Anonymous asked:
Does the upcoming Thief game look bad to you so far? For the record, I'm not sure but I doubt I'll play it since currently I don't own a virtual reality headset and I'm not interested in getting one.
I haven't looked into it past the initial trailer. I would be willing to give it a second look if it weren't trying to validate Thief 14. That game was made by people who had no idea what they were doing. Original Thief works precisely because it's the opposite of a modern game. It was made by the sort of people who were fans of Infocom, and it shows. It lies to you, or forces you to figure out where you are by referencing deliberately unhelpful maps. When you streamline things and give people the ability to see through walls, or cinematic takedowns, or animations that lock the player into their action (such as very stealthily slamming doors), you're kind of missing the point of it. And considering that they initially wanted a world with dry ice instead of water crystals, and XP for headshots, you can tell they just didn't understand the character of the setting at all.
Thief in VR sounds like a very good idea, on paper. The limitations of VR could even justify some of the modern bullshit, like being unable to jump. But my only interest in it is hearing Stephen Russell come back, and even then, I don't trust them to get his character right. They didn't the first time, when they made Garrett a kleptomaniac who "steals to live", and keeps all the good stuff in his Batman lair instead of selling it. It's also depressing that they're probably going to be validating Thief 14's lore, where, instead of disappearing into the pages of legend, Original Garrett just got caught, and shoved in prison, and probably died there. That's a great ending for your character. It's like seeing Indiana Jones in a nursing home.
wdym "XP for headshots"?! In the original trilogy, one of the objectives for the highest difficulty was "don't kill anyone", with Garrett even mentioning a few times that he's "a thief, not a murderer". I haven't touched the reboot, the reviews showed me enough to avoid it like a plague, but I had no idea it's THAT bad.
ReplyDeleteThat didn't make it into the final product, but only because everybody complained when they saw it in the early gameplay trailers. The developers wanted to modernize the game, which often entailed trying to make it "realistic", or add mechanics that don't make sense for Thief. And they had this irritating tendency of saying, "Good news! We've listened to your feedback!", but only actually changing things in a really superficial way.
DeleteSo when people said, "Where are our water arrows?" they just changed the dry ice arrows back to water, which is an easy fix when they're functionally identical.
People complained about the XP system, so they reworked that to revolve around gold. Now instead of XP, you can spend gold to buy upgrades and perks, such as the ability to visually see footstep sounds.
They originally wanted to give Garrett a grappling hook, which could only be used in certain places. People said, "Where are our rope arrows?", so they replaced the grappling hook with rope arrows, but ones that only work in the exact specific spots that the grappling hook was going to be used anyway. In fact, if my dim memory of this is correct, I think there's a part early in the game where you rope up to a glass ceiling or something, and then it enters a cutscene where Garrett's climbing on top of it using a grappling hook, because they didn't bother to change that.
I really recommend checking out Dishonored, it was made with some of the original devs of Thief. In my mind these games basically exist in the same universe, just in different countries/islands. (There's a small vague hint in Daud's and Corvo's (main characters of Dishonored) past that could be tied into Thief)
DeleteI own that, thanks to Amazon shovelling free games into my GOG account. I'll get around to playing it eventually, though it's probably a bit much for my aging laptop at this point.
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