fett on 19/5/2009 at 18:17
The problem isn't so much the inclusion of the equipment as it is the need to use it, or rather, the abundance of surfaces that "accepts" the use of ropes/gloves, etc. Why could Garrett climb some walls but not others in TDS? Because the devs only wanted him to climb to certain places. Rope arrows make sense in the world because they only worked on wood and soft surfaces, but those textures were used in places that were both goal oriented and not.
Back to Splinter Cell - it's really cool in the tutorial how Sam can do all these corner jumps and suspensions, etc. In the second one, he can hang upside down and shoot his gun. Really cool, right? Except there's not a single fucking moment in either game where you really get to/need to use these skills - not to complete the mission, and certainly not for fun. There's no point in fancy stuff like gloves and rope arrows if the devs don't purposely build the WORLD where the player can use them at whim (instead of building neat little pre-ordained spots where the player must use them - but can't use them anywhere else). This is a crucial difference between the design mentality of T1& 2 and TDS, or dare I say it, most games developed for the PC, vs. typical console titles. (p.s. This is why you guys who compare MGS to Thief are fools, FOOLS I SAY).
SlyFoxx on 19/5/2009 at 19:09
Hell yeah fett. I posted something similar a few days back
Quote:
....Then there are the times where the game seems to sense what you are trying to do (like attaching to a ladder) and things go into auto mode for a moment. I'm a big boy and can drive the camera just fine without the extra help.
One of the great things about the original games was the consistency of what kind of movement you could perform. As a designer it's up to me to design the map to keep the player constrained but I'm forced to do so in a logical way. How fucking lame is it to have the player see a clear path only to be told.."well you can usually do that but not here?" How cool would it have been in The Cradle if the skilled thief managed to make an outside climb into the attic right off?
Don't get too worried about having the map's "story" unfold in an unintended way because a player gets creative and strays from "the path." I know designers sometimes have this glorious master plan for the player but guess what? For the most part they don't care about that. They want to do things their own way and sometimes revel in foiling the designer's plan. (hell that can be half the fun right there!)
Faxfane on 19/5/2009 at 21:20
Fett, you are right on the money. Again. Yanno, sometimes that gets annoying. ;)
I got Thief2 as part of a hardware purchase in 2001. Almost a decade for me and I still install the Thief series (plus T2X), after a fresh OS install. It's the sneaking, the tension, exploration, the attention to detail and immersion.
Tracing the Courier is the single TMA mission I both loathe and love. You never have enough of everything to get the job done from the get-go, but have one helluva time dodging patrols, running away, and simply exploring. My third time through, I found water arrows in the canal. Talk about happy! I got rewarded for oblique exploration.
Use that. Make the various areas explorable, even through unconventional means, and reward them that succeed. Not everyone has the subtle touch for a 30 crate stack. Self included.
Trust me. If items are included which can be climbed, stacked, stood upon, or outright used to scale a vertical or sloped surface, someone will do it. And tell others. Which creates interest. And fan missions. And longevity alongside legacy.
Then add in the villagers, which is where TDS failed. In the priors, the townsfolk didn't wait until you stole from AND alerted them to the theft before they sought out guards. If they saw you skulking about with a weapon, you were held in high suspicion and any nearby guard alerted.
I loved that, even when I was daft enough to get caught. Integrate intelligent AI for the commoners in addition to guards and you'll have a winner. Citizen see you steal? Alert the guard...unless you can catch and threaten them first. Then they say nothing, fearing reprisals, even up to lying on your behalf when questioned by the Village Watch.
Then have the few which aren't so easily cowed, who attack in self defense. That brings along its own consequence set in stature and actions: i.e. the guards know you did the deed, but can't prove it, so your actions are monitored a bit more closely while they hope for a slip-up while the commoners are more wary and less likely to cover for you.
I realize and understand that there are some followings for games which came out prior or alongside TDP which are still being modified and supplemented. Among that cadre, Thief is unique (except, perhaps, for the System Shock franchise) for the stealth routes afforded for gameplay (though not necessarily for exploration). Of the current stock, few live as long. The trend now is a new game is successful if interest is held for a few months. The defunct LGS has had us in its thrall for well over a decade of years. And that is on the single-player route, not multi.
Speaking of which, I hope there is multi-play. Do Not attempt to compete directly with WoW, as that franchise had supplanted almost all other genre priors, except for the remaining die-hards. Now, a stealthly insidious genre? That will win us and others, once true stealth game-play is restored.
