Iceblade on 14/12/2015 at 19:21
I'm with fortuni... Have Blackjack will travel. I enjoy methoically cleansing a level of AIs. I try to get into the story, but I've found my interest to have waned over the years... Unless it's a story driven new FM (like the next Rocksbourugh), I don't care to do more than skim the readables. Ghosting is definitely something I dislike, but not as much as I used to with my ability to run circles around dark engine AIs.
fortuni on 14/12/2015 at 19:25
Quote Posted by FireMage
Expert is supposed to be the most challenging! ;) Never forget it!
True, but challenging does
not have to involve ghosting at all times, yes sometimes ghosting makes one part of that mission really challenging but I often feel the authors resort to ghosting to make the mission challenging far too easily.....actually that is a lazy way to make a mission hard..... clever AI paths, limited shadows, tight timing, limited weapons, well hidden switches, good puzzles etc all contribute tough missions. A great mission usually includes, ghosting a small area, easy in others, simple puzzles, tough puzzles, obvious switches, hard to find switches.....MIX IT UP, give everyone something to love, but please not not make your mission tough / impossible / stressful etc throughout, from beginning to end, I can guarantee that is a sure fire way of p**sing off 75% of players IMHO :p
FireMage on 14/12/2015 at 21:13
It is not an excuse, If a mission force you to ghost or to BJ a limited amount of AI in expert only, play in normal or hard then. :cheeky:
As I said the problem is that if we don't do that NOBODY will play in Normal/Hard then these difficulty level have no sense to exist.
If I must make everybody able to blind-play in the Highest Level Difficulty and succeed unless he completely makes an entire mess everywhere in the level by killing/knocking everybody out, to me it is not serious because there are no challenge, no skills then no game.
Good puzzles and patrols are not the most efficient to define difficulty.
You can say what you like/dislike things in missions, Thief is a stealth game and should lead you to a gameplay where you should sneak and hide yourself in the shadow. And higher is the difficulty level, more skill must be required. This is a question of sense to me! ;)
piesel on 3/1/2016 at 11:48
I love creepy mansions and city exploration missions, yes, there are already a lot of them but if done well these missions are the best Thief can offer.
JarlFrank on 3/1/2016 at 14:46
I love city exploration and mansion missions, too, and can't get enough of those - be they funny (some of Christine's missions, kfort's Wicked Relics, Tales From The Cleft: Vandal), mysterious (Ominous Bequest, Rowena's Curse), or just plain thiefy (Heist Society), mansions are fun places to rob. And cities, of course, are fun to explore, especially if they're gigantic open-ended and interconnected cityscapes like the beasts Melan and Skacky produce, or sensut's enormous Being Thief 2. And, whenever I play around with Dromed (without any real results up to now... let's see if I manage to finish something for the newbie contest!) it tends to be mansion-related too.
But one thing I think we see too little of is the more mysterious, strange, sometimes even surreal of Thief Gold's mission variety. Mages. Catacombs. Weird f***ed up strange places like Constantine's Mansion. There are few Bonehoard-inspired missions (but those that are there are excellent) that let us delve down into forgotten crypts, few missions that make use of the stranger elements of Thief lore like the mages and trickstery surrealism... I haven't played anything yet that tries to do something similar to The Sword, where you start out in a normal mansion that becomes a strange and surreal place the deeper you go into it, with architecture that just looks wrong and with strangely-placed gardens. The closest I played was stinkykitty's campaign, especially the first two missions.
I'd like to see more of that "weird" Thief, and more Bonehoards, but I won't complain about well-made mansions and cities either. :D
