legoman on 16/7/2013 at 13:57
Quote Posted by Starker
We are talking about core gameplay here, not deviations. The combat in Thief is aligned with the slow stealth gameplay which in turn is well suited for immersion, because you are taking your time creeping around and not speeding through the levels. The slow draw speed of the bow forces you to make every shot count, the slow movement speed discourages you from rushing into things etc.
When I talk about the pace of the New Thief, I don't mean just the movement speed. I'm talking about things like the dashing, the time it takes to get a shot off with the bow and combat speed.
This is why so many stealth action titles fail -- they try to provide two diametrically opposed experiences: for both the players who like waiting as well as for those who don't. The end result is that people who like the action will find the stealth boring and the stealth players won't care for the action sequences.
Whilst I agree slow gameplay is suited to immersion, its not exclusive to it. Dishonored employed a very quick stealth mechanic and yet in my opinion was just as immersive as Thief, even if the story wasn't as great and the character wasn't as fleshed out.
I'm on the fence with the dash mechanic, whilst yes it does appear remove the challenge from the stealth. It may open up interesting gameplay in guard heavy environments (I'm thinking finding the gaps in frequent tight patrols for which the regular movement is too slow).
SLIEZER on 16/7/2013 at 15:45
Unless we ask questions in a clear structured manner, b1zkit won't share anything with us, of course he wont get baited into verbal fights like this.
I'd rather want official T4 information than a spiraling thread of venting anger, even if the official information is no doubt sugar-coated.
nickie on 16/7/2013 at 16:41
My understanding is that B1skit won't be answering any more questions here regardless of how clearly structured they are or not.
Renault on 16/7/2013 at 16:48
Was it just B1skit, or are the others (Ashpolt, Spyhopping, etc.) not answering questions as well? Haven't see them around much since the weekend of the 4th.
nickie on 16/7/2013 at 16:58
I don't know. Ashpolt was visiting a few minutes ago, I noticed. I think spyhopping is playing chess.
Edit. I understood B1skit wasn't going to answer any more questions from his post back on Page 1, I think.
Chade on 16/7/2013 at 22:25
EDIT: Damn, didn't realize what a big post this was. Sorry ...
Quote Posted by Starker
There are multiple quotes that confirm LGS wanted this to be a stealth game above all else, not the least of which is that they discarded metagame elements and "a form of player extra-sensory perception" in favour of a more stealth-centered experience.
Off topic interjection: are you talking about the manifesto? I don't
think they are specifically talking about stealth there. You're right about the metagame elements. But I wouldn't be surprised if that manifesto applied to all stages of development, certainly including dark camelot, and possibly going all the way back to better red then undead. Just my speculation.
Quote Posted by Starker
Now, it may be that all these elements work very well together, but even if that's the case, it will be a very different game from the Thief that we know ... The question remains, is Thief something that has mass appeal for a wide audience or did it just happen to be the pasta sauce that nobody was providing? I would think it is the latter.
Well, it hinges on what you call "very different". I wouldn't call what I've seen "very different". There are certainly elements that are extremely different, but they tend to be elements around the edges of the core experience. The overall experience looks pretty similar to me, albeit more different then thief 1 to 3 (but thief 2 was basically a glorified mission pack, so that's not saying much.).
As for thief being a potential mass market success, well ... it used to be a mass market success, and stealth in general had mass market potential only a few years ago. I guess thief 4 will give us some indication of whether that's still true. I believe they can do it, but I'm always optimistic!
Quote Posted by Starker
Sure, they might have thought about making an RPG in the same universe in addition to the stealth titles, but what does that prove exactly?
No more and no less then it says on the tin. Thief was a success, LGS would have loved to expand it, and would have loved to see it be a mainstream hit.
Quote Posted by Starker
The question isn't whether Thief was commercially successful or not, but whether their goal was to sell as many copies as possible. If they had pursued a wider audience, would they have tried to make a game with a virtually unknown style of gameplay? What they did was truly something crazy and experimental. They didn't play it safe.
LGS certainly didn't play things safe, that's for sure. They had the skills to do a damn fine doom clone at any time, and chose not to. At the same time, I think your analysis is a bit shallow and ignores LGS's and thief's history.
