Should There Be a Thief 4?

Fafhrd on 7/5/2011 at 01:20

Quote Posted by Sulphur

I thought your point was hardware limitations and problems caused by a poorly adapted engine were responsible for DS being the 'aberration' that it is, or have you lost that train of thought?

Two separate trains. The A-Train: Shit Engine. Passenger Manifest: Climbing Gloves, Unswimmable Water, Shitty Movement System, some of the Small Levels family. B-Train: Platform Restrictions. Passenger Manifest: The rest of the Small Levels family, Loot Glint, Arrow Trails, Atomic Frob, Low-Res Textures.

When those two trains COLLIDE, you get T: DS. But those trains don't run simultaneously on the current console generation, and EM (http://uk.ign.com/videos/2011/05/04/the-pc-hud-in-deux-ex-human-revolution) seems to be doing an okay job of keeping the passengers separated.

And Microsoft's UI requirements aren't NEARLY as stringent today as they were in the OXbox and early 360 days. There are only three requirements: Terminology: Essentially 'use the correct name when referring to proprietary Microsoft stuff (i.e. Xbox LIVE),' Error Messaging: 'Tell people what's wrong when something goes wrong,' and Confirmation of Destructive Actions: 'Make absolutely sure that somebody wants to delete/overwrite/quit/restart before you do so.' And there are only two video requirements, and only one of those has any bearing on end user experience, and it boils down to 'the game can't crash when booted up in any video modes.' Compared to the days of title safe areas, 2xAA REQUIRED, 720p minimum framebuffer REQUIRED, all interface elements NEED to be legible in every conceivable resolution, the flexibility in interface design is immense..

Quote:

If we take your argument as it is, we should have had multiplat games by now from surviving members/fans of LGS/ISA/Origin's ideologies that are analogous to the original Thief/Deus Ex experience and don't hold your hand every other second -- but we don't.

Metro 2033, Mirror's Edge, Dead Space 1? Seriously dude, I know you've ventured out of ThiefGen on occasion, you can't be completely ignorant of these things.

jtr7 on 7/5/2011 at 01:53

Quote Posted by Briareos H

Agreed. I enjoy Garrett's cynicism as much as everyone else, but I don't think having him as an avatar is integral to Thief. I would prefer seeing fresh and strong ideas developing new concepts around the city rather than rehashing the old themes/characters.

("heresy!")

Your heresy is only that you keep missing the mark, badly, and think you're on target, when it comes to what we're saying. It's uncanny. You seem to want to improve what bores you about Thief by making it more like the boring homogenized gaming market already in place and making bank.

It's called Thief, not Thieving. The person was always more important than the person's chosen occupation. Garrett or not, it wouldn't be a Thief game, but merely a game about stealing--whoopdedoo--if the character wasn't fighting to be a master thief and only a master thief against several tugging external forces from all over and just outside The City. The skillset was always more important than the character's personal acquisitional wishlist. Remove the themes and you still have major elements to remove to make it a game about stealing, which it never was. Frobbing everything in sight was optional and never even the character's personal goals as a master thief. Thief 4 can be a Thief game, and any other fundamental deviations can be unfettered and go hog wild under a different title and give you everything you want without an issue. The title makes perfect sense from the fiction's standpoint. Of all the games where the character is a thief, whether by title, trade, or never mentioned even though the player steals from everybody anyway, the last thing anyone should want for Thief 4 is just a set of maps to run around in and a bunch of gadgets. We can get those for free by the hundreds.

Boxsmith on 7/5/2011 at 05:14

Quote:

Games...from surviving members/fans of LGS/ISA/Origin's ideologies that are analogous to the original Thief/Deus Ex experience and don't hold your hand every other second

Quote Posted by Fafhrd

Metro 2033, Dead Space 1

hahahahah what are you even

Sulphur on 7/5/2011 at 05:26

Quote Posted by Fafhrd

Metro 2033, Mirror's Edge, Dead Space 1? Seriously dude, I know you've ventured out of ThiefGen on occasion, you can't be completely ignorant of these things.

Bwahaha, a) stop trolling me, and b) give me a fucking break. No handholding? Apart from Metro, ME and DS1 had nuclear frobs built into the environment, just with different tells. DS1 was a linear corridor shooter inspired by SS2, but hardly as complex or sophisticated to even require handholding. And if you were dumb enough to not know how to use a map, you had a glowy breadcrumb trail all the way home. ME1's a parkour game with barely any environment interaction or complex goals, it's first-person platforming on speed. Any more handholding than runner vision and the game would have to play itself.

You might have something with Metro. The one game that just gives you an arrow in the general direction of your goal and some semblance of Deus Ex nuance... but not really.

So that's it? Barely one game in the past seven years of multiplatform development since ISA? An embarrassment of riches.

Briareos H on 7/5/2011 at 08:17

Quote Posted by jtr7

What is uncanny is your ability to dismiss my reasoning as subjective based on one sentence and then go on to force your own views of what is Thief onto us. T2X contradicts you. TDM contradicts you. Countless Thief FMs contradict you. All that is important is a strong and cohesive storyline with personal involvement. All I said was that I expected people to have new ideas (not 'current gaming' ideas, see my previous post in the thread) so as not to be limited by the existing framework.

