TheCapedPillager on 27/5/2009 at 19:43
Somewhat related to this thread: (
http://www.wired.com/gamelife/2009/05/fallout-baby) http://www.wired.com/gamelife/2009/05/fallout-baby. The article talks about unintended gameplay elements when 'breaking' the game.
fett on 27/5/2009 at 22:43
Great article - exactly what was so awesome about Thief back in the day. Raise you hand if you've ever been on the roof of the Lost Cathedral, or gotten in and out in under 45 seconds!
Namdrol on 28/5/2009 at 07:41
Quote Posted by Faxfane
Fett, you are right on the money. Again. .....
...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.
Faxfane, your right mate, do they want to make dross that only we remember because it's so bad or do they want to produce another landmark in gaming??
I play games to live in the life of that game, and it's the feeling that it's my world that made me fall in love with Thief.
And it's true, it was the confidence in the game and the players that let them do it.
I've just finished TDS and got sadder and sadder as I played it.:(
So close, it was so close to being a truly great game, which made it worse.
I should write an essay dissecting my experience (especially when I showed my 12 year old nephew (an x box kiddie) how to play) but I guess it's been done to death.
This thread should be compulsory reading for all EM.
Fett, please pull out your posts plus some of the replies and send them to Rene
MaxDZ8 on 12/6/2009 at 12:41
Quote Posted by rainynight65
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.
And because the expectations nowadays are higher, it may fail to deliver anyway.
Sure, a world once costed 100 and a "Thief-open" world costed (say) 200; costly since the start - as LGS learnt the hard way.
For nowadays, to deliver the illusion of an open world, not only it should be bigger and equally detailed but include more variation (which doesn't just scale as easily).
The cost ratio would probably be more like 1000 -> 8000; big numbers that only a few would invest for what could end being an experiment.
I fear hoping T4 to match the "open design" of the first two is hightly unrealistic - unless they chose to go "last gen" and shift the target from useless detail (look! 8192x8192 textures! I'm very bored of that approach) to providing more content. Sounds far from being viable nowadays (although I'm reasonably confident they should really consider this approach).
Quote Posted by hexhunter
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.
I wish I could agree. I felt limited constantly.
Dresden on 13/6/2009 at 02:39
Quote Posted by fett
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).
Chaos Theory was a lot better about this IMO. Have you played that one? But anyway I generally agree, though Thief and SC are not really the same game with the same goals, just the same genre.
To me, the best thing about Thief was how dynamic the game was for it's time. Bashing down doors was programmed in. You could throw metal hammers to hurt AIs and wooden doors. You could stack crates up and climb somewhere you otherwise couldn't, which was crazy fun. There were so many ways to do a mission, none of them marked with a "Go Here" sign. It
was a sandbox game. It's just that the sandboxes were smaller.
fett on 13/6/2009 at 17:53
I haven't played it in about three years, but I'm finishing up Pandora right now and about to start it up. IIRC they get progressively better, but I still always remember wondering why they bother to give Sam all those cool moves and then only needing to use them once or twice, in very scripted/ham-fisted way.
I guess it's the irritation of wanting to climb on a ledge that's not mission sensitive but being blocked by the infamous invisible fence. It's lazy design, and it's hand-holding at its worse. The gadgets and concept for SC is cool enough for me to overlook it, but if when Thief takes this approach, it comes off no better than the Thieves Guild path in Oblivion. :(
pwyll on 13/6/2009 at 20:07
I want open world, too. Something like Assassin's Creed type. But all buildings have to be infiltratable. The player has to be able to get to every place that he sees. I would like weather effects - rain, snow, wind, also days and nights, sunsets and sunrises. At the beggining as always the map should not be open to all places, some quarters have to be locked. And there should be a good reason to be locked as in Thief DS with bars and notes about a Plague epidemic. That makes it believable not like in Need for Speed - transparent shining barriers made from nothing.
belboz on 14/6/2009 at 13:26
On a recent run through of thief 3 when I got to the cradle part, I hadn't picked up the map of the place from the shop, and had actually forgotten how to get into the place, so I spent about an hour trying to find somewhere to climb up, as the texture was the same as the texture you can climb in the city, but couldn't in the end I found that cellar door, strange that the place had been boarded up for say 50 years, yet the wood had been rained on and infected by gunk from hammerite factories, but was still good as new, no rotten wood anywhere, so much for an open map, one way in, one linear path through it (if it was an open map then you would be able to pick things up, and not limited to only picking stuff up when the story allowed for it), one way out.
Blake1 on 14/6/2009 at 13:31
Quote Posted by nickie
Very eloquent and perfectly explains how I feel too. Thank you. :)
You read my mind. Very nicely said(
http://bamboo-fiber-clothing.com) !
Beleg Cúthalion on 14/6/2009 at 18:54
While I might agree that there should be at least one more entrance to the Cradle just for the sake of having another entrance (...); finally some response to the whole climbing texture discussion:
Quote Posted by belboz
[...] I spent about an hour trying to find somewhere to climb up, as the texture was the same as the texture you can climb in the city, but couldn't
Wrong. The Cradle's outside is textured with a practically unique rotten stone texture from the HH (Haunted House) material library. Even
if it appeared in other places, you wouldn't be able to use the climbing gloves (which I don't really like just because you don't need gloves to climb better... rather on the contrary). Whether or not a texture can be climbed depends on a property given to it in the material library's sort-of index. Since almost all TDS textures appear only once in a matlib (except for a few windows and roof textures AFAIK) a wall texture is either climbable or not, not both at different places.
There might be a way to override this material property but I really doubt it happened significantly. So basically you
see if a wall is climbable like you see if a door can be opened or if it has the average fake door texture like in TDP/TMA. And I really doubt that a lot of textures with the same appearance had randomly-chosen climbable properties. Usually it's those with large seams. If someone can prove me wrong, I'll have a closer look myself.
