Vivian on 8/11/2012 at 02:10

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Just finished it. The sooner I realised it's not the second coming of Thief, the sooner I began to enjoy it for what it is - a flawed masterpiece. The mechanics are a really interesting hybrid between stealth and acrobatic evasion. It's definitely a different approach to the stealth in Thief - guards (more realistically) are well able to see you if they are looking at you from less than 15 feet or so, so you can't sit in a shadow and be totally secure until you make your next move, but you can instead run, jump and teleport like a bloody (teleporting) klipspringer and be out of harms way in a split second (or suddently 50 foot above the street if you accidentally ported sideways out of a window), so running away is totally a large part of the fun. The setting is really good, I wish they had made a bit more out of the whales, which were easily my favorite visual, but the design and world were all hugely inventive.

The only thing that let's it down is the writing - the characters are extremely threadbare, and the disinterested celebrity VA typical of bethedsa stuff does nothing to sell them as much more than either obstacles or quest givers, although callista get's some quite well done characterisation via a few logs. The main plot does not flow particularly satisfyingly either, dumping you head first into a bunch of high-stakes assassination without giving your character and motivation any time to brew, clunking it's way through a fairly impactless twist, and ending rather abruptly (not a comment on length, I got a solid 24 hours of fun out of it). I like that you could forget to pick up your gear (if you are an idiot) and have to do the remainder of the game with no crossbow and some gammy old sword you found. Overall, great stealth, great setting, beautiful visuals, great level design, bad writing, listless acting. Also, Viktor Antonov has got such a distinct, iconic style that you can't really separate his look from the Combine - this does look very much like HL2. It's like getting Giger to do your monster, you are going to end up looking a lot like Alien. Again, not a complaint (I love Antonov), but it does take the edge off the visuals a little - when you first saw combine architecture it was dazzling, all eerie tallness and greenish black spindles, like a cross between a steel coffin and a dried beetle. Dunwall didn't take my breath away as much as it could have just because it looked too much like HL2.

fett on 11/11/2012 at 23:57

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My only disappointment in subsequent playthroughs is the ticki-ness of the ghost/clean hands stats. Not very well thought through in some aspects. A simple idea, but they've complicated it significantly. Ghost/Clean Hands should be as easy as leaving no bodies found, no casualties, and no alarms ringing. But there is no feedback to determine where you fail these. The most non-sensical things can fail the alarm thing especially. Other times, it seems necessary to kill the target to prevent the body from being discovered.

Case in point: Mission 2 - Branding, rather than killing, Campbell leaves him clamped to the interrogation chair. This apparently counts as a body found, which also means the guard who finds him sounds an alarm. Even disabling the alarm busts the bodies found stat. If you disable the guards in that area, the others notice and come to check on them, and there's nowhere to hide the bodies where they can't find them (maybe because of so many open windows?) - and they sound the alarm. So my only option seems to be killing Campbell so I can move the body far away where it won't be spotted. However this busts the "kill no one" achievement (on XBox) and it's ridiculous to have to replay the level just to do that single thing differently. Also, saving the captain that he plans to kill can backfire because if you poison Cambpell, he sounds an alarm. A simple fix to the whole thing is to simply make Campbell move-able after the branding scene. Apparently there are similar problems in other levels where the lethal target kill is assumed along with the ghost stat - I can't fathom why that would be.

Probably a minor oversight for the majority, but the Taffers playing this eventually will shoot for clean stats and it's nearly impossible to get them without killing targets.

fett on 12/11/2012 at 00:20

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Maybe it has to do with where the patrols are - possibly your guys don't come upon him before you leave that section of the level, and my guys do. The timing and hash marks for stops are randomized a bit, or at least varied. I wonder if maybe disabling the guards brings others more quickly than just leaving the guards to find Campbell. I'm going to try it again tonight, but it just seems overly ticky to me - either make it where I can get out in time or not. I have no control over whether or not the patrolling guard stops 2 or 3 or 5 times before coming upon him in the chair. It's great for replay, but sucks when you're trying to get the stats.

SubJeff on 12/11/2012 at 07:51

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That guy is more interested in sounding cool than in saying anything useful.

He fails at both and spectacularly misses the point again and again in that video. What an arse.

Acnug on 12/11/2012 at 08:27

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fett, maybe Campbell is spotted by the overseer that walks down the hallway between the library and the interrogation room. Did you try closing the door behind the interrogation char?