Vae on 27/4/2013 at 11:36
Quote:
And that is the key to Eidos Montreal's approach: it's not replicating the gameplay specifics of
a game too dated to emulateWhich of course is ridiculous, considering that THIEF was not only ahead of its' time regarding stealth gameplay mechanics,
but still has never been equaled to this day...other than TDM, which stands as a true emulative example.
Chade on 27/4/2013 at 12:04
I think you're all being a little unfair to thiefessa here.
There were already reasons to suspect that things may be a little chaotic inside EM, as we already knew about some staff turnover. This is the only reason I can think of to pay any attention to these trash pieces.
"According to annonymous sources close to EM"? The reporter would have to see the news in his tea leaves to be any less authoritative. The original vertical slice doesn't work in their current modified engine? Now I don't work in the industry and my intuition may be completely off, but as a programmer that sounds entirely unsurprising to me, yet in these articles it's presented as a smoking gun. Some of the claims appear to contradict earlier reports by outlets I would usually trust (rock paper shotgun), at least if you take everything said in both articles at face value. Other claims by these "annonymous sources close to EM" could easily be exagerated or misleading or just flat out wrong.
I believe there is a reasonable chance that thief development is pretty chaotic. I believed that before reading these articles, and these trashy pieces don't do anything to change my mind in either direction. Thiefessa is probably a little over confident, but hey, someone has to be! It's certainly reasonable to be skeptical of these news reports.
Dia on 27/4/2013 at 14:01
Quote:
In short, Focus adds a dash of the spectacular to Thief's patient lurking. Its supply is strictly limited, forcing you to use it strategically, but the idea of it will have the purest of purists twitching.
'Twitching' with what - apprehension? Dismay? Elation and anticipation? This 'purist' thinks it is a good thing this will be an option (once again, my opinion).
Quote:
The camera slips into thirdperson perspective for the kind of ledge clambering seen in the Assassin's Creed series (during which Garrett uses a new piece of grappling equipment called the claw) and also during cinematic combat takedowns.
Remind me not to use the claw - or is that even going to be optional? And if I wanted to play AC I'd play it. Whatever happened to doing your own takedowns, btw? Sure, the takedown scenes can be utterly awesome .... at first .... but that gets old after awhile and personally (I'm feeling very compelled to include disclaimers lately), I really don't like having the controls taken away from me so the animators can showcase how very kewl and talented they are. So we've got 'cinematic takedowns', 'freeburst running', forced switching from 1st to 3rd person, and parkouring across rooftops (which, and I could be wrong, sounds as though Garrett goes into his parkour maneuvers automatically?)? Where's the immersion factor here? Oh yeah, that's right; you're allowed to explore The Hub. Gameplay video, please.
Quote:
Drawing in further influences, there's also a burst of freerunning through the city inspired by Mirror's Edge. The view's still locked in firstperson, but Garrett's dashing down alleyways and sliding over surfaces while frantic music plays in the background. The aim is to make Garrett agile as well as invisible and, rather more functionally, to cut down the time potentially impatient players spend negotiating the rooftops and plague-ridden streets of the City, which isn't entirely open to exploration, but does feature an explorable hub.
Aw - come on!!! What if I don't
want to employ that burst of freerunning, regardless of what other game inspired it? And I won't be able to enjoy taking my time while up on the rooftops or do a lot of exploring while down in the City streets? Rooftop travel was quite enjoyable (for me) in TDP & TMA. There have been whole FMs created by TTLG authors which were dedicated to 'negotiating rooftops'. 'Thieves' Highway' was a brilliant example. You could explore to your heart's content in TDP and TMA and there were huge FM maps created just for the purpose of exploring the City streets. So I was right and EM is catering to the 'potentially impatient players', which I read to mean players who have the attention spans of gnats - action junkies who like blasting their way through games and don't want to have to think while going from point A to point B. I hadn't realized there were so many of them out there.
The original two games were all about taking your time, being stealthy, and exploring (at least for me they were) ... ok, and stealing stuff, granted. Now EM's taking that away and replacing it with action-based, non-optional moves? I'd really like to know how many of these new moves
are going to be optional, ya know? I'm kinda wondering how Garrett is able to remain invisible while parkouring his way across rooftops and running frantically down the streets - or will these actions be forced only if Garrett is discovered? (Don't know about you, but I think I'd notice if someone was doing that in my neighborhood.) ;)
'Drawing in further influences'; now that bothers me. It could mean that T4 may turn out to be a decent game if put together properly, or, it could end up being a hodge-podge of influencing aspects of several different games all jumbled together.
Quote:
According to one source, each new lead and senior designer would come with a new vision for the game. Old ideas — including stages and mechanics — would be rebuilt or scrapped.
(Quoted from (
http://www.polygon.com/2013/4/26/4269912/thief-reboot-impeded-by-office-politics-high-level-departures)) Add to that the use of influencing gameplay tactics from other games and it could turn out to be a mess. Gameplay video, please.
Quote:
“The Garrett I know is back,” says producer Stephane Roy.
