Chade on 20/6/2013 at 21:15
Yes, I thought Roy's quote about tech limitations was a little surprising. Perhaps this does explain it.
Nervous levels rising.
I'm probably worried more about the apparent late change in strategy rather then the news itself. I'm sure you could do a perfectly good thief game on current gen hardware if you started out knowing you were going to target it. But hacking support for older hardware after already working on the game for years sounds painful. Plus it looks like either Square or EM are flailing around a little bit, which is probably a sign of something bad.
SuicideMachine on 20/6/2013 at 21:48
Quote Posted by Springheel
Seems like one of these two must be true, doesn't it, given that the majority of the game and levels are supposed to already be done?
1. T4 has been designed to use the power of next gen consoles, and will need to be trimmed somehow in order to work on current tech (flashbacks to TDS levels being cut in half).
2. T4 was always designed for current gen tech, and all the spouting about "next gen" was marketing crap.
Actually, from my point of view - it's different.
Unless something has changed with our lead level designer - the levels were designed the way they were designed. Yes, NuThief looks graphically fairly impressive, but I also realized quite quickly that what it was showing could have been very easily scaled for current gen. Simplify shadows, convert parallax mapping into simple bump maps, simplify lighting, scale textures... and that's almost it. Well, it may actually require some simplifications in AI, but from what we've heard with AI being turned off when a player wasn't in the area - it may have already been done:cheeky:
Either way - no, I don't believe they're going to make levels smaller because of current gen, since we've seen some huge and fairly complex levels at this gen already - some of which were indeed using UE3 (Batman Arkham City?). And if the levels turn out to be really small and simple, I'm not going to blame current gen for that - I will throw all the blame at Eidos Montreal... they've shown more than enough, for me, that they don't really get what Thief was all about, so if level design also fails - it's going to be yet another thing on a list screwed up by them... I'm not going to give them an excuse that it's because current gens - no way.
Infinitron on 20/6/2013 at 21:51
I think the levels may be fairly large, as they often were in DX:HR, but the individual rooms within said levels will be more cramped, or "dense" as the Sneaky Bastards article described it.
ZylonBane on 20/6/2013 at 22:29
Oh joy, the return of "smaller, deeper maps".
Vae on 20/6/2013 at 22:33
Lovely.
Specter on 21/6/2013 at 03:20
Quote Posted by ZylonBane
Oh joy, the return of "smaller, deeper maps".
Good memory.
Queue on 22/6/2013 at 17:40
So does this mean that they will be reworking the current game (that was to be for next-gen consoles) to make it compatible with 360/PS3/PC?
If they are still trying to hit their initial release-date target.... Well how the hell did they suddenly find the time and ambition to rework the thing when the next-gen version of the game was barely functioning just a few weeks ago?
Renault on 23/6/2013 at 05:56
DXHR and Dishonored are on current gen, and they didn't suffer from smaller levels. Plus, look at Skyrim, Bioshock Infinite, Arkham City, AC, etc - they found ways to provide large environments, so EM doesn't really have any excuses in this area.
(Granted, I haven't played all these games, but I've heard they have larger levels).
SubJeff on 23/6/2013 at 08:26
I wonder if the more intense lighting calculations will have an effect.
Dishonored has decent level sizes but they don't seem quite as big or as detailed as Thief levels.
Shinrazero on 23/6/2013 at 08:46
Quote Posted by Brethren
DXHR and Dishonored are on current gen, and they didn't suffer from smaller levels. Plus, look at Skyrim, Bioshock Infinite, Arkham City, AC, etc - they found ways to provide large environments, so EM doesn't really have any excuses in this area.
(Granted, I haven't played
all these games, but I've heard they have larger levels).
This raises a good point. Since Dishonored is the most similar title that compares to Thief, I can say the levels were pretty nice in size. Hell, skyrim or even morrowind on xbox had massive areas.
