The Shroud on 11/10/2013 at 23:09
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SR: We’ve seen players who don’t even bother to read anything they find. We have to make sure the game is fun for them, too. So, it’s a big challenge to add enough layers of exposition to not penalize anyone who wants to skip over that kind of stuff.
This is an example of what's wrong with both the modern gaming industry as a whole and with the vast majority of younger gamers (i.e. gamers who have never known anything beyond the types of games currently being produced). From a business perspective, EM's approach to Thief makes sense on the one hand -- they have to appeal to the widest possible market in order to turn a profit on this game. That facet of the problem is unavoidable, unfortunately. On the other hand, the consequence of that mentality -- letting the market be the primary influence in shaping the design of the product -- is that it
adds to the greater problem of games' declining standards by forming a cyclic devolution of both the quality of games and the standard of gamers' expectations for future games. Because what EM fails to realize is that game
developers also shape the
market every bit as much as the market shapes game development.
If games like TDP and TMA (with modern graphics) were the general standard of game quality today, the vast majority of gamers would expect and demand that standard from game developers -- and in turn, game developers would be incentivized to continue producing games with that level of quality and depth. So the market shapes the producer while the producer shapes the market, and the cycle goes on indefinitely. But in order to
reach that standard, some developer somewhere has to do something incredibly bold and risky -- they have to go
against the current market's grain,
against what the majority of gamers expect, and produce something that's
better than the market's standards and expectations. That is where truly inspired and innovative creations like the Thief franchise come from. Passion and guts overriding safe business practice and appealing to the widest market. LGS paid the ultimate price for that boldness -- but in so doing, they elevated our standards and expectations for what games can be and ought to be. The fact that we are still here as a thriving community of passionate fans today after 15 years demonstrates the long-term success of that kind of approach to game design.
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SG: I’ve said in other interviews that our Thief has a new story, a new Garrett, and so on. The old Thief games have that great history and legacy, but the more you’ll play our game, the more you’ll hear words you’ve never heard before. We have a sort of brand new lexicon for the game, as it were. As for taffer, you may or may not hear it. Maybe it exists in this world and maybe not. There’s an entirely new vocabulary at work.
This pervasive theme of "new, new, new!" really irks me. Newness for its own sake rather than for the sake of true improvement. New things
can be better than the old -- but when they're better, it's not because they're
new, it's because the old was imperfect and someone came up with a way to improve them. That's why graphics are better these days than they were back in '98. Technology has improved on that basis of problem solving. But it's
just as crucial to
preserve what has been perfected in the past as it is to improve upon what's imperfect. Not recognizing when something is
right and when something
works is every bit as bad as getting stuck in the past by clinging to outdated and sub-standard elements and methods. Garrett doesn't need to be reimagined and reinvented. The old lexicon and vocabulary of Thief doesn't need to be replaced with something new.
Those aren't the things in Thief that need fixing. They are perfect just the way they are. What
can use a lot of improvement is the outdated graphics -- and EM has already accomplished that, I'll give them full credit for their gorgeous rendering of the City and its inhabitants. Why can't they stop there?
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Within the framework of Thief, do you think it’s better to let players benefit from a full freedom of exploration that includes mistakes and frustrating moments, or is it more effective to include slight nudges in the right direction for a safer but slightly restrictive experience?
SR: There’s definitely not a black or white answer to this.
There definitely
is a black and white answer to that. The answer is yes, it's better to let players benefit from a full freedom of exploration that includes mistakes and frustrating moments --
and it's effective to include slight nudges in the right direction, which are scaled by Difficulty Level. Restricting the player's experience is absolutely
not the way to go.
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SR: On one side, you have the kind of player who demands to jump or go anywhere and die if he or she chooses. Others get bored if they keep dying and don’t mind that kind of stuff being blocked off. What we’re trying to do here is impart subtle messages that certain jumps will kill you—if you still tell Garrett to jump, he’ll instead crouch near the edge and look down. You can still jump and potentially die if you miss an actual landing spot like a wooden beam. It’s a matter of tightening the visual language and showing where and where not to jump to signify that any deaths come from genuine player error and not a communication failure on our part.
Communicating where the player can and cannot survive a fall is not the same thing as
preventing a player from attempting it in the first place. Outside of some kind of bizarre defficiency with a player's depth-perception, I cannot possibly imagine how someone could fail to understand that they'll die if they fall from a really great height. Seriously, when has this ever been a problem? Why is it that
learning how to jump safely must now be replaced by removing the capacity for stupidity so that one only
can jump safely? You don't replace trial and error by guaranteeing the trial and denying the error.
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SG: I consider the matter pretty subjective. It’s kind of like the “are games art” debate—what might be defined as art for one person isn’t the same for someone else. It’s the same with what’s considered difficult by various kinds of players. There’s some things my best friend can’t do in games that I’m perfectly fine with, for instance.
Your friend can't execute a jump without plummeting to his death? You know, there is a pretty good solution in place in games like Thief for players who disagree on what's "too difficult" and what's "too easy." It's called Difficulty Level.
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SG: Every time I start a new game, I have these old gaming habits kicking in to urge me to find out whether I can fall off this edge or die this way and so on. After I figure it out, I have a pretty good feel of what kind of game I’ll be playing. That’s my personal way of doing things
Yes, well, that's kind of basic, isn't it? Even if a player doesn't intentionally fall off an edge or die in a "will this kill me?" experiment, it's mistakes like that that teach what one can and can't survive in a game. That is the natural way to learn
anything -- by observation.
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but still, falling off because you weren’t paying attention isn’t that much fun.
Then pay attention. Seriously, what game that is any fun at all doesn't require paying attention? It pretty much defeats the whole purpose of playing a game (or watching a movie or a tv show, or doing anything really) if one doesn't even pay enough attention to what they're doing to be able to enjoy the experience in the first place. Short attention spans can
not be the guiding influence in the design of a quality game. It's specifically short attention spans and the entertainment world's
submission to those short attention spans that are utterly ruining games, movies, and tv shows the most -- and in so doing, conditioning players and audiences to accept and expect more of the same. That is exactly the cycle of devolution that we have to break.
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I can see why it’s empowering for some people, though. It’s sort of a Dark Souls effect where movement and combat veterans clearly stand out from the rest.
Combat veterans are unlikely to stand out much in a game like Thief -- that is, if it's done right. But what combat, movement, and stealth all have in common in terms of the method by which they are learned, is trial and error -- just like anything else.
You cannot remove trial and error from the learning process of a game, any more than you can do away with it in real life. It is vital to the experience of interacting with the game's environment, and that freedom to experience -- to choose one action or another, to experiment and take risks, to succeed or fail --
that is what's empowering.
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SR: If we decided to backpedal and add in “taffer” because a bunch of people wanted it, we’d get another complaint the next day from someone else saying, “Why stay stuck in the past?”
And the answer to that complaint would be, "Because the past got it right."
