CloudOJD on 12/8/2013 at 00:04
Quote Posted by Subjective Effect
Would you rather they made a hardcore Thief game that is a great Thief game but which loses them money?
As opposed to making a terrible Thief game but make loads of money, which only encourages what they're doing?
Honestly? Yes, yes I would.
SubJeff on 12/8/2013 at 00:26
Quote Posted by Esme
EM could have produced a hardcore Thief game with significantly less investment within a couple of years of starting,
TDM pretty much did this exact thing with no investment and a very small dev team.
No, TDM made an engine, not a game. They go to great lengths to make this clear. I know, I did a little bit of work with them.
They haven't:
Paid for an engine license.
Paid for art.
Paid for music.
Paid for voice actors.
Paid for models.
Paid for programming.
Paid for any marketing.
Paid any writers.
Paid any level designers.
Paid for media distribution.
Done a cross platform console and PC development.
Don't get me wrong - what the TDM team have done is incredible. But it's not a commercial development. No one got paid for that, company profits aren't affected by it.
EM have possibly made many mistakes during this development and the final thing with the contextual movement it among the stupidest things I've seen or heard of in gaming. But you can't compare the game to mod.
Quote:
As opposed to making a terrible Thief game but make loads of money, which only encourages what they're doing?
Honestly? Yes, yes I would.
But this would discourage other developers from making interesting niche products.
Besides that, wishing they'd make a game you like but which puts them out of business is the worst entitlement nonsense there is.
CloudOJD on 12/8/2013 at 01:11
Quote Posted by Subjective Effect
But this would discourage other developers from making interesting niche products.
Besides that, wishing they'd make a game you like but which puts them out of business is the worst entitlement nonsense there is.
And the opposite would encourage developers to make bad products. See what I mean?
And well, of course I am going to wish for a game I like. As far as I know, there are no people who wish for games they do not want. In an ideal world, I want both the game to be good and for the developers to prosper, but if I can only pick one, I'd pick my own enjoyment over theirs.
If they made a terrible game but earned a lot of money, I would be at loss. If they made a great game but lost money, they would be at loss. Why would I want to pick them over me?
Azaran on 12/8/2013 at 01:19
If Thief 4 ends up being a commercial success, that's not a good thing. Not because I want them to fail, but because it sends a very bad message to the gaming industry, i.e. you can do whatever you want with whatever game franchise, and people will still buy it regardless. It means established fanbases will be more and more pushed aside, because why bother making a good game and pleasing the fans, when you'll make money either way?
SubJeff on 12/8/2013 at 01:42
I doubt it will at this point.
The preview chat is bad, there are so many things people don't like. EM are coming out with nonsense excuses and the game journalists are seeing it for the nonsense it is.
I also wish they'd make a good game, but I'm not going to wish them financial ruin over a game.
Dia on 12/8/2013 at 02:10
Quote Posted by Subjective Effect
Would you rather they made a hardcore Thief game that is a great Thief game but which loses them money?
Yes.
Esme on 12/8/2013 at 11:39
Quote Posted by Subjective Effect
Don't get me wrong - what the TDM team have done is incredible. But it's not a commercial development. No one got paid for that, company profits aren't affected by it.
EM have possibly made many mistakes during this development and the final thing with the contextual movement it among the stupidest things I've seen or heard of in gaming. But you can't compare the game to mod...
Sorry but I'm going to briefly persist with this illegitimate comparison.
TDM set the bar, EM could have hired what members of the TDM team they could find and were available, given them the commercial toolkit and and a small dev team and said "have at it" and got a better product than we're seeing now in a much shorter time.
Thief 4 hasn't got to anywhere near the same level as TDM, except perhaps graphically, with 4+ years of development, commercial investment out the arse and a development team many times the size there should be more positive things to say for it than 'it looks pretty'.