So...rope arrows, vine arrows (I love those, by the by), and climbing gloves. Paranoid guard mixed with the lax and lazy, with quips and personal barbs regarding the stringent's view on such and the verbal reprisals. Means of removing blood stains from physical altercations, and not enough water arrows to remove the stains from every non-plot murder.
We don't necessarily want power-ups, skill augmentations or similar. Simply immerse us and we will be sated for another decade plus. Oh, and we'll sing your praises, create forums and fan-missions...well, so long as we're given the tools to do such. Another thing to ponder, I reckon.
LGS has a definite legacy. So why not EM? Trust me again when I say that such will only cement your franchise's legacy with the fan and modder community. Which will keep the rest of us playing and discussing your game for a solid fortnight of years.
There aren't many singular titles which can claim the same.
rainynight65 on 22/5/2009 at 18:40
There are a lot of valid points made in this thread, and I agree with a great number of them. What made the Thief series unique was not only the openness of the world that allowed for multiple routes and lots of exploration, but also left it pretty much to the player how he or she wanted to reach an objective. The comparison with Splinter Cell makes it most clear. There is a game where the developers thought of exactly one way to get through a mission. Deviation is neither necessary nor does it reward the player in any way.
But - (I guess you saw that one coming :D) I also see some people who seem to be looking down on, let's call it less experienced or less hardcore players. Maybe it just seems like that because I am one of those less hardcore folks. I have never ghosted a level. If I have the choice between trying to avoid a torch's light or douse the torch instead, I will douse the torch 98% of the time. I have used plenty of broadheads or gas arrows to dispatch guards that I was too timid to sneak up on. I prefer to minimize the risk of getting caught. To me the best moments in a Thief session are Garret's musings (I can listen to Stephen Russell's voice forever) and making it through a mission without getting caught. I enjoy a game for its story and the way it is told. In all my years of gaming there has been only one game in which I went out of my way to discover everything and solve every sidequest in addition to finishing the storyline (that was The Witcher). I can perfectly live with not finding every single piece of loot in a mission, just so long as I manage to get the objectives right.
My point, if I am actually trying to make one, is that it is perfectly fine to want a challenge. Most of you are veteran Thief fans and have mastered the art of the game. But don't look down on those who are not as experienced, skillful or hardcore. There are people out there who enjoy a good game as much as the next one, but are content to achieve just a part or even the minimum of what a game has to offer. A really good game is one that caters for several levels of experience and is just as enjoyable for a more casual gamer as it is for an expert.
fett on 22/5/2009 at 18:49
Agreed rainynight. I hope the point I'm making here is not that we want the game to be hard, or only appeal to the vets, but rather that what appealed to the vets in the first place was not having our hands held, and the ability to explore areas that weren't mission-crucial, but added to the believability of the game world. I imagine those same things appeal to the beginners, since all of us were just that the first time we played it and fell in love with it.
On a related note - Ghosting. I don't think the original LGS team even planned missions with this playing style in mind. But the fact that it can be done (as opposed to forced combat/confrontation in other sneakers, including SC and NOLF) shows just how "open" the game world was - we always found a way to do it, if we wanted to bad enough. There's a big difference between coming up against a wall that's too tall to mantle in Thief, and Sam Fisher inexplicably not being able to jump onto a ledge 1/4 of the size of the one he just climbed onto a second ago. Don't get me started on the fucking drain pipes he can't climb 98% of the time unless it's mission crucial. Seriously UbiSoft. WTF?
The significant difference between the two is that one breaks immersion and the other doesn't. In T1-2 the architecture was designed in such a way that you could climb all over it when it made sense to do so - the designer didn't interfere with the player's exploratory whims, unless it was at the edge of the map - and even then, the architecture confirmed the fiction that "you can't go that way." A locked door, an fence too tall to climb, the wall of the Old Quarter. You couldn't get through these in RL either. In SC however, Sam can literally stand in one spot and be allowed to climb down or up the wall, but take a single step to the right and he can't - the invisible wall problem that confronts most developers. Most simply close off a space or prevent the avatar from interacting with the architecture and the reasoning is arbitrary, or even worse, the player immediately deduces that they can't go that way because the developers don't want them to. This is tantamount to having a pop-up window with a picture of the dev shaking a finger at you and yelling "not THAT way!" FAIL.
rainynight65 on 22/5/2009 at 19:11
Look, Splinter Cell in all of its incarnations is just a bad example for a stealth game. It's typical 21st century game design, where the player is taken by the hand and guided through it. One path, one outcome. Stealth and violence as and when prescribed, no choice, no option. I guess that's why I never finished a SC game, actually I never went past the first two or three missions. The limitations overshadowed the gameplay. In addition, the first three SC games were churned out so quickly by Ubisoft that I got the feeling it was one game split up into three, to make more dosh out of it.
