Let's All Play Thiaf - TTLG Forums

Jason Moyer on 26/2/2014 at 21:16

Aja, do you have the original Deus Ex? I have a giftable copy on Steam from pre-ordering The Fall.

Edit: N/m, apparently you do.

Ostriig on 26/2/2014 at 22:38

Quote Posted by Muzman

Then HR's dopey ending kinda falls out of the sky from nowhere.

Yeah, that's really the biggest problem with DX3's plotline, which otherwise develops in a very engaging manner. In a nutshell, aside from the thing with the chip swap, there's not a single thing that Jensen does prior to getting to the giant ocean vagina that affects what goes on there, beyond informing the player of the context. You could just as easily create a shortcut to it by having Jensen skip maintenance and then accompany Sarif to the conference as his chief of security and bam, you've practically cut out the entire game and still arrived at the same episode in the end.

But HR really shined in some other aspects of storytelling. One of the things that really stayed with me, for instance, was this bit of conversation I overheard while goofing around, exploring. Without giving anything away, you hear a couple arguing through a closed door and it's just superb how a few angry, domestic exchanges make you get so much of that world and its concepts of transhumanism. I was so impressed with that scene that I felt compelled to blab about it to Jim Swallow when I got to speak to the guy after a panel he was in. Main plotlines and characters are great and all, but it's the little details that you discover off the beaten path that stick with you the most.

I'm curious whether there'll be any of that in the new Thief. I mean, it can't all be banter about junk-jewellery.

Dresden on 27/2/2014 at 01:25

So...they made another Asylum level and it's almost the same as in TDS minus the ghost girl. Good one devs.

Moments of wisdom from Garrett:

"Do you believe in ghosts, Basso?" Well gee, it's not like there a whole section of the city walled off due to the undead.

"I've been in a lot of prisons...but nothing quite like this." *facepalm* Did they even fucking play any of the previous games?

Renzatic on 27/2/2014 at 01:42

Quote Posted by Dresden

"Do you believe in ghosts, Basso?" Well gee, it's not like there a whole section of the city walled off due to the undead.

Those are zombies, not ghosts. Two totally and entirely different things.

Dresden on 27/2/2014 at 02:14

There are ghosts too. Besides why would you discount ghosts in a world where the undead exist?

june gloom on 27/2/2014 at 02:20

(http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/FlatEarthAtheist) It's surprisingly common.

Besides, zombies are physical creatures, the risen corpses of the dead -- you can blow 'em up, they're not much more dangerous than any wild animal. Ghosts are more ethereal and intangible and conform less to known laws of science.

Renzatic on 27/2/2014 at 02:24

I was being all tongue in cheek with that reply, but Deth did a pretty good job explaining it. Just because Yetis exist doesn't mean the Loch Ness Monster is real.

Dresden on 27/2/2014 at 04:02

Yeah I suppose.

Aja on 27/2/2014 at 04:37

I have completed the first mission. Here are my thoughts so far in no particular order.

* The graphics are very good. Whoever said they were on par with Human Revolution was completely wrong. It feels more like Skyrim but with better lighting and fewer interactive objects. On my old core i5 and Radeon 7870 it's quite smooth (between 30-60fps) with everything at maximum except SSAA, which makes it a bit choppy.
 
* Visually it's quite atmospheric. The design of the city feels like what the original Thiefs were going for but didn't have the power to render. I hear accusations of blandness, and that may be as a whole, but so far it's very immersive. The original Thiefs were definitely more surrealistic, which is what I love about them, but I wasn't really expecting that here, given the more realistic art style.
 
* The movement is a mixed bag. Most of Garrett's animations are wonderful, and the little touches, like pushing forward to peek over a ledge or the way he leans when you run give you a good sense of being grounded in the world. Unfortunately, the contextual jumping undermines that feeling, and while it seems to work most of the time, a proper jump/mantle key would have felt a lot better. Another janky thing are his feet, which look strange when you walk, but that's not a huge deal. They also kinda shuffle unnaturally when you walk up to a ledge. It's a bit rough, but by no means a dealbreaker. I went back to play Deadly Shadows briefly the other day, and I can confidently say that new Thief's movement is still far better than that disaster. The grabbing animation is nice, and swoop works pretty well, too. No mouse acceleration. Having a 360 controller plugged in and being able to switch between it and KB+M at will is nice, especially since some actions that use vibration (like lockpicking) are more satisfying with the gamepad.
 
* So far the levels are fairly small. I'll have to hold off commenting more until I complete some of the larger missions, but I will say that even though they're small, I found myself moving far more slowly and carefully than in the original games since there's just so much more detail to explore. There's a fair amount of verticality as well, seems to be two levels of approach most of the time.
 
* Sound propagation is bad. This is one of the biggest issues so far. I can't believe they didn't at least make guards behind doors sound quieter. The original Thiefs did it more believably. It feels like an FM where the author forgot to do the sound brushes.
 
* Sound design otherwise is quite good. Based on the soundtrack that someone made available for download in ThiefGen a few days ago, I wasn't expecting much, but there's a lot of ambient music that isn't on that disc, and it feels pretty Thiefy to me. It doesn't have the character and weirdness of Eric Brosius' work (and I'm not talking about the techno but the woozy ambient loops he made), but in my opinion he's a master, and anything but his work wouldn't be the same. What's there does work. I also like how the music ramps up when you get spotted or even just alert a guard. It doesn't have that cinematic feel I was worried about; rather, it feels more creepy and it heightens the tension. It's not cliched, which is nice. Footsteps seem to be less important than sight, which I'm okay with; nevertheless, they still have a nice weighty feel to them.
 
