Thief at VGX 15 minutes video

386DX on 29/12/2013 at 16:44

You are absolutely right. They prioritized the visual aspect over the gameplay and the PR machine hyped it up to being "immersive" and everything that they were unable to blend between the two or didn't bother to implement was immersion breaking.

Regarding Garrett, they had Stephen Russell on board but I think they axed him once it came down that this was to be a reboot. That was the start of a domino effect of really bad design and game world decisions.

Nuth on 29/12/2013 at 17:46

Quote Posted by 386DX

I think the first domino was them trying to turn Thief into a 3rd-person game with a their idea of a cool action figure hero Garrett in the beginning.

Llama on 29/12/2013 at 20:25

Quote Posted by Nuth

I think the first domino was them trying to turn Thief into a 3rd-person game with a their idea of a cool action figure hero Garrett in the beginning.

I'll say it again. They made Garrett into Batman.

Starker on 30/12/2013 at 02:57

Quote Posted by Llama

I'll say it again. They made Garrett into Batman.

The Crow, more like.

garryengly on 30/12/2013 at 04:10

Quote Posted by Brethren

I think b1skit was the one who originally threw out the "bunnyhopping" thing - and I think anyone who's read his posts realizes he doesn't understand how Thief works at all.

Speaking of b1skit, isn't it a bit strange that EM, with a major release less than 2 months away, has not hired a new community manager yet? Wouldn't this be prime time for marketing and promoting the game? EM continues to confound me. They've completely let up on the podcasts and Q&As too. Maybe at this point they've just decided they're strictly aiming for new sales and aren't going to concern themselves with the existing Thief community anymore.

Or maybe a a delayed release date is forthcoming. Seems like for a while there, there were Thief ads on all the major gaming sites, but I haven't seen one in a while.

And another strange thing I noticed about b1skit is that on his linkedin page it says "I'm currently seeking employment in the Vancouver, BC area." (http://ca.linkedin.com/in/adambadke)

I wonder why someone would quit a job and just move to the other side of the country without have a job waiting for you, especially considering he is a foreigner so I assume he doesn't receive unemployment benefits if he gets stuck. I think EM fired him from his job and just swept it under the carpet.

Renault on 30/12/2013 at 05:20

EM said he left for personal reasons, so it would make sense if he moved back closer to home and is simply looking for a job there. I have no idea where he's originally from, I'm just saying it's a possibility. The 3 jobs he held before EM were all in Vancouver, so it's obvious he's returning to familiar territory in some way.

New Horizon on 30/12/2013 at 14:53

Quote Posted by Brethren

I think he's Australian, so Vancouver isn't going to be much closer to home for him. :)

Chade on 31/12/2013 at 11:32

Quote Posted by Platinumoxicity

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.

I would be very surprised if there are a set number of completely hardcoded and inflexible jump animations. How is that going to work anyway? Given two parallell walls, can you only jump at certain angles between them? Of course not, it's ridiculous.

We know that contextual movement is calculated from the level geometry. It would be a big waste to do all that work to dynamically generate those possibilities, and then delete 99% of them in order to ensure that you can navigate the world with a handfull of static animations. There's no reason to believe they've done this, and I'd bet that if they had the effects would have been catastrophic enough that we would have heard about it.

Platinumoxicity on 1/1/2014 at 17:47

Quote Posted by Chade

Can you back that up with something? I'm pretty sure that the only reason to have fully contextual movement is because of those movements being static sequences that can only work in very specific, standardized situations. The animations would de-synch in arbitrary situations because there is no system of dynamic adaptive blending. Even the "Garrett feels stuff" -hands that EM kept talking about is not dynamic. Garrett grabs walls when you enter "cover mode" -not when the player character is in sufficient close proximity to wall colliders in the level.

Contexual movement being "calculated from geometry" makes no sense. Why not have free movement if your game is capable of adjusting the movement animations dynamically based on arbitrary geometry? I think the most logical explanation is that Thief 4 is incapable of doing that, so any jumps or other environment interactions are standardized to work with a limited amount of static sequences. Just like how the level design in the entire Assassin's Creed series is built out of static nodes that cause the player character to lock onto specific animation modes. Instead of there being a complex system to make the character move realistically by analyzing the geometry, there's a simple proximity-based system that sacrifices control freedom to make more limited animations match a standardized set of level design details that are repeated.

In other words, Thief 4 will only have gaps to jump over that are as long as the animations for the jumps, and only ladders that are as long as the number of climbing animation loops it takes to climb the ladder. And ropes arrows can only be attached to hot-spots, because that's the easiest way to ensure standardized rope lengths, that match with standardized static climbing animations. In fact, they are not ropes at all. They are the same standard-length ladders with a single way on at the bottom, and a single way off at the top, as the regular ladders in the game are. The player is only given an illusion of increased interactivity.

Springheel on 2/1/2014 at 15:56

Quote:

Given two parallell walls, can you only jump at certain angles between them? Of course not, it's ridiculous.

Are you sure about that? What makes it different from opening doors or takedowns, where an animation takes over as soon as you press the button? You press the awesome button, the computer decides if you can jump there and the corresponding spot you can jump to, and the animation takes over.