OK, I accept a lot of the visuals come from the engine in TDM they didn't design every brick and stone, but the unreal engine has been around a while too, there are libraries of objects for unreal as well, so EM making something pretty isn't that big an achievement.
I don't care if no one got paid for it and no one profits, TDM is currently streets ahead of Thief 4 in my opinion, I don't care that it's just a mod, I don't care that it's just a platform for people to build on, that basic platform beats the commercial game effort hands down.
And the reason for this is because the TDM team didn't try and turn the game into something that it's not, they kept the core elements and built on them, they didn't throw the baby out with the bathwater doing some wildly imagined re boot, they didn't spend ages deliberating or introducing non essential elements.
However, you say I can't make the comparison, so fine, drop all that in the bin, pretend I never said it and I'll make my point in a different way.
EM, in my opinion, made a fundamental mistake by trying to turn a mechanics and geometry driven, niche game where the player had pretty much full control to explore the story in their own way and put the narrative together themselves, into a graphically rich, scripted event driven, player on rails, mass appeal movie that gets nudged from lavish scene to lavish scene with occasional input from the user while the story is spoon fed to them lest they get confused.
Something like this tomb raider ( beware it's quite long )
[video=youtube;HQ4OkyvfFBw]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HQ4OkyvfFBw[/video]
Now that tomb raider looks very pretty, it's graphically stunning, it would be a really nice movie, but that's supposed to be a gameplay video from a fan who loves the game and I'm not seeing much in the way of gameplay.
I'm seeing lots of handholding, I'm seeing lots of "go here and press this", OK it's the intro and they are teaching the player what the controls do and where the visual cues are.
But I'm also seeing lots of extremely restricted choices in where the player can go and what they can do presumably because it wouldn't do to hurt the narrative.
Now OK that's a different game, it's not Thief and the design choices probably work in that game because that's what the target market expects, I know I'll never buy it though because I absolutely hate that sort of game, I want to play, I don't want to watch, I have a DVD collection for that.
It's basically a longer version of the glowing footsteps in TDS, I wanted to explore the exterior before going into the inn, but deviate from the path and you fail so no exploration, bad decision imo.
But this is the direction EM chose for Thief and for me this was the first mistake, since then every decision they've made has pushed them further down the cinematic road and compounded that mistake and made it harder to undo.
You can still have a story, even if you allow the player to play some sections out of order and put it together in their head, it's very difficult to show a movie like that though and that's what they seem to be making.
I still maintain they could have produced a mechanics and geometry driven niche game in half the time and at a much cheaper cost if they'd dropped the cinematic story approach, cost of voice actors/mocap/scripting/yaddayadda notwithstanding and that niche game wouldn't have had to sell as many units to recoup the investment.
But now they've spent too much time and money and cannot afford for this approach to fail, they cannot change to the mechanics driven approach as a niche game wouldn't recoup their investment to date, they have what I consider a poisoned chalice that they now can't put down.
I sincerely hope that the game they make is a success and gets them their money back, as there is then a faint possibility they might go mechanics driven for the next Thief game they release, but my personal thoughts are that this is going to kill the franchise.
I don't see this version of Thief as being sufficiently different to all the other generic, visual effects driven, scripted movie with occasional button push type games that are already out there to sell well, certainly not well enough to justify a sequel.
And if I'm wrong and it romps off the shelves, then the sequel will be more of the same interactive movie crap that I hate because the sales will justify this approach.
Either way the franchise will be dead for me.
Chade on 12/8/2013 at 12:43
It's not a case of setting bars, it's a question of what the game's goals are. TDM is made specifically for us. I would be extremely surprised if a game not made with us as the sole audience is as "good"... for us.
As for wanting EM to spend millions of dollars making a game just for you, well... put up the money, and you can wish for whatever you like.
Esme on 12/8/2013 at 13:01
I never said I wanted a game just for me, I said I don't like nudge along movies and I won't buy them, I'll cheerfully buy a game I can play rather than watch though