* The voice acting seems pretty solid me so far, certainly on par with Human Revolution. Guard chatter can be a bit repetitive, but I've still noticed a larger variety of lines than in the original games. The swearing is sometimes jarring, sometimes not, but it doesn't bother me much overall. Garrett's replacement has clearly studied Stephen Russell.
 
* There are lots of readables, reasonably well-written, and unlike Deadly Shadows, the majority of them seem to be flavour text and not just "I've left my necklace in the bathroom, love -M". Lots of newspapers describing the city.
 
* Takedowns work like they do in Deus Ex, which is to say, pretty well. I haven't bothered with combat. It seems difficult and there's lots of buttons involved, and I'm a thief, not a murderer, anyway. I haven't really tested the guard reactions as I'm still learning the lightgem, but I haven't really noticed any inconsistent behaviour (on Master difficulty). One guy relit a candle I snuffed, and in another case, when I thought I was doing a silent drop takedown, I ended up waking a guard in an adjacent room, who eventually went back to sleep. There's definitely more complexity than in the original games, but how consistent the AI behaviour is remains to be seen. I would not call them stupid at by any means at this point.
 
* Can't comment much on the story. Consensus seems to be that it's a disaster, but so far I'm intrigued at least. If I hadn't read so much negativity I wouldn't be thinking about it at this point.

So overall I'm quite enjoying it. I'm definitely surprised at how poorly it's being scored, since I feel like it plays only marginally worse than Dishonoured (and in some ways better), better than Deadly Shadows, and has the visuals and atmosphere of its predecessors.

Muzman on 27/2/2014 at 09:05

Quote Posted by Aja

But the reason I found myself not paying attention was because the story didn't grab me. I found a lot of the writing to be very dry, if well-written otherwise.

Film Crit Hulk wrote a column about story vs plot -- it seems to me that DXHR has much plot but little story. At the moment I'm back in China for some reason, having to plant a bomb at a harbour to create a distraction for a gang leader's son whom I rescued from a different complex earlier... you get the idea. The game has a lot of events that happen but few compelling reasons for them to happen. It feels like I'm being strung along for the sake of providing new environments to play in.

It reminds me of modern action movies, where you get set piece after set piece, locale after locale, character after character, and all of it is designed to keep the viewer stimulated at the expense of logic. I tend to lose track of what's happening in those, too. Give me a simple story with well-developed character motivations any day.

I think if you lay it out it actually comes together as a pretty solid sort of Big Sleep-esque movie plot, where you don't necessarily know what's going on but are following various threads. But a movie can control its own pace and flow of information, where a game that wants to give you loads of options and things to do can easily mess that up. It's a mistake that a few games make I think, and then rather than adjusting their pacing better they just underline and repeat everything and your story is then heavy handed crap.
So yeah, I don't think its a matter of paying attention better, but that games like this are caught between two worlds. Like Hitchcock said, drama is life with the boring bits cut out. RPGs and other games write a drama and then put all the 'boring' bits back in, try to make that interesting and hopes you know the difference (or grabs you and shakes you with cutscenes to make sure. "This is the story bit! This! Care about this!").
It's not that it shouldn't be done, but it's easy to get wrong. I think HR makes a lot of little errors that mount up. It wisely gave you more character development than Invisible War, but it's still trying to play him fairly broad and neutral and not tell the player how they're supposed to feel about (or at least react to) everything. This gives the player agency to inject their own Jensen into conversations and actions and you're given lots of opportunity to do so as early as possible. These self impressions are then usually broken by the cutscenes where-in he, I dare say, never aligns neatly with who the player thinks he is.

I think if you're befuddled now it's going to stay that way. But once you're done, you should give it another go at a later date. Even though you won't feel like it at the time. There's a fair bit of good stuff in there.

Quote Posted by Ostriig

Yeah exactly. You barely get a look in at this conspiracy (Spoilers: there's a big conspiracy or two in a Deus Ex game) and put anything much together before the big-bad, or big-tortured-&-regretful hits the self destruct button.
It'd be like if Thief 2, after many hours following false leads, cut straight from overhearing Karrass and Truart to Garrett knocking on Soulforge door only to find servants pouring out into the city.
I think they were hoping he'd been set up like Dr Breen in Half Life 2, but I was like "Who is this guy again?"

I also think they really drop the ball with the Megan aspect which is kinda related. It's your big emotional journey (and it even climaxes in a wonderfully surreal place 2001-ish place). But is quickly dispensed with in favour of running and shooting regarding some other stuff.

Oh well. It is pretty decent on the whole though. It's a serious, earnest attempt at a solid Deus Ex game at a time when probably no one thought that was going to work.

Speaking of The Big Sleep, it's kinda about time for these games to really embrace something like that as a theme or "plot" if you can call it that (anti-plot perhaps). The series so heavily depends on the rabbit hole of conspiracy thinking and all of that stuff being true. They really should take that to an Umberto Eco-ish extent and have you the obsessed enhanced agent follow all these mind bending leads and threads and wheels within wheels, secret truths, false histories, lies upon lies until reality just breaks down and you go insane.

er, anyway. Back to Thifourf.