The City and the steampunk world of Thief are the main character, not Garrett. Keep telling me it's not and insulting me, I won't mind. It's just disproved by all the existing missions where you don't play Garrett.

Scots Taffer on 7/5/2011 at 09:19

sup dudes I hear they're making a 4th thief game? cool, count me in :cool:

Koki on 7/5/2011 at 17:37

Quote Posted by Sulphur

You might have something with Metro. The one game that just gives you an arrow in the general direction of your goal and some semblance of Deus Ex nuance... but not really.

I'm pretty sure Metro had a "smart" arrow, that is it pointed you where you actually need to go, not just directly at the objective.

SubJeff on 7/5/2011 at 17:57

Quote Posted by Fafhrd

Finely tuned != mechanistically complex. If you did a point-by-point comparison of the necessary game mechanics to make a Deus Ex game vs. those necessary to make a Thief game, the DX list would be significantly longer.

Deus Ex may require more types of mechanic but imho it's therefore less important getting each one just right. When you're using very few actions throughout the game you become more aware of how well balanced those actions are and you're also able to squeeze that little bit more out of them. It's like the jumping in Mario games (thing NES, SNES versions) - it's so tight that when you get good, you get really good and you need that.

That video about the PC control system in DXHR is very, very promising. If they have the foresight to so this, and frankly I'm very, very surprised and pleased (even amazed!), I'm sure they'll have the same approach to Thief 4. Which has just got me quite excited!

Tomi on 7/5/2011 at 19:44

To answer the original question: Yes, why not? Even if Thief 4 turns out to be a disappointment, it most likely won't force us to uninstall the old Thief games from our computers, so we can still play them any time we like.

Quote Posted by Dia

I'd love to see T4 turn out to be an exciting, updated version of TMA and TDP, but that's just not gonna happen.

But how exactly should they update it and make it exciting? The old Thief games have their fair share of flaws too, and fixing/updating them all would result in a pretty different game. For example, if the developers improved the retarded AI of TMA and TDP so that the guards would actually be capable of making some clever decisions every now and then, people would surely complain that they've broken the core gameplay of the original games. The fans will hate the developers if there are no zombies in Thief 4, but they'll also hate them if there are. The graphical style will never please everyone, the shadows aren't black enough or they're too blue, and so on...

As long as some people compare every single detail of Thief 4 to the old Thief games, you simply can't please them. I may be in a minority here, but I thought that Thief: DS was a pretty good game on its own, even if it didn't impress me as much as TDP and TMA did when I first played them. As a Thief game Deadly Shadows was a slight disappointment, but it was still one of the best games of that year in my opinion.

Fafhrd on 7/5/2011 at 19:55

Quote Posted by Sulphur

ME and DS1 had nuclear frobs built into the environment, just with different tells... ME1's a parkour game with barely any environment interaction or complex goals, it's first-person platforming on speed. Any more handholding than runner vision and the game would have to play itself.

Despite which, the majority of games critics still couldn't find their way around the level. It's analogous to Thief because it's A: The second least cinematic core gameplay mechanic ever (the first would of course be Thief) that has been honed to razor sharpness, and B: it is completely unforgiving to anyone who doesn't adjust how they look at the game world to be more in keeping with the player character. Runner Vision is designed to assist that, but it's hardly 'follow the red bits and you'll always get where you need to go,' and the number of interactive environment elements that aren't highlighted vastly outnumbers the ones that are. It also has the benefit of being consistent with the art style of the rest of the game and has a (slight) story explanation for why it's there.

Dead Space, despite breadcrumbs (which, again, at least has a decent in-game fiction reason for existing, unlock BioShock's floating objective arrow), is still very heavily exploration based and set in an extraordinarily well realized, detailed, and open game world.

I'd also throw Dead Island into the mix, but it hasn't been released yet

Quote:

Deus Ex may require more types of mechanic but imho it's therefore less important getting each one just right. When you're using very few actions throughout the game you become more aware of how well balanced those actions are and you're also able to squeeze that little bit more out of them. It's like the jumping in Mario games (thing NES, SNES versions) - it's so tight that when you get good, you get really good and you need that.

That's kind of my point, though. If you have 50 core mechanics that go into making your game, you're only going to have enough time to make some of them 'good enough,' and some of the 'awesome,' and which ones to prioritise will be subjective (Deus Ex). And if you've already got that many mechanics, adding in one or two more won't strike you as a big deal (DX:HR, and to a worst case degree, Invisible War). If you have two or three core mechanics, you can spend the time honing them and balancing them and making sure that they're ALL awesome (Thief 1 and 2, Mirror's Edge, Portal). And as blasphemous as it is to say: even Thief didn't get everything right, and Deadly Shadows did get the core mechanic right (seriously, can you honestly say that, bar the wonky movement, the sneaking was genuinely worse in T: DS?), it just diluted it with extraneous crap (Open City being the biggest offender, and we were ALL clamouring for it right after T2) and some bad presentation decisions (which, as I went into before, weren't entirely the fault of the designers).