DirkBogan on 31/5/2019 at 01:10

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In my experience, having the freedom to kill NPCs makes areas designed to be challenging trivially easy.

Say you have a stationary guard outside a doorway, and too much light to easily sneak past. If you can't kill him, you have to come up with some way to distract him -- maybe a flashbomb or a noisemaker arrow, but maybe you don't have any. Even if you do use one, you still have to find an opportunity to blackjack him or sneak out of his range, otherwise you've just made a guard alert for a while and not actually dealt with the problem.

If you can kill NPCs, you can just shoot him in the head with a broadhead (usually very plentiful), or a fire arrow, or a mine, from the shadows.

However, I think players should have the option to play Thief in either of these ways. I believe this is the reason that many OMs and FMs have no restriction on killing on Normal difficulty, and No-Kill objectives on Hard and/or Expert. It prevents players of higher levels from allowing themselves an easy way out in harder moments, but if players want the latitude to kill NPCs, that choice is still available to them on Normal. I think this gives the player the optimal amount of choice.

DirkBogan on 31/5/2019 at 02:37

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I think blackjacking enemies comes with more stealth-based restrictions than killing. In most cases, when you engage a guard, you have to be stealthy the whole time for blackjacking to work. You can't just run out into the light making as much noise as you want, because then they won't KO when you hit them, and at certain alert levels even hitting them from behind doesn't work. The game is much more lenient with the ways that you can successfully kill NPCs.

I do agree that blackjacking is often just as easy, but I don't think it's intentional. In a well-designed level, there probably shouldn't be massive windows of opportunity to blackguard lots of guards who are by themselves in the dark. Choosing to blackjack a guard should come with some risk to the player, whether they're in earshot of other guards, or somewhere along intersecting patrol routes. Some of my favourite Thief moments have involved picking up an unconscious guard right as another one comes into view, almost spotting me.

marbleman on 31/5/2019 at 05:59

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Usually, no-kill objective is only there on Expert and, apart from gameplay purposes, it also helps immersion. It sells the idea that Garrett is a professional. The only time I'd think about ditching it is when there are already so many objectives that they hardly fit the screen.

That said, the other two difficulties don't have it, and authors sometimes do cool stuff there. In Gems of Provenance, Hard is replaced with Overkill, which requires killing everyone. This way, doom-style playstyle becomes meaningful.

FenPhoenix on 31/5/2019 at 06:21

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I don't like killing in the first place; it's noisy and feels cheap. Also, it alerts everyone and makes it extremely difficult to sneak, KO, or kill anyone else, so yeah. I guess I'm hypocritical cause I KO guards all the time but for some reason that doesn't feel as cheap to me. But even then, I don't like to use exploits like standing in shadow, jumping up and down, and then KOing the guys from the front when they wander up. That feels equally cheap to me and I would only do such things if I was extremely pissed off at the mission and felt it wasn't playing fair by me. I guess I feel like KOing people is "part of a gameplay scenario", while killing or doing cheap things with the engine "breaks the scenario". If that makes sense. The thing I most want to avoid when playing any mission is to bring guards away from their set-up positions and routes, as I feel like that breaks what is probably a meticulously hand-crafted scenario and removes what could have been a cool and interesting experience from that area. That's just me though.

Anyway, though, I barely register no-kill objectives when I read them, it almost feels more like tradition to have them than anything else to me. Due to my above-stated aversion to killing, the only time a no-kill objective might bother me is when the mission is purposely trying to be outrageously aggravating by spamming a bunch of a helmeted guards around, making me wait ten hours for pure random chance to give me an opening just to walk across the street and then not even letting me kill anyone to at least thin the ranks out. (I'm lookin' at you, TROTB2 "The Forgotten Kingdom".:p Yeah, there's no no-kill objective, and it's "hard-to-deal-with undead" rather than "helmeted guards", but the general idea still applies. Yikes.)

Speaking of TROTB2 though, the fact that it never (I think?) gives you a no-kill objective was a godsend during times when it decided to get brutal with the AIs, and I had the option of at least killing them if they were getting too annoying. So... I'm mostly pretty disciplined with not killing, I'm not gonna do it if I feel like there's an even slightly sane way to do otherwise. So to me, if the mission is reasonably fair, a no-kill objective or the lack of one isn't going to make much practical difference to me.

downwinder on 31/5/2019 at 07:16

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i like no kill objectives,but if they cant be knocked out from blackjack hit or killed if hit with black jack,makes it harder,then you have to ghost,then you mine as well have "don't be seen" objective ,bypassing killing anyone