Esme on 28/12/2013 at 21:17
Personally I used it to pull AI out of position, if people want to use it for other reasons I don't have a problem with their choice, I'm certainly not going to sneer and deride that choice, my point is that taking away that choice is arbitrary and a poor design decision.
Renault on 29/12/2013 at 00:33
Quote Posted by Nuth
Lead level designer Daniel Winfield Schmidt tried to justify contextual controls because free-jumping is immersion breaking. He didn't say "bunnyhopping" but I wouldn't be surprised if that term was commonly used at EM to try to justify what they're doing.
“Jumping, bouncing up and down, kind of broke the immersion,” says Schmidt.
Another guy who doesn't really understand how Thief works. Whenever I hear him talk, or being quoted in an interview, I really wonder if he's ever even bothered to play the original games. Most of the things he says are just beyond stupid.
demagogue on 29/12/2013 at 02:57
Possibly in his defense, the way that's phrased makes it sound like to me they play-tested it and found that too many players in their target demographic were bunnyhopping out of sheer habit & probably getting frustrated they couldn't make progress. Then "immersion breaking" is a euphamism for "too many players were too dumb not to do it" for why jumping everywhere needed to go. I wouldn't be surprised if it's a story like that.
GodzillaX8 on 29/12/2013 at 05:49
There's nothing really lost by having contextual jumps unless there are things you aren't allowed to jump on/over.
Renault on 29/12/2013 at 06:08
That would be incorrect.
Renzatic on 29/12/2013 at 06:09
The best case scenario is that the contextual control setup ends up feeling like you're just able to mantle on everything without being able to jump directly. Here, the end result wouldn't be much different than oldschool Thief. It'd be a little more specific, but would still allow for a nearly equal amount of that freeform exploration we know and love.
The worst case scenario is that you're only able to mantle at a few select places, specifically put in for such by the level designer. Like you can only climb on these eyecatchingly blue crates, but regular crates are only there as static props that can't otherwise be interacted with. Or you can only climb walls with this really bright ivy texture laid over them. If you want to mantle up to a windowsill for a better vantage point, well TOO BAD! It doesn't have any ivy on it, so it's not meant to be climbed.
..this would kill the game for almost all of us here.
GodzillaX8 on 29/12/2013 at 06:22
Quote Posted by Brethren
That would be incorrect.
No, it wouldn't.
Renault on 29/12/2013 at 08:38
Quote Posted by GodzillaX8
There's nothing really lost by having contextual jumps unless there are things you aren't allowed to jump on/over.
You obviously don't get it, or haven't played the original games recently, or both. Just to name a few, here are some scenarios that we're probably not going to be allowed to do in the new version of Thief. Jumping...
-From one quiet surface to another, for instance carpet to carpet, or stone to stone, or jumping over a puddle (it just occurred to me that this is likely why the game doesn't have moss arrows).
-To distract a guard, by making a sound.
-To dodge an arrow.
-Up high enough to get to a ledge where you're in range to mantle.
-Up just to get a better view, such as seeing over a wall or fence.
-Down a flight of stairs or hill to quickly evade an AI.
-Jumping over an obstacle and ducking behind it to take cover (will the game allow you to do this with every object in the game? Unlikely).
-Off of a rope or chain, either to the ground or another ledge area.
That's just some quick brainstorming, I'm sure there are lots of other examples.
I just recently played Zelda Ocarina of Time, and the contextual jumping is really annoying, tbh. First, you just feel like you only have a partial control of your character. And second, there's no challenge in the jumps, because your character just does them automatically. It's like a script. It's the difference between the old games where you were allowed to do a jumping KO, and now just pressing X in New Thief to do an automatic takedown. The player is losing control of the avatar - even if it's only for a second or two, it's significant.
Aside from what's listed above, you just have to wonder why the jumping is contextual. What's the purpose? I can only think of one thing - to control exactly where the player can and cannot go. You're going to end up with a game full of specific pathways to travel, and a complete lack of freedom or ability for the player to freelance.
Chade on 29/12/2013 at 10:09
I would be very surprised if bunny-hopping was one of the reasons for contextual jumping. I think that's just PR: attempting to tar all the things you can no longer do as unnecesary.
EDIT: There are less intrusive ways to control where the player can't go than contextual jumping. Bog standard approaches include architecture, invisible walls at a pinch, sudden death if absolutely desperate, etc. Why would they introduce the whole system just to do something that every other game easily accomplishes? Automatically calculated contextual jumping doesn't even put the places the player can go directly under the designer's control anyway. At best it would make it easier to have an editor draw lines to show where the player can jump to, but you could do much the same thing with non-contextual jumping, except for player movement bugs ala the dark engine.
IMO it's an attempt to make it less likely that the player falls. (Although some of the impressions we've heard make it sound like it's quite easy to fall down, so I guess we'll see how that turns out in the final product ...)
Platinumoxicity on 29/12/2013 at 13:45
Quote Posted by Chade
Why would they introduce the whole system just to do something that every other game easily accomplishes?
Because of the prioritization of visuals over gameplay combined with laziness and/or incompetence. They want body awareness animations to always play perfectly, but they don't want to put any effort into dynamically blending free movement with matching animations. It's pretty hard to make animations dynamically match every type of level interaction that the player is capable of creating.
-But it's incredibly easy to make a few static interactions match a few static animations. You don't need to have jump animations interpolate between each other based on jump speed and length, when you can just have 3 different static animations for the only 3 jump lengths that the level design supports.
Just look at the peeking system. Same worst case scenario. Instead of there being dynamic interaction of Garrett's hands when using "lean" -keys, you "press X" to enter a static leaning mode. Gameplay freedom compromised for lazy implementation of higher visual quality. Eidos Montréal just wants to go the easiest route. A true innovator would compromise nothing about the old functioning system, while still being able to stylize it with modern graphics technology. Eidos Montréal are not innovators. They don't take things and make them better. They just do what they want the easiest way possible, which often results in something that looks cool, but is inferior to its earlier equivalents in every way other than visuals.
What's the clearest example of Eidos
Montréal's laziness you might ask? Why is it that Romano Orzari is playing Garrett instead of Stephen Russell? I'll give you a clue. He lives in
Montréal.