jtr7 on 3/2/2011 at 00:51

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How is the dev stage relevant to the number of employees and having something to show, even if it's crude and obsolete? We were shown early concept art for the other titles, and mere weeks after May 11, 2009, the general manager declared T4 was coming along in leaps and bounds. If a core team of twenty have nothing to show more than a year-and-a-half later, and all we have seen has been made by marketing people, it's a marketing/management decision, not a development stage concern.

Also, I don't trust anyone who is amused by these things. Besides, I don't give a rat's ass about what other companies do with games I'll never play, or how they choose to tease their fans.

jtr7 on 3/2/2011 at 05:25

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No. Not at all. Just this:


That's it in a nutshell.

None of my feelings on these issues has anything to do with René--unless the reasons he left were related behind-the-scenes, but we don't know. If anything, René and Paul Weir sound the least like a puppet than anyone else.

It's not entitlement that drives me on this issue, it's the fact I do not trust marketing, marketers, or marketing's mouthpieces, who expect me to swallow their lies, their subjective excitement, and hand over my cash before I really know what the product is about, with little chance for a refund. I am staunchly against people telling me what I will like, assuring me on word alone I will like something they want my money for, and making promises they can't keep. I don't give a damn about their reasoning because it's usually condescending and serving people who aren't creating the games. It has to do with people telling me what matters to me, and then acting surprised when we disagree, and further saying they don't know what I and my friends want and don't want when we've told them everything many times in the arena they set up for us. Don't tell me you're coming over for dinner and neglect to say you meant two years from now.



EDIT: Oh, and Brethren? I don't know about a falling out, and I know you're just saying that to be a turd, but if there was a falling out with René, it was one-sided and kept to himself. In fact, all I know, and you can claim to know, is that René stopped talking to most everyone in March, and removed me from his Facebook's "friend" list in late June--and we know what "Friend" often means on the Internet--but only after he was essentially gone from Eidos-Montreal, not before then. I don't know what happened with him last year, and I don't know why he stopped talking to everybody who wasn't a mod/admin/favored employee, not just myself, and I believe I stated clearly that it was a mystery to me, and agreed with others it was rude. I don't know who else he may have un-Friended or befriended, if he even lurks the forums or not--he doesn't log in--and he's not publicly responded to, or logged in to read messages from, some people who worked with him, which they weren't expecting, either.

The silence since then has been uncomfortable, with no contact but a greeting from Kyle Stallock. It's the abrupt and sustained vacuum since June that's got a lot of us wondering why EM would expect us to care, let alone be positive and happy sheeple. I'm more worried for the existing fan community if T4 really does make TDS look a lot better, or if it emulates TDS and uses it as a foundation.

I'm not a gamer. Most games do not interest me in the least. Most of what I like about Thief isn't the playing of it, but it fires on more cylinders for me than other games, and I love playing it. I cannot say I love playing any other game. I'm looking for info that tells me I will at least like T4, from what I know of myself, not what some other person thinks. By the way, you still suck at understanding my motives, and I cannot translate them for you, 'cause I don't know how the hell you come up with what you do. TL;DR?

Renault on 3/2/2011 at 16:32

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Any kind of info shared at this point could also be fabrications or marketing speak, and that info could also change significantly before release time. Screenshots would be nice, but they really aren't going to be a good gauge of gameplay for the final product. Gameplay video would be great, but it's still pretty early for that, especially if they want to show off something impressive. Way too early for a demo.

Don't get me wrong, I want info too. But just like you, I don't trust marketing. Someone mentioned this before - there was a significant amount of info released to the public prior to TDS's release. There were screenshots, video, interviews, game details. People were pumped and excited, I think even Saam went to Ion and tried the game and came back with a glowing review. And look what happened. None of that pre-release crap meant anything. The game was sub par.

So what can we do? Either have faith and then take a chance and buy the game on day one, or wait for the reviews from the web and the folks here. I know with Deus Ex 3, I'll be doing the latter.



Why is that? I know you're severely limited in what you can say, but this could shed some light on our current issue here. The game's been being worked on for over 2 years, and no announcement or title yet? Is it a conscious thing from Arkane, or is someone higher up in Zenimax putting a hold on things?

d'Spair on 3/2/2011 at 23:56

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I hate it. It's way too short a period. Skyrim's just been announced, and it's already almost done. It should be around two years period at least.

Digital Nightfall on 4/2/2011 at 14:41

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Okay, lemme share what I know about the greater games industry and how marketing works. I am talking about companies like EA, Activision, Square Enix, Ubisoft, etc. There's certainly huge exceptions to all of this, like ZeniMax or Valve.

In most, but not all cases, the marketing team and the development team are rivals. Marketing gets to make high-level decisions about the game that tie the designers hands (make it 3rd person, add vehicles, you need a female side kick, you can't show any dead bodies, etc.), and then they get to decide if the game lives or dies based on the projected investment/return. Sometimes a marketing team will look at a game, decide that it's not going to sell well no matter how well they market it, and decide not to market it at all. Example: System Shock 2. So in most cases, the fans' exposure to a game is based totally on the say-so of people who don't have the best interests of either group in mind.

Most big games from big publishers are not developed for fans, they're developed for markets and demographics. These mysterious people targeted by the marketing team form their buy/nobuy opinions on games based on several weeks of TV ads and billboards prior to the store date of the game. The hardcore gamers who trawl through the internet for interviews and ads make up a very small percentage of a game's buyers, and honestly, they're considered by the marketing team as shoe-ins anyway. That's right. As far as Square Enix is concerned, every person registered at a Thief forum is a guaranteed buy for Thi4f, and so they have no incentive to win you over anew.

So why do some games have long marketing campaigns filled with cool trailers and screenshots and talks at game industry trade shows? They're not for us... no, no, no. They're for the press and the so-called gaming journalists (and to be fair, real game journalists too). Those are the only people who Marketing wants to form an early pro-bias towards the game, in the hopes that it will impact Metacritic scores and Awards.

So that's the evils on the marketing side. But that's not all of the bad news. By and large, fan Input simply does not impact a game's development. The only way you can is to become one of the semi-randomly screened folks who are brought in to playtest the game during beta, and those are almost never people familiar with the franchise. Why? Because fans of the game can't be trusted not to break NDA! So, two years, six months, it doesn't matter. Fan reactions to marketing materials are not going to impact how a game is made.

Oh, and pretty sure d'Spair was being sarcastic.