fett on 23/6/2009 at 04:24

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Plus, I STRONGLY believe that opening up the city any more than in TDS allows the player to "make" their own game in a sense. This is the opposite of what drew most of us to the original games. The fact that LGS developed a strong character and a strong story and had the balls to stick to it in a time when most FPS characters were nameless, faceless, extensions of the player is one of the very things that made it unique. Whatever *I* might choose to do in the city is irrelevant - I can do that in Oblivion, Guild Wars, WOW, etc. etc. etc. I want to know what GARRETT is doing in the city. LGS decided what that would be and fleshed it out through the missions and their confidence in the strength of both the character and the story is IMO 50% of the charm.

When you try to explain Thief to people, do you start with, "There's this CITY, and you get to go around stealing things in it"? No - you start with, "See, there's this guy named Garrett, and he's trying to survive in this city..." The story is about Garrett - not about me, not about what I choose to explore when I sit down to play. It's about something that's already happened. I'm playing Garrett's adventure through Garrett's eyes. EM needs to tell us that story and let us experience it. But I sure as hell don't want to decide what it is for myself. That's the crucial difference between Thief and your run-of-the-mill RPG, and adding such RPG elements as a totally open city, character building, etc. runs completely counter to LGS's mindframe in the originals.

Dresden on 23/6/2009 at 09:43

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I agree, fett. Having a GTA style hub environment, at least for this type of game, is overrated. All it makes you do is backtrack a massive amount and waste the player's time. There used to be time when using the same levels in a game was avoided by the developers unless they could change it in an interesting way. I know I don't like exploring the explored.

Who else immediately skips to the next part in Assassin's Creed when given the option?

Lytha on 24/7/2009 at 09:23

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My apologies for resurrecting a 2 months old thread, but I got to post my approval of the OP's point. One of the best things about Thief 1 was that you could just about stack every single item and use the stack to explore the world beyond what the developers had intended. One of the biggest disappointments of Thief 2 was the discovery of the fact that you couldn't stack most items anymore, and were thus forced to play more "like the devs intended". It became even more rigid in Thief 3 - or I just didn't spend enough time in that game to discover my ways out of the "normal world".

Thinking about it - one of the most exciting times I had in Thief 3 was when I had climbed out of the world in Auldale and discovered that I could enter Gammal's Lair a couple of days before the mission that led into it. Of course, I couldn't leave the Lair again without dieing, which was sort of bad. ;)

A mission should only polished up to the point where the player doesn't accidentally fall out of the world.

On the other hand, it should allow the player the freedom to climb around and explore on her own free will. Even if the climbing methods may be absurd, like Oblivion's "paintbrushing", Thief 1's "bottle&crate stacking". As long as the player has got to go out of her way to do these things, and nobody accidentally gets trapped out of the world, exploits like that are fine and should be welcome. They prolong the life expectancy of a game, because it can activate and hold the interest of certain player types better than a game that strictly holds the player at the hand and guides him along certain fixed paths.

As long as it's a single player game, nobody will get hurt by exploits like that; and it's definitely more exciting than having the players use the console or editor to do the explorations.

Brian The Dog on 24/7/2009 at 19:29

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No-one should apologise for resurrecting this thread - if Eidos Montreal only read one thread on Thief IV, then it should be this one :)

jtr7 on 24/7/2009 at 20:56

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They do!:thumb: