Emerald Wolf on 21/2/2006 at 04:27
Quote Posted by Jashin
Or, since there's glint, there's no need to make them look different. Honestly, texturing a couple of plates and chalices isn't very hard.
The textures actually DO look different, you just have to squint very hard at it from close up because instead of increasing the brightness of frobbable objects, like in T1/T2, they cover it in an atomic blue plastic mould.
ZylonBane on 21/2/2006 at 04:28
Oh god no. Thief is not Morrowind. Thief is all about the missions, not walking all over the same town over and over and over again.
New Horizon on 21/2/2006 at 04:45
Quote Posted by Jashin
Why don't you darkmod people make a better hub city then?
Because it's not a priority...nor is it necessary for a toolset. We're primarily making a toolset for FM development, not a campaign. We intend to release a mini campaign after our toolset release, but a city hub isn't on the to do list. I personally felt the city hub got in the way of the pacing of the story. When we finish, the tools will be available for the community to build whatever they want. If a city hub is what they want, they will be able to build and maintain it.
Quote Posted by ZylonBane
Oh god no. Thief is not Morrowind. Thief is all about the missions, not walking all over the same town over and over and over again.
Agreed.
sparhawk on 21/2/2006 at 08:17
Quote Posted by Jashin
Or, since there's glint, there's no need to make them look different.
Well, this is exactly the same like saying "Crap, we can't make good jokes, but hey! We will simply put in a laugh track, and whenever we say something that we think should be funny, we play. This way people know when we said something funny, even though it wasn't really funny, but at least it will give the impression as if it has been."
Quote:
Honestly, texturing a couple of plates and chalices isn't very hard.
Well, then why didn't they do it properly? After all this was a design decision from the project lead.
Quote:
Why don't you darkmod people make a better hub city then?
We discussed this and decided against this. You know, we had some very good ideas about this, but when thinking this through, we came to the conclusion that it becomes boring and tedious if you have to routinely do this, and to make it usuefull it would require the context of a campaign. Any non-compaing related city hub would be pretty tedious after time. Actually I had some ideas how to do a city hub, which probalby would work well enough, and certainly better, than that 2D shop excuses in TDS.
sparhawk on 21/2/2006 at 08:18
Quote Posted by ZylonBane
Oh god no. Thief is not Morrowind. Thief is all about the missions, not walking all over the same town over and over and over again.
That sums it up pretty nicely and is about the same conclusion we came to, when we discussed this about 1.5 years ago.
Jashin on 21/2/2006 at 08:50
A good hub city'd take a lot of work, kinda like Gothic and its "1-2 huge maps = whole game" approach where the city is very lively, and specific areas would launch into new smaller maps. It'd be difficult from initial layout to final debugging - probably something beyond mod authors.
bukary on 21/2/2006 at 08:54
Quote Posted by ZylonBane
Oh god no. Thief is not Morrowind. Thief is all about the missions, not walking all over the same town over and over and over again.
I do not agree. Mind that not the whole city was uncovered from the beggining. (You did play TDS finally, right?) Each quarter was a nice mini-mission with its objectives. Besides, it was great to visit the same place and see how it changes (the fall of Clocktower, reopening of the Fogerty's, closing of the shop in South Quarter, different notes in the same houses / library, cementary "metamorphosis", new AIs appearing: Curtis, Hauknor etc.) as a result of your activities. And one more thing: the introduction of city hubs allowed the gameplay to be less linear: one could choose the order of the missions (Pagan Sanctuary, St. Edgar's Cathedral, Kurshok Citadel, Pavelock Prison etc.). Strangely, thanks to designers' / writers' talents, such nonlinearity did not destroy the way the story (great story!) was told.
The only problem with city hubs was that they were too small (and respawning in such a small areas was not a good idea).
Sparhawk, if you had the possibility of making some kind of city hubs between missions, and you decided not to build them based on such argument ("Thief is not Morrowind"), then you've made a big mistake. I guess you could make city hubs in Dark Mod the way they should be made in TDS.
Zygoptera on 21/2/2006 at 10:44
Thief, like every other game- or piece of literature, or work of art for that matter- is all about whatever the individuals who use it think it is. If people happen to like loot glint or a city hub- or wish to play Garrett as a sociopathic mass murderer for that matter- then more luck to them, says I, whether I like those features or not.
What I really don't get is the mentality of those who treat games pseudo-religiously, complete with dogma. Unless I'm mistaken and there is some sort of 'Thief bible' which codifies exactly what is 'Thief' and what isn't all those who are saying 'X isn't Thief' are doing is confusing opinion with fact.
sparhawk on 21/2/2006 at 13:10
Quote Posted by Jashin
It'd be difficult from initial layout to final debugging - probably something beyond mod authors.
A city ghub is no different than any otehr game mechanics. But you a bit right at least. It is certainly beyond squabblers, because they don't do much. Mod authors are the guys who actualy do something.
Quote Posted by bukary
Mind that not the whole city was uncovered from the beggining ... Strangely, thanks to designers' / writers' talents, such nonlinearity did not destroy the way the story (great story!) was told.
...
Quote:
Sparhawk, if you had the possibility of making some kind of city hubs between missions, and you decided not to build them based on such argument ("Thief is not Morrowind"), then you've made a big mistake. I guess you could make city hubs in Dark Mod the way they should be made in TDS.
I doubt that I did a mistake. After all, we evaluated the ideas and considered what it would actually mean for gameplay. And as I said before, the first part of your statemtent shows exactly what I said there. Such a city hub can make sense in the context of a campaign, because TDS *IS* a campaign. TDM is not a campaign. First and formest it is a toolset to allow FM authors to create missions and campaigns. If you create a city hub in the toolset, it means that it has to be generic and is totally unrelated to any FMs. Since there is an almost infinite number of potential FMs, it is not THAT easy to make a city hub that would work in all cases.
My idea was to create a kind of starter node, similar to a menu, but the menu is not a traditional menu HUD, instead it would be a playable map that offers all the options that a menu would also offer. This would work well enough, but of course it would get simply tedious, because it means, if you load an FM and you want to play it, you would have to walk through this map in order to load up all the items that you want. I could also extend this and create dynamic map content to connect to any individual FM that a player has currently on his hard disk, but the problem persists. It would simply become boring to go through this excersise after some time. The city in TDS was just an obstacle to get to your mission. It didn't really offer something after you learned the map because it was always the same routine. Go to point X in order to start your mission. There are other games wich have similar mechanics, and I never liked this, because it is simply boring after walking the fourth time through the same map without any real changes. And if it comes down to that, a city hub is also just another map.
ZylonBane on 21/2/2006 at 14:41
Quote Posted by bukary
Besides, it was great to visit the same place and see how it changes
But how "great" was it to be
forced to revisit so many places if you wanted to actually cash in your loot after each mission?
It's like the devs were screaming, "We made all this content, so eat it! EAT IT! IT'S GOOD FOR YOU!".