The original conception of better red then undead and dark camelot was pretty clearly derived from LGS's UU lineage. (Much like SS: taking UU and putting it in a different setting and trying to figure out how to do NPC's better.) Of those games, UU1&2 were big commercial successes, while I believe SS was a small loss. Overall, though, this line of games was pretty successful for LGS, so it's no surprise that they continued it. LGS also continued in other profitable genres like flight simulators. (Presumably they would have done another John Madden game as well if EA would have let them!)
The move towards stealth didn't happen because someone had a shining vision in their shower and inspired the company to follow him to a genre where no one had gone before. It happened over many iterations of their first person sword fighting concept, as they slowly realized that sneaking around was more fun then the combat. They didn't even have shadows at that stage, stealth was just running quickly past a guard while his back was turned, but they were doing dark camelot and finding that the easiest missions to sell were infiltrating camelot and stealing things, and so over time they went in that direction, until eventually they put their foot down and just focused exclusively on that concept.
But who knows, it's interesting to imagine alternative histories where the NPC stuff worked better. If they hadn't been struggling to get the AI factions working, would we have thief now? Would we even have the stealth genre that we recognize today?
I found this interview with Doug Church very interesting. Here's some excerpts from the section talking about thief and it's development history (and there's
tons of other interesting info in the interview: (
http://flylib.com/books/en/4.479.1.135/1/) source):
Quote Posted by Doug Church
How did the Thief project originate?We had a bunch of high-concept ideas about game design which, in practice, very few of actually happened in the final game. We had a lot of thoughts about having different factions. As I discussed, we felt that character and conversation were something that was hard, to put it mildly. So we had conceived of factions of people in the world being a better foil for the player because you can interact with a group in a slightly more iconic and abstract way than you can interact with an individual. ...
The other big idea was that these same factions would help you in off-screen ways, because we didn t want to have actual teammates. We didn t want to write [
team-mate] AI ... we set up a couple of game worlds where there were a lot of different factions and you were primarily interacting with them and they had lots of opportunities to help. You d see the evidence of their help, such as an arrow would come shooting in from off screen or something, ... most of the designs we were trying to do were a little more interesting, a little less standard.
You mean in terms of the game fiction?In terms of fiction and structure. We had a post-ColdWar zombies proposal called Better Red than Undead in which you were fighting off zombies in a communist Cold War era ... so you had to pick which groups you were going to ally with and go against while everyone had this common enemy of the zombies ...
And then we had this reverse-Arthurian fiction ... Actually our marketing department wasn t really into that one. Not too surprising, I suppose ...
But they were all still immersive simulation, first-person games?[
This is the most relevant paragraph]
Yeah, yeah. Once again, in Better Red there were all these spy groups and in Dark Camelot there were all these different groups of outcasts you could work with to try to get into Camelot and mess things up. But as we started worked on some of the Dark Camelot stuff, A, we were having infinite challenges trying to convince anyone it was marketable, and B, the missions that we had the best definition on and the best detail on were all the breaking into Camelot, meeting up with someone, getting a clue, stealing something, whatever. As we did more work in that direction, and those continued to be the missions that we could explain best to other people, it just started going that way. With the faction thing we never got whatever we needed to actually make time to make a prototype. The thing about that is it requires a lot of play mechanics until it starts working, whereas the basic stealth model was something you could kind of get the basic idea of by having the guard looking the other way and you going past pretty quickly. So Paul had been pushing for a while that the thief side of it was the really interesting part and why not you just do a thief game. And as things got more chaotic and more stuff was going on and we were having more issues with how to market the stuff, we just kept focusing in on the thief part. ...
...
It s interesting to me that you considered Thief the more bankable game concept, even though its game mechanics were in a lot of ways totally new and original.I think it was more that we believed in it. I mean, Eidos never really believed in it and until the end told us to put more monsters in the levels and have more fighting and exploring and less stealth and I m not sure there was ever a point they got it ...
Yet they still funded it...Certainly ... I think they at least had OK, we re selling this anti-hero cynical thief guy, maybe we can do that, in a way that selling reverse Camelot or whatever was just not appealing to anyone.
Starker on 17/7/2013 at 00:01
Quote Posted by Chade
Off topic interjection: are you talking about the manifesto?
Nope, I was talking about Leonard's postmortem.
