The Shroud on 4/11/2013 at 21:55

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I agree that there should be a game mode without a HUD. Maybe that should be one of the defining traits of an Expert mode. I mean, if a player really is an expert at sneaking, then they should be able to judge suitable hiding places without a light gem telling them how visible they are.


It's true that we had been playing TDP and TMA for years by the time we played with the light gem disabled. However, I believe the instincts that we drew upon to determine good hiding places (even during our very first play-throughs of TDP and TMA) were actually relatively basic -- as basic as the very first lesson learned in the training mission of TDP: "Stay in the shadows, avoid the light." Once a player grasps that simple tactic, sneaking around isn't really that much guesswork, it's intuitive. They already know they're going to be invisible if they hide in a dark enough shadow, even if it's in a place they've never seen before. If that simple principle weren't the case, then there would be no such thing as "getting better" at the game as the player progresses through it; every single mission would be reduced to trial and error. The fact of the matter is, the instincts upon which a player relies to determine good hiding places in Thief are almost entirely developed during the earliest stages of the gameplay.


Wow, one minute we're having a respectful debate about the light gem, and the next, it's come to insults. Not exactly the best way to enter a discussion.


Sure it does. Haven't you ever sneaked past someone before? Or played hide and seek when you were a kid? Real life teaches through trial and error faster than any game ever can. In one single attempt to hide from someone in real life, you can learn more from your mistakes and your successes than you can learn from multiple attempts in a game. A game is limited to a dialed down, skewed simulation of reality, wherein the skills one can learn are biased by the artificial environment in which they're acquired.

Your ability to absorb knowledge about effective sneaking and hiding methods in the real world is limited only by your talent for observation -- paying close attention to your surroundings and to the noise you make, watching the way others around you move, gauging their mannerisms and habits, noticing where their attention is drawn and why, perceiving minute patterns in their body language and predicting windows of opportunity to sneak past them. When you really get down to it, stealth is all about observation and information-gathering from one moment to the next, and applying that information in forming tactics to avoid notice. It does involve some guesswork, but that guesswork is informed and educated by your perceptive abilities. The more observant you are, the better equipped you are to conceal yourself.


I think Starker had the right idea with preserving the light gem for lower difficulty modes and disabling it for the highest difficulty mode. That way, there's a learning curve built into the game and players can choose to either start with the light gem's help and play without it when they're ready, or try it from the beginning with only their wits to guide them.

The Shroud on 4/11/2013 at 23:20

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Ah, when you said a "game mode" for the hardcore players, I thought you were referring to difficulty levels. My mistake. I think it should be tied to difficulty level though. But that's just my opinion.

The Shroud on 5/11/2013 at 20:34

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I think the degree of uncertainty about which hiding places are effective and which aren't without the light gem is being exaggerated. Even when I first played through TDP, I was able to tell where I'd be able to hide before I got there because during the course of the training mission and Lord Bafford's Manor, I'd seen how dark shadows needed to be in order to conceal me. After grasping that, the challenge throughout the rest of the game wasn't so much determining where I could hide (if the shadows were dark enough, I knew I'd be hidden if I went into them), but rather getting there without being seen or heard.

The light gem at that point was really somewhat unnecessary. The darkness of shadows in TDP and TMA can be gauged visually without much difficulty at all. There's just an initial learning process that spans maybe half of the first mission or less, and then it's straightforward from then on throughout the rest of the game. I think due to the fact that you and most other Thief players have only ever played with the light gem visible, you're presuming that the gem is much more essential to your ability to hide than it actually is. I think if you were to try playing without it, you'd discover that you actually know how to spot good hiding places on your own and know when you're visible and when you're not based on your surroundings.

It's really the player's ability to visually gauge light and shadow in an area before they select and move to a hiding spot that enables stealth, not the light gem confirming that they're hidden when they get there. Once the player knows how dark shadows need to be in order to conceal themselves from view, they can discern those types of shadows on sight, and not only can, but in fact do predict beforehand that they'll be invisible once they reach those areas. That is actually the essence of how stealth gameplay functions in Thief -- it's predictive at its very core. You may not realize that you're actually predicting where you'll be hidden whenever you move to a chosen hiding place in Thief, but that's exactly what you're doing. Basically, you've convinced yourself that you're depending on the light gem's feedback all the time, but in actuality, what you're depending on is your ability to visually recognize hiding places before you even enter them.

Starker on 5/11/2013 at 22:56

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@The Shroud

You are talking about hiding as if it was a binary thing (hidden/not hidden), but Thief is all about bringing you to the edge of detection and then keeping you there as much as possible. It's more about seeing how much you can get away with than about successful hiding.

The Shroud on 6/11/2013 at 01:56

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Well, that's true. Or at least, it's just as much about keeping you on the edge of detection as it is about successfully hiding.


While it's true that in Thief, your visibility is on a gradated scale rather than a binary "hidden/not hidden" state, the point I was making was that the player's visibility in shadows is directly proportional to the darkness of those shadows, and the player is capable of gauging that darkness visually. Therefore, simply looking at an area of shadow is enough for a player to predict how hidden they will be when standing or crouching in that area. It's not really a complex concept.

That intuitive relation between darkness of surroundings and level of visibility is what's really guiding the player whenever they attempt to conceal themselves in shadows. The light gem is only a confirmation after the player moves to an area of concealment that yes, they are in fact X degree invisible in whatever spot they've chosen to hide. But the player would already have determined that before deciding to move there in the first place. The moment the player understands that the darkness of shadows around them equals their degree of invisibility, the light gem becomes a redundant form of feedback.


And ZB, just because I may write more to back up my arguments than you care to read does not mean I do it just to hear my own voice. I can understand that you disagree with my viewpoint and you've lost interest in debating the subject, but that's no reason to toss rude comments.

EDIT: "Von Shroudenstein"? Really?