Infinitron on 28/4/2013 at 14:12
Quote Posted by heywood
I don't see the problem with bringing Thief to a wider audience.
Famous last words of many a genre.
The mass market is the death of the niche. When they make a game for everybody, they're not making it for
you.
This is something that CRPG fans know very well. See you on Kickstarter!
Starker on 28/4/2013 at 14:20
Quote Posted by heywood
I don't see the problem with bringing Thief to a wider audience. If we want more Thief and/or Thief-like stealth games to be made, the fan base needs to grow. And if we expect these games to have high production values, they have to sell in the millions. It's a simple consequence of the rising cost to make games.
I'd rather have a 3M title like T1-2 with passable graphics, unique visual style, great audio design, crappy combat, great stealth mechanics, and minimalistic cutscenes than a 60M flashy action packed title. In the end, the more you spend on visuals, the less game you get and there's no particular need to crank the visuals up to eleven for a Thief title.
Quote Posted by Infinitron
See you on Kickstarter!
If only.
Dia on 28/4/2013 at 15:06
Quote Posted by retractingblinds
There's an interesting article I read recently from a ways back. Lots of interesting stuff about the metal age's development. Lots of scary stuff. I don't like John Romero much any more.
(
http://www.salon.com/2000/06/20/dark_glass/)
Wow.
Great link! I knew there'd been problems in the making of TMA, but was relieved to read that the problems weren't among the actual devs, but with the parent and sibling companies (unlike what seems to be happening at EM with T4). Color me stupid (more like my memory is leaking out my left ear far too often as of late), but I don't think I knew that EI was LGS' parent company. That explains a lot.
Quote:
the truth that provoked such fury: This company was special, and its passing seemed to mark PC gaming's final decline. From here on out, the industry would only assemble endless variations on exhausted genres (pathetically timid when they were not totally appalling), design for game platforms permanently beholden to the whims of morbidly obsessed adolescents and fully acquiesce to corporate publishers willing to finance every expense save for the desire to innovate and even perhaps to inspire. Looking Glass' demise signals the gaming industry's descent, then, into its own metal age of decadence and unthinking greed. Pretty much what a lot of us have been saying all along. And in my opinion it's a very sad statement indeed that game studios have gone the way of corporate greed. Something tells me that aside from outstanding FMs, as well as TDM of course, created by our outstanding authors, we'll never see the likes of TDP and TMA again. Dishonored being the exception, even though it never claimed to be a Thief game. :(
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As Thief level designer Rich Carlson puts it, Looking Glass was “made up of artists and intellectuals who created role-playing and action games for people who like to think and use their imaginations.” LGS, with its 60 employees, for a little over 2 million and with an unforgiving deadline, managed to create a masterpiece that has become a classic. And how long has it taken EM to get this far; with how many employees on the T4 team and for how many millions spent already, yet all they've managed to come up with is a not-fully functional demo? Don't accuse me of comparing apples to oranges - I'm fully aware that the technology involved in creating video games today is a lot more complicated, but as far as I'm concerned our best bet to have a Thief game that was true to the core concepts/gameplay of TDP & TMA went out the front door with the first batch of EM T4 devs to leave that studio behind. They should've quit while they were ahead.
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Some exchanged farewell posts on the Looking Glass fan site, a community that boasts, by webmaster Saam Tariverdi's estimate, about 100,000 unique visitors a month. I think it is so very cool that TTLG earned an honorable mention in that article. Afterall, we've managed to keep the world of Thief alive for all these years, haven't we (major kudos to Saam & Digi, btw). At least we'll always have the FMs (honorable mention here to TDM, as well).
jay pettitt on 28/4/2013 at 15:35
Eidos wasn't Looking Glass' parent company, just the publisher for Thief. Looking Glass was owned by a military simulation tech company. LGS's demise had nothing to do with Eidos or Ion Storm, but the parent company doing an internal review and deciding that LGS was more of a distraction than an asset. (
http://gambit.mit.edu/updates/audio/looking_glass_studios_podcast/) Linky
Among other things, it's also very unlikely that Eidos own the source code rights for the Dark Engine, but that's a whole other storey.
Melan on 28/4/2013 at 15:46
Quote Posted by Infinitron
The mass market is the death of the niche. When they make a game for everybody, they're not making it for
you.
Precisely absolutely.
Springheel on 28/4/2013 at 16:58
Quote:
That's what happens when you have companies who make games to make money instead of companies who make money to make games.
If companies didn't spend huge sums of money on the latest eye candy, maybe they wouldn't need to make so many sales to make a profit.
How much money has EM spent on motion capture/lipsynching that is so precise they can't use Stephen Russel? How much money have they spent to produce rain where every drop is rendered and lit in real time? How much money was spent designing the replica bow and costume? That's just three examples of things that have NOTHING to do with how enjoyable the game is.
If producers actually spent the majority of their time and money on the things that were actually important, they could afford to target smaller audiences, and avoid the "trying to please everyone" problems.
MoroseTroll on 28/4/2013 at 19:20
Quote Posted by jay pettitt
Among other things, it's also very unlikely that Eidos own the source code rights for the Dark Engine, but that's a whole other storey.
Very interesting... Then who, do you think, is the owner?
jay pettitt on 28/4/2013 at 21:09
I'd guess it's either it's the defence contractor, or they sold it on with LGS's physical assets. But it sounds very much as though the engine was looking Glass', not Eidos'.
jtr7 on 29/4/2013 at 00:42
Square-Enix own the rights, except for the SS2 portions of the code that EA owns the rights to. Eidos was ignoring us, but then the mystery developer found a copy and sent it to René who then handed it over to the Legal Department. Attempts to get a response have been ignored or deflected, with even an Eidos forum mod getting in between the fans and the community manager Kyle for some bizarre reason.