Building a world like in the first two Thief games, and to a lesser extent the third, requires more thought by the developers, more courage to be unorthodox, more experimenting and testing. More brainstorming, more planning. In essence that means developing such a game takes more time and costs more money - both are things that are not overly popular with publishers nowadays. To me it is one of the saddest fact in the development of gaming over the last ten years, that the majority of games is short and quick, that immersion, longevity and variety are no longer a factor. The attention span of gamers has become drastically short.
Tail on 22/5/2009 at 21:53
Totally agree, fett.
The open world, as you describe it, is one of the greatest accomplishments of the game. Just about every roof can be reached without any paths being designed for you to get there, and that's awesome. To me, it seems largely like a happy accident which has come about by actually having confidence in their design.
Invisible barriers seem cowardly. Created by devs terrified of players being out of control. Thief just revels in it, "You want to spend 2 hours stacking crates? So you can climb onto an empty roof? Only to jump into an endless void, unable to return? ...GO FOR IT!". It's so ...liberating. And, as you say, it makes the game, the experience, yours.
It's also affected the way I play other games, I want to break out of their boundaries too. I love a game more if it lets me, get annoyed at it if it doesn't. Incidentally, if you stray from the map in Crysis, it threatens to make you explode.
Beleg Cúthalion on 22/5/2009 at 22:11
We could have big green half-transparent walls hinting the Cradle Memory Zone (CMZ).
hexhunter on 22/5/2009 at 23:03
There's alot of anti-Splinter Cell sentiment here, I understand your point, I know I definitely noticed how designed the New York level was in Chaos Theory, but overall SC is a great stealth game. I never felt like my hand was being held, not even in normal mode.
It is certainly true that Thief is generally more open than SC, but not always. For a game without many scripted events there were alot of bottlenecks in T2s level design, but it was designed only in 2000 so you couldn't expect to much, they were very good levels in most respects.
On how Thief 4 should be designed, at teh moment I hope for full free-roaming, well, kind of. I would like to see the whole city as a single map, like in inFamous or GTA IV, and the game could use large amounts of procedurally generated content.
For example, they always said the city had been constantly changing, old buildings falling down, new ones being built in their place, I'd like to see that happening, to keep the mystery there should be no sat-nav view, just a basic map and certain roads and buildings which never change. (Pubs, stores, churches, any building which is identifiable)
Leaving the city you could be faced with endless procedural woods and plains, and of course sea, into which new gameplay areas could be added in the future. The only issue is if the tech's up to it, though there aren't any 80 MPH cars or trains so the city doesn't have to be massive.
Thief 3's mission system more or less got things right, it was badly let down however by the small and unforgiving maps. The other issue is the lack of time between missions, in GTA you are always with the character while he's awake, he doesn't go to the pub between missions unless you take him there.
In T4 I want some time to pass between missions, like in TDS some missions could happen on the same day, and maybe I could choose which order to play them in or whether to play them at all. Then between nights Garrett would have spent lots of his money, you could only hoard for a day, the next day you would only get a certain amount of the money to spend on equipment. I think that's that issue solved...
God I wish I could make my posts shorter, I think if Eidos checks these forums they probably have to hire a guy especially for this.
- Deus X Machina
fett on 23/5/2009 at 03:00
I love the Splinter Cell series, but I play it knowing not to expect anything beyond a one-sided, linear, repetitive experience. Maybe I'm not familiar enough with it (as with Thief), but I swear I've never had a single use for any of the cool moves that you learn in the tutorial. They've made a character that is capable of doing all this cool stuff, then built a world in which he never needs to do it. I was so stoked in the tutorial of SC 1 when I realized I could do all those wall jumps, expecting to be able to get on top of buildings and such. What a disappointment when I realized the only time I could use them was when the devs intended, instead of when I wanted to explore the game world. Even more disappointing when the illusion of a world beyond the designated path didn't exist.
I think Tail nailed it - it's almost like a happy accident, except for the fact that LGS pulled it off twice with Thief and with SS2 (never played SS1, but I assume it's the same). It comes down to a design philosophy that is extinct in next-gen gaming, but EM would do well to re-invest themselves in it lest they drive another nail into the Thief coffin.
