Campaignjunkie on 17/5/2009 at 08:21
Life of the Party is Thief at its purest form of cat burglary, exploration, and vertical floorplans in level design. Imagine LotP x 100, and that's the promise of how compelling an open world would be. Hopefully nothing castrated like Thief 3's City, but something expansive.
I'd say it's a no-brainer, assuming they have the resources / time to dedicate to it - and considering Ubisoft's record with open world sandbox stuff (FarCry 2, Assassin's Creed, Prince of Persia) they already have experience with such design.
MaxDZ8 on 17/5/2009 at 08:27
I mostly agree, but personally I don't think there's necessity to go in the void.
The world has to end at a certain limit: letting players into the void surely tells the truth about the bounduary yet it feels somewhat dumb to me.
It could be awesome if levels could be packed togheter so climbing to the void could actually take to a fan-made mission which happens to have been placed there just to expand. A pipe dream.
Open levels thief style take a bit of work. I hope there will be focus on providing alternatives.
Eshaktaar on 17/5/2009 at 09:06
One thing that hasn't been mentioned yet is the way the linear mission structure in Thief 1 & 2 prevented the player from hoarding money/equipment. The cash you stole in the former mission could only be used for buying equipment for the next mission. If you didn't spend all the money, it disappeared. And if you didn't use all the equipment in the mission, it didn't carry over to the next one (Trail of Blood being an exception).
That way the player was encouraged to buy equipment and use it in the mission ahead without having to worry that they might need it in a later mission. In Thief 3, due to the open world and the regrowing elemental arrows in the City, I ended up with a lot of cash and equipment that I didn't need.
Shortage of equipment is an important factor that adds tension to the game, but the suboptimal balancing of Thief 3 destroyed this to some extent. If I hadn't decided to ghost the Cradle on my first try, I could have just stormed the place, as I had more than enough flash bombs and holy water. The mission structure in Thief 1 & 2 enabled the developers to have much more control over the difficulty and tension of an individual mission.
What I'm trying to say is that I wouldn't mind if the fourth installment went back to the first two games' mission structure. As long as the missions themselves are large and non-linear enough and leave the player to decide how to tackle them.
On the other hand, games like System Shock 2 and Deus Ex managed to pull it off without the player ever getting swamped with equipment, though I imagine finding the right balance is quite a challenge.
steo on 17/5/2009 at 13:43
While I agree that Thi3f messed up on the balance and before long you had max of every item and arrow and could more or less just tank it through levels if you wanted, I also don't feel that the Thi1f/Thi2f implementation is the best solution. Yes it meant they could balance the levels better, but it was also kind of constricting and at first I rather felt like there wasn't much point in all this looting, since I couldn't save any of it and was forced to spend it all on stuff which I often never used.
It might have been better if they'd given you a lot less default equipment in missions - they give you the bare minimum and then you have to decide much more of your own gear. Or else in Thi3f, they should have had a lot less item/arrow pickups, and perhaps have put in fewer shops and severely limited their supplies of certain items. On top of that, they should have given you less loot/made everything more expensive.
Another idea, and we're drifting further away from thief here, is have RPG-style items/upgrades which cost a lot of money but give you a reason not to just buy maximium fire arrows and flash bombs. It would be like the upgrade system in Stalker: Clear Sky, which fixed the hugely broken economy that the first stalker suffered from. Ideas for upgrades would be where we have to start being careful, lockpicks are the most obvious choice, since Garrett buys a pair in the first game. You could perhaps have Garrett start with no lockpicks, but be able to buy first a square-toothed, then a triangle-toothed which allows him to open more locks than he could before. There could be different types of pick required for different types of lock, e.g pin and tumbler, lever tumbler etc. There could potentially also be better versions of the same pick, which make it easier to pick that kind of lock, but I'm a little less fond of that idea, since it could reduce the need for player skill in picking locks (which I think should be implemented via a mini-game, but something that's better and harder than Thi3f's) and it's arguably too rpg-ish. Bow upgrades would be another quite obvious one that would work, but the devs should stay away from stuff like stealth boots/suit (anyone remember dark messiah after you maxed stealth and got the master thief suit?)
Eidos stop reading here plz.
Another option would be to have Garrett not start with any of his gear, so he has to buy it all, maybe he could start the game imprisoned for an unknown crime but then get rescued by Patrick Stewart and told to find Sean Bean but then be left to randomly loot houses and tombs to get cash to buy better stuff, doing quests for the fighter's and mage's guild which are entirely unsuited to a thief and fighting in the arena for phat cash prizes, interspersed every few hours by doing another plot mission for Sean Bean until you actually realise that the plot is crap and you should be doing the assassin missions instead.
