Thief 4: Sorry for being negative but ... - by undetected
undetected on 19/5/2012 at 13:44
Hello to all.
I've played both Thief the Dark Project and Thief the Metal Age and about a hundred fan missions between them. When Thief III came out, I played the demo and was disappointed with the small map and the loading zones. It felt very cramped, unlike the first two games. I know that Thief III was designed for the console in mind, and that's why it had small maps. That excuse doesn't matter. I did not buy Thief III.
My strong suggestion to the makers of Thief IV: Do not have small maps with loading zones. I won't buy the game if you do.
jay pettitt on 19/5/2012 at 21:34
Don't apologise. It's a prerequisite of entry.
I think you're probably safe there though. Deadly Shadows was pushing some pretty radical technology on to the first generation xbox - tiny levels were the inevitable trade off for pushing so hard in those other areas.
Current generation technology has a different set of compromises - but you can get some fairly decent lighting and still have big levels.
That said, there's plenty of other reasons to be negative - so don't pre-order just yet.
Tomi on 20/5/2012 at 09:32
You only need to apologise for being positive here.
jtr7 on 20/5/2012 at 10:39
Depends on the positivity. Paul Weir's contributions have me hopeful T4's sound design might be worthy of Thief. That's one example of many. Retreading old crap has guaranteed results here, including surprise at the predictable result by people who should know better, every time. Paul Weir's exit, and the new guy, Jean Christophe Verbert's hand in the mix have put a damper on a bright spot in all of this, which feeds back into the greater negativity. Hysterical claims of hysteria and made-up grumpiness against the only people who care about how Thiefy T4 will be have been most ruinous of all. Keep an eye on the prize and act accordingly.
SubJeff on 20/5/2012 at 23:22
Quote Posted by Tomi
You only need to apologise for being positive here.
And for posting concerns that have been aired a thousand times.
lost_soul on 25/5/2012 at 18:17
Although tech has advanced, RAM is still a huge limiting factor on the console side, which probably means the computer side as well. You have to make your game world fit into 512 MB of memory because you can't assume that the user has a hard drive attached to his 360. IIRC this was an issue for Rage. They had to make *sure* the game would run on systems lacking an HDD, so you can't rely on it as temporary storage.
That means my machine with 16 GB of memory wouldn't be pushed to its limits, just as my 1 GB system wasn't back when TDS came out.
As a game developer, you could take and simply splice two of the levels together for the computer version of your game, but that:
A. Requires more effort (bad!)
B. raises the system requirements for your game
C. Might cause other trouble, like reaching draw call limits in the engine
