Beleg Cúthalion on 21/8/2013 at 19:35

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You will be pleased to hear that the floating hands were tweaked quite a bit and don't disturb the field of view at all IMHO (even when just watching the game being played). This seems to be a case of fan criticism taken seriously but I don't know in how far they want/are able to change the contextual jumping issue (of which I know nothing really new).

Beleg Cúthalion on 21/8/2013 at 19:49

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We were there today. Nice presentation, nice people and I can probably give some feedback later when I feel less tired. There are no big surprises, though.

DrK on 21/8/2013 at 19:52

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Were you able to play the game ?

Beleg Cúthalion on 22/8/2013 at 07:46

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Yes, we could only see the cinematic show with a slightly new/improved recorded playthrough of the Northcrest Manor mission. I believe the door handle animations were tweaked, too, it looked more natural IIRC. There was no QTE escape scene either, although it might have ended beforehand. There was a section with carpet patches on tiles, so I did wonder about the jumping and how silent the swoop movement was but the whole convention hall was so loud that you couldn't hear details like the sound of footsteps. Speaking of details, I believe at some point the player "sold" something (loot?) to fill up the focus meter since it didn't re-charge automatically when stealing IIRC. Obviously context-sensitive actions cannot be judged by watching the movie, but I only remember one instance of a "hold-XY-for-takedown" prompt, there was nothing like that for both mantling or jumping down if I'm not mistaken.

Afterwards we had long and nice chats with SE/EM employees, including a presentation of the narrative by Steven Gallagher who quite passionately told us the story that led up to the new Thief game. I think it is nicely fleshed-out and fits the new (maybe even the old) universe but I won't go into the story itself, first because it'd be a plain spoiler and second because I think there might be something official about it coming out later, but I'm not sure if I heard that correctly. A strong narrative seems to be one of the core elements of the new game, although I got the impression that the element of experiencing the story on your own might be less important than in the previous games (and in general this do-things-on-your-own vs. we-prepared-it-for-you conflict in all areas of the game). It made me wonder whether or not people really got the story on their first play-throughs of the original games and if my perception of how this can be balanced (what I thought worked well in the first games) is indeed correct. Catering for the player seems to be what games today have to do in order to be economically reasonable.

There are a lot of elements which can probably only be judged correctly once the game is out. The EM guys seem to be as enthusiastic about their baby as we were told already. This might explain the partly awkward initial PR campaign with some later adjustments/revisions and their careful reading of the forums (including this one). There is hope that they will listen to our ideas (as long as they're presented in reasonable manner and not plain hatred!) in areas that are not affected by technical limitations and the market. We'll see. :erg:

henke on 22/8/2013 at 08:06

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Thanks for the write-up Beleg.