EvaUnit02 on 10/11/2013 at 03:47
If that's your way of presenting the cliched, non-argument "defense" of only content creators can critique, aka "I'd like to see you do better" then fuck you and the horse you rode in on.
He made a game that will be sold on the biggest PC gaming distribution platform around? Fantastic, he deserves a cookie but when it comes to discussions he's no different than the rest of us here on TTLG. ZylonBane has done a shit load for modern playability of both System Shock 2 and Vampire Bloodlines, yet there's no one rolling out the red carpet for him in any regards on TTLG, nor should there be.
Volitions Advocate on 10/11/2013 at 03:50
Didn't say that. I'm implying that he has something genuine to discuss and a reason for it. He wants to critique games and discuss them, and others apparently want to critique and discuss him personally.
Yakoob on 10/11/2013 at 05:26
Heh, thanks for so volitionally advocating in my favor ;)
FYI I'm not claiming to be above anyone here or have some magical wisdom because of my game. But it did make me reconsider many aspects of game dev and design, hence my increasing surge of design and theory-related threads/blog posts since :p
But lets not derail the thread and get back to bitching about terrible games we can't put down because there's "that one cool thing so I HAVE TO finish it hrnnnfghhh" like the good TTLG masochists many of us are :D
Jason Moyer on 10/11/2013 at 07:38
Thief 2. Yeah, Life Of The Party is great. I'm talking about the rest of the game.
Sulphur on 10/11/2013 at 07:59
Yanno, I've only ever played Thief 2 from top to bottom, not TDP. But T2 struck me as pretty awesome, so what is about TDP's level design that's so much better?
demagogue on 10/11/2013 at 08:30
Quote Posted by Sulphur
Yanno, I've only ever played Thief 2 from top to bottom, not TDP. But T2 struck me as pretty awesome, so what is about TDP's level design that's so much better?
The received wisdom (and the way LGS people have put it themselves) is that T2's level design was better and TDP's narrative, atmosphere, & je ne sais quoi was better, which is still a matter of game design incidentally. It's just in making a sequel, they wanted to really focus on good thieving/stealth missions & level design for it, which wasn't what the first one was principally about.
Sulphur on 10/11/2013 at 08:37
I can see that, and that's really why I like T2 in the end - in terms of creating engaging gameplay spaces, it's pretty damn special.
Jason Moyer on 10/11/2013 at 08:43
Thief 2 basically breaks down like this:
The first 5 missions are meh. Not awful, but about average for Thief levels. Which is still better than anything in a Half-Life game or something.
The middle 5 missions are pretty goddamn good. Up there with the best from Thief 1.
The final 5 missions are fucking awful. Worse than anything in Thief 3 even. One of them is basically a mission from Thief 1. And then you have to do one of them twice. The final mission is so unbearably awful that, while I have Thief 2 marked as "completed" on backloggery, I can't honestly remember if I ever finished it.
Thief Gold? Two of the addon missions (Thieves Guild/Mage's Tower) aren't really up to par with the rest of the game, but everything else is top notch beginning to end. The game has QUALITY and VARIETY. A couple residential heists (one of which starts with an assassination attempt and tailing the assassins through the city), a jailbreak, a tomb to plunder, a dead city, a lost city, a seemingly normal residential heist that turns into Alice In Wonderland, an undercover mission in a Hammerite temple, etc. Enemies and settings vary from the mundane to animals to the supernatural, oftentimes in the same mission.
Also, Burricks vs cheesy steampunk robots? Not even a contest.
Of course, Life Of The Party is so good that you pretty much have to play Thief 2 just for that mission. It's also the one mission in T2 that really captures the same scope, variety, and sense of mystery that the first game had. It's an interesting space to explore.
Sulphur on 10/11/2013 at 08:48
So T2 shakes up as being less varied in comparison to T1 even if its level design is great.
Subjectively, I can agree that some of the levels were a bit painful in places, just as bad as TDP's zombies, but I don't see what you're talking about in anything about T2's levels being meh. That's really just down to individual cranial makeup. It's still an odd reason to hate a game, but you know, whatever.
Jason Moyer on 10/11/2013 at 08:50
Having interesting spaces to explore is, I think, one of the reasons why Thief 1 is the greatest immersive sim ever made. Simply wanting to see more of the crazy shit that the designers stuck in the levels is enough, by itself, to make you want to keep playing it.
Saying I hate T2 is a little strong, I guess. It's good enough to be in my top 20 or 30 games of all time, probably. I just find it disappointing compared to the previous game.
Now if you want to talk about games I hate but have played every iteration of simply because people won't stop jacking off about how great they are, there's the Half-Life series.