TTK12G3 on 17/5/2009 at 15:29
I always wondered why Garrett never set aside any of his money for his landlord and ultimately ended up spending it all on water crystals and flashbombs.
fett on 17/5/2009 at 16:35
Well, ISA tried to control equipment hoarding by setting limits on the amount of each item you could carry. Unfortunately, this was merely a concession to the lowest common denominator. The essence of any sneaking game is that you use minimal equipment. 5 Flashbombs and 2 gas grenades are the equivalent of a fucking tank in most other games. Most of us probably don't even buy equipment in the original games any more. I think I may buy rope arrows if there are none in the default inventory, but I can't remember the last time I purchased water, moss, or gas arrows, or especially a flash bomb. The only reason to need a flash bomb is getting caught, which technically you're not supposed to do. I understand the need to make them available (obviously) but why so many?
Seriously, if you need 5 flashbombs, 10 gas arrows, and 15 oil flasks, either you just plain suck and need to go back to Halo, or the game has failed to properly convey it's gameplay characteristics (or even worse, failed to inspire you to indulge in them).
Bulgarian_Taffer on 17/5/2009 at 16:36
Speaking about open world, do you think that Thief 3 had an open world? I think yes. We had the option to choose for example whether to play Abysmal Gale first or the Sunken Citadel, plus you can go wherever you want in the city.
Beleg Cúthalion on 17/5/2009 at 19:39
Funnily, the small sections of the TDS City made the whole thing/rest more mysterious to me than any other cool "open" maps would have done. Still, people are complaining that TDS took away the mystery of what Garrett did between the missions AND that those levels were too small. :p
Petike the Taffer on 17/5/2009 at 20:30
The only thing we truely need is expanding and improving the "open city" idea from TDS, which only failed because the levels had to be made small (damn you, XBox ! :mad: :cheeky:).
As much as I like TDP and TMA, their mission-only nature just isn't as fun and engaging as taking a stealthy stroll through the streets and gazing at a living, breathing world. TDS did this right, and I felt incredibly immersed. It was the first game in my life, where I actually experienced the same feeling I always have when walking through an old historical quarter of a real world city or town (like Levoča and Bardejov) at night. It felt like a genuine place continuously inhabited by people. The only other game, that gave me this feeling of "wow, look at the details, it looks like a real office or flat" was SWAT 4, which had small, but brilliantly designed levels.
Nonetheless, I still felt somewhat dissapointed because of the limited number of things the townsfolk could actually do (it all felt like they were walking around just for the fun of it :)). So, Thief IV just needs to : 1. Add more visitable streets in all the known quarters of the City (so they won't look like a collection of two medium-sized lanes and three tiny alleys) 2. Make the various citizens look like they're really doing some everyday activity - going to the pub; buying food and goods at a market place; gossiping (more), joking and making deals; driving a fully-loaded cart; etc. Make the streets more crowded (as crowded as they can be in the evening or at night). I don't want to compare it to Assasin's Creed (since that takes place in the day time and the gameplay is different), but it should be somewhat similar. Not overdone, just a little more alive and interesting, that's all. ;)
SubJeff on 17/5/2009 at 22:29
Quote Posted by Bulgarian_Taffer
Speaking about open world, do you think that Thief 3 had an open world? I think yes. We had the option to choose for example whether to play Abysmal Gale first or the Sunken Citadel, plus you can go wherever you want in the city.
I think fett is talking about "open" in a different context. Many games have large open worlds, sandbox games if you will. But its all often an illusion. You can only climb specific textures, use your tools at specific places and so on.
There is little scope for, ahem, emergent gameplay.
From the sounds of it Splinter Cell is just like that. Assassins Creed certainly displays aspects of it, although its world is open enought that the restriction is less obvious. You still only have the option of climbing the bits you are "allowed" to climb. Tomb Raider Underworld gives the illusion of being open but if you try to stray of the path you won't get far. If you want to get from A to B you might have 4 specifics steps you have to take - a jump, a swing, a drop and another jump. Sometimes you can take a slightly different path but it is no way as open as Thief 1 and 2.
Let's put it this way - in order to get from A to B in Tomb Raider both you and I would use the pretty much the exact same path and set of moves, in the same order. In Thief 1 and 2 we could do it our own way, however the hell we want to.
Now
that is open.
Quote:
As much as I like TDP and TMA, their mission-only nature just isn't as fun and engaging as taking a stealthy stroll through the streets and gazing at a living, breathing world.
With respect I completely disagree, and I think most of us here would.
The beauty of Thief 1 and 2 was that even in those missions you felt like you were in a living, breathing city. Trace the Courier, Assassins or Life of the Party realise a perfect illusion that Ion Storm tried, and failed, to make a realitiy in Thief 3.