In my opinion the Garrett
he knows and the Garrett
I know are two different people. Oh wait; I keep forgetting. This is a 'reboot' which means anything goes. My bad. But I'd really like to see that gameplay video, please.
Goldmoon Dawn on 27/4/2013 at 15:02
I guess we can forget about free form exploration? Dont you want at the very least to be able to completely control your characters movement from the start of a Mission all the way to the end? Even Deadly Shadow managed to accomplish that! If they go to a 3rd person view when you use the rope/claw and get on "climbable pipes", where and when exactly does the free form exploration take place? Once again, the new team has focused on the wrong things to the extent that a core gameplay element and piece of LGS heart is tragically overlooked. Like the pride that ultimately sank Ambrosia. Why do people keep trying to cash in on a game that they dont understand? Thief: The Dark Project is a cursed game, so be careful when you start to unwrap its burial cloths. A Thief game without free form exploration will enjoy the same frothy results that Deadly enjoyed, and worse!
:ebil:
New Horizon on 27/4/2013 at 15:28
Quote Posted by thiefessa
There is some obvious nonsense in that article; disabled AI, sex-scenes etc, which is why I haven't taken any of it seriously at this point in time.
Disabled AI certainly isn't a nonsensical thing. AI devour a lot of resources, trust me I know from TDM's experiences and from talking with the former TDS devs about their development woes. They made the same mistake the TDS devs initially made. They went all out with graphical resources and details, only to discover when their tech came online much later that the target systems wouldn't handle it. Now it's not like the AI would be 'disabled completely' but they would be run off of a simple script that the player would interact with, rather than actually having any senses. That's why nobody else was allowed to play it. Unless your AI are going to be highly optimized or severely stripped down, you can't do whatever you want graphically in a Thief game and think you can get away with it. There are compromises.
demagogue on 27/4/2013 at 16:49
That's what I was thinking too, since as you mentioned we're familiar with the issue too with TDM. I was actually thinking of the trick we sometimes use with TDM that you were implying, which is to disable the senses of AI based on proximity (though they still might path and act on cue), but only the most nearby AI are fully functioning ... so it might not be quite as bad as reports are making it out to be.
And it might be fair for demo purposes since the most nearby AI are still behaving normally, so I can be a little sympathetic with their dilemma & decision under the circumstances.
Optimization is one of the things you do towards the end of development. What it means that performance and optimization are big issues for them, they might have bit off a lot to chew, and I hope they get it together. AI are the heart & soul of stealth gameplay, and all the parkour and action in the world can't make up for it if it's not up to snuff.
New Horizon on 27/4/2013 at 17:16
Quote Posted by demagogue
And it might be fair for demo purposes since the most nearby AI are still behaving normally, so I can be a little sympathetic with their dilemma & decision under the circumstances.
What we have in place in TDM is an optimization, but in this instance with the Thief tech demo it isn't. What I actually meant was that all of their AI had none of their processing senses enabled and just ran on rails off scripted sequences, which would also mean the nearby AI, not just those far away.
It was probably the only way they could get reasonable performance.
New Horizon on 27/4/2013 at 17:35
You know what the headline should really have said?
Thief reboot impeded by too much time and money!
demagogue on 27/4/2013 at 17:37
Quote Posted by New Horizon
What we have in place in TDM is an optimization, but in this instance with the Thief tech demo it isn't. What I actually meant was that all of their AI had none of their processing senses enabled and just ran on rails off scripted sequences, which would also mean the nearby AI, not just those far away.
Sorry, I know what you meant... I actually wasn't meaning to argue what you said, but I had a different interpretation of the situation, and was talking about that.
This is the sentence: "Many programming tricks were necessary to run the current demonstration, like turning off non-playable character AI — the engine has trouble when too many characters are on screen." That could technically mean different things, and we can't even know if the article writer wrote what he heard 100% accurately or even how off the cuff the source was speaking.
"Turning off NPC AI" technically doesn't tell us if *all* the AI were turned off the whole time and running on scripts, or e.g. they were turned on just as needed and then turned off right afterwards, so only a few were on at any given time. I suspected it was actually the latter (they're on for a little while then turned off when not in use), and ran with that interpretation because the next sentence mentions "trouble when too many characters are on screen", which implies the AI performance is ok when just a few of them are on, but lags when too many are on at the same time. So the best solution doesn't have to be turn them all off.
But you could be right too; they just put them all on some pathing script. That's probably the more fail-safe solution too, so there's even a good case for it.
Edit: The punchline is the same though... Whatever it was was a hack, not a real optimization, and it speaks of AI performance issues that need to get fixed or optimized in the right way to be playable. I agree with you on that.
Well, and this weird issue of a vertical demo that actually gets derailed from the engine & the game itself... Which raises the question, so where is the game going now? (Edit: Reminds me a little of Thief's Den & St. Lucia actually, which also took a little work to get reintegrated into the actual game engine later... But in our case, we didn't need them to be integrated to release 1.0 anyway.)
