Azaran on 7/6/2011 at 09:48
Quote Posted by Beleg Cúthalion
Actually from the input we have quite the opposite is the truth.
What I've read so far was that they wanted to cater to the X-Box crowd, and dumbed down the the engine to adapt it to the console market.
C'mon, you really think they couldn't add rope arrows, and make the levels a bit bigger? Even back in 2004 they already had the technology to tweak game engines in limitless ways. Sure, it might take a bit more effort, but I'm sure they could have done it. They can do anything.
Just look at our humble Dark engine - look what FM designers have done with it, they've taken it to unbelievable levels (have you played Rose Cottage or the Rocksbourg series?), and this using Dromed alone.
Whatever the case may be, the T4 screenshot looks good in terms of level size. At least we can safely assume they didn't cut corners on map size this time...
juveli on 7/6/2011 at 12:34
Should there be Thief 4?
No. There never was a game called Thief 3, so having a 4 all of a sudden would be silly ;)
Should there be a new Thief game?
Sure, why not? Thief: Deadly Shadows had some nice ideas (free roaming in the City, more involved lockpicking) but unfortunately suffered from the technical limitations of that age. It will be interesting to see what the 2010s have to offer for Thief series.
It would be nice to have some other protagonist than Garrett, though, as the ending of T: DS closed the circle for him.
Pyrian on 7/6/2011 at 21:18
Quote Posted by Azaran
What I've read so far was that they wanted to cater to the X-Box crowd, and dumbed down the the engine to adapt it to the console market.
C'mon, you really think they couldn't add rope arrows, and make the levels a bit bigger?
Dunno about rope arrows, but I really don't see how taking a level of a given size and splitting it into two connected levels of half that size is in any way catering to anything except the limitations of what they could get to work.
Beleg Cúthalion on 7/6/2011 at 21:19
Quote Posted by Azaran
C'mon, you really think they couldn't add rope arrows, and make the levels a bit bigger? Even back in 2004 they already had the technology to tweak game engines in limitless ways. Sure, it might take a bit more effort, but I'm sure they could have done it. They can do anything.
From a sofa point of view this might be true. But I objected not to the technical possibilities themselves but to the attitude you were foisting on them. We have Krypt talking about City maps ten times bigger than the ones in the game. They had to be cut down, this wasn't about "we could [build them in the first place] but we won't". We have comments about the devs struggling with the difficult lightning which was one of the problems the engine re-writer left them with. We have remains of rope arrows in T3Ed (and maybe even swimming animations/placeholders, but that's just a shadow in my memory right now, try the search function). However flawed TDS might have been, we can usually be sure that the devs were aware of these flaws and tried to avoid them as much as they could with all the limits in time, budget and so on.
Azaran on 7/6/2011 at 22:12
The only justification I've read for keeping the levels small, was because of the X-Box limitations. I don't know if this was the official reason or just hearsay, but so far that's the only one that's come up again and again.
dexterward on 8/6/2011 at 17:59
Hi folks/2nd post/etc ;)
New Thief game?
On one main condition - that it`s done in first person (with 3rd optional or whatever)
For me this is most important, any other changes I could (probably) live with, or at least try.
(Well unless it`s some total madness as in what Gearbox just have done with Brothers in Arms :)
Azaran on 8/6/2011 at 22:44
Quote Posted by Krypt
Actually,
Xbox memory is EXACTLY why the maps are small :p
Most of the maps were originally much larger, probably 2x the size they are now, but we had to shrink them down to get them to run on Xbox.
Quote Posted by Krypt
The big one was getting a map to fit into the 64mb of memory on xbox. That is the reason why all the maps are fairly small. .
See, that's exactly what I thought. If they had kept it to PC only, the map size problem would be nonexistent.
Btw thanks for the links
Beleg Cúthalion on 9/6/2011 at 12:26
No, it wasn't just about "the developers trying to appeal to the masses, but most of it was just lazy programming". I thought it would be clear that it's NOT exactly what you thought...or wrote. :p It's by the way one of my pillars of hope concerning T4: They don't only have TDS's flaws to learn from but also the evidence that it wasn't even planned that way.
downwinder on 10/6/2011 at 02:24
if they make thief 4 like thief 2 with a ton of new textures/weapons/what thief 3 should have been,i dont think taking a game to next gen graphics makes it better,there is still a ton that canbe done with thief 2,just look at the hundreds of fan missions that are so amazing being put out to this day.