Quote Posted by Chade
Well, it hinges on what you call "very different". I wouldn't call what I've seen "very different". There are certainly elements that are extremely different, but they tend to be elements around the edges of the core experience. The overall experience looks pretty similar to me, albeit more different then thief 1 to 3 (but thief 2 was basically a glorified mission pack, so that's not saying much.).
For me, New Thief seems like a travesty of a Thief game. I would never have believed it, but actually looks worse than TDS from a Thief game standpoint.
Quote Posted by Chade
As for thief being a potential mass market success, well ... it used to be a mass market success, and stealth in general had mass market potential only a few years ago. I guess thief 4 will give us some indication of whether that's still true. I believe they can do it, but I'm always optimistic!
Well, I for one don't believe Thief has universal appeal. I think Thief is a niche title like Dark Souls that has a sizable but limited audience, and that it will never support the big bloated AAA budgets required for a massive hit. And Thief wasn't a massive hit nor regarded as such in the past: they were moderately successful titles.
Quote Posted by Chade
At the same time, I think your analysis is a bit shallow and ignores LGS's and thief's history.
I didn't focus on LGS's and Thief's history, but I didn't ignore it either. It's just that it wasn't relevant to the point I was making -- that the making of Thief was an incredibly focused effort and that they deliberately discarded all the extra stuff that sound a lot like the things that EM is putting in. Besides, the postmortem touched on quite a bit of that stuff, so I just didn't think it was necessary to bring it up here.
Chade on 17/7/2013 at 00:59
Quote Posted by Starker
Well, I for one don't believe Thief has universal appeal. I think Thief is a niche title like Dark Souls that has a sizable but limited audience, and that it will never support the big bloated AAA budgets required for a massive hit. And Thief wasn't a massive hit nor regarded as such in the past: they were moderately successful titles.
Thief certainly wasn't a massive hit along the lines of ridiculously popular games such as Baldur's Gate, Starcraft, or Half-Life ... but it was still a big hit. Thief 1 sold 2 million units by 2000 according to wikipedia.
As for Dark Souls, wikipedia says: "In April 2013, From Software announced Dark Souls had sold more than 2.3 million copies.[9] The PC version was the second most played Games for Windows Live title in 2012".
If those two games don't count as big hits to you, you have a much stricter criteria for counting a game a big hit then I do.
Quote Posted by Starker
I didn't focus on LGS's and Thief's history, but I didn't ignore it either. It's just that it wasn't relevant to the point I was making -- that the making of Thief was an incredibly focused effort and that they deliberately discarded all the extra stuff that sound a lot like the things that EM is putting in. Besides, the postmortem touched on quite a bit of that stuff, so I just didn't think it was necessary to bring it up here.
Hrmm, you seemed to say a bit more then that, which is what I was responding to. But ok. As far as what LGS discarded, I think the comparison is a bit off.
LGS started from a game that wasn't a stealth game at all, in fact, with no clear idea of what the game was. They were experimenting with all sorts of stuff that has nothing to do with stealth gameplay. So when they decided to focus on stealth, naturally there was a lot of completely irrelevant stuff to remove.
Whereas EM are starting with stealth as a starting point, and then trying to figure out how to make that work in today's market. And I'll bet that what they end up with will still be vastly more focused then what LGS had circa dark camelot.
I don't mean to justify everything EM has added. But I don't think the comparison to LGS is a good argument against it. The two studios really are in completely different situations.
Starker on 17/7/2013 at 01:06
Quote Posted by Chade
Thief certainly wasn't a massive hit along the lines of ridiculously popular games such as Baldur's Gate, Starcraft, or Half-Life ... but it was still a big hit. Thief 1 sold 2 million units by 2000 according to wikipedia.
Thief 1 sold 500k units by 2000 (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thief:_The_Dark_Project#Sales) according to Wikipedia.
I've seen a lot of numbers thrown around but very few of them have sources and most of them are from magazines that based it on speculations.
Oh, and had Dark Souls had an AAA budget, 2 million sales would have been as disappointing as Tomb Raider and similar "failures". It was only a success because it was budgeted and marketed within its means to a pretty specific audience. They didn't just throw money at it to simulate every single rain drop and hair strand.
Chade on 17/7/2013 at 01:15
Yeah, I know. Sales numbers are very unreliable. It sucks. The 2 million figure is given in the third paragraph of that very same article.
EDIT: And I should say, I would still call 500k a hit back in 1998.
