that's a good idea". This was said time and time again by the devs. They started with first person and body awareness, then added third person as an afterthought. Not the other way around.
Platinumoxicity on 31/5/2009 at 15:27
Quote Posted by van HellSing
Think of it this way: If you want to look at something to your side in
real life, do you turn your whole body, or just your head first? They wanted body awareness, they didn't know where to draw the line. Third person? Someone movet the cam
outside Garrett's head and thought "Hey, that's a good idea". This was said time and time again by the devs. They started with first person and body awareness, then added third person as an afterthought. Not the other way around.
If it was like that then I think it looks more like they didn't get the 3rd person mode to work properly with the 1st person mode they made at first, so they scrapped a
good 1st person control system they had made and had to redesign it based on the 3rd person mode that they got barely working on the second try. But you have to admit, making the whole body turn in 1st person is a lot better for game experience, even though it's not realistic.
Edit: Also, do you see any sense in the whole "body awareness" thing? I haven't seen a system like the one in TDS in any game after TDS. F.E.A.R. for example has 1st person perspective but a completely functional and very realistic 3rd person model that can be seen in mirrors and shadows that doesn't have anything to do with the first person model as far as I know. The only excuse for making the body awareness like it's in TDS is the primary development of 3rd person mode. I can't think of any other excuse.
van HellSing on 31/5/2009 at 15:47
Quote:
I haven't seen a system like the one in TDS in any game after TDS.
"After" is the key word here. TDS was one of the first games to implement that, and yeah, they made some mistakes.
Dia on 31/5/2009 at 16:00
Quote Posted by van HellSing
"After" is the key word here. TDS was one of the first games to implement that, and yeah, they made
some mistakes.
Understatement of the year, imo. ;)
van HellSing on 31/5/2009 at 16:18
Quote:
Understatement of the year, imo. ;)
Nice change, recently I'm being accused of the opposite all the time.
Dia on 31/5/2009 at 16:22
:laff: :laff:
jay pettitt on 31/5/2009 at 16:46
Quote Posted by van HellSing
You forget third person was put into Thief 3 pretty much accidentally, as a side effect of body awareness. That they botched the movement is a different topic.
To be fair to me I didn't forget, I've never known of any specifics of what stage third person made it into Thief 3. And I'm not sure it's of relevance to anything I said. Do you have a linky?
