june gloom on 17/3/2013 at 09:46

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Just a correction -- comics don't actually reboot very often. Up until recently Marvel has been operating on largely the same continuity for 40 years. DC does a total hard reset once only every 25 years or so.

I can name a number of reboots that have been successful. The Batman movie reboot was wildly successful compared to the increasingly ridiculous movies of the 1990s (see: Batman and Robin.) Pokemon rebooted itself with Black/White and it's still going strong. Casino Royale rebooted James Bond into a more serious mode, and was pretty successful. Battlestar Galactica seems to be by all measures much more successful the second time around. GTA4 is a reboot of the PS2-era GTA canon (and the PS2-era GTAs were themselves a reboot from largely plot-free GTA 1/2.) Spec Ops: The Line effectively resurrected an old, obscure, and largely ignored milsim (well, as close they could get to milsim in 1998) franchise from the Playstation 1 era and redefined the tacticool manshooter, proving such games could achieve the kind of thoughtful plot and presentation you expect from games like Silent Hill 2. (The loading screen saying "you are still a good person" still haunts me.) Hell, even My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic is a wildly successful reboot of the original 80s 20-minute commercial. It's also a pervert magnet but let's not get into that noise.

DXHR was really really good for being a sequel to a seemingly-forgotten PC-centric franchise; so I'm giving Re-Thief the benefit of the doubt here.

But... there's one problem, nothing to do with reboots but everything to do with the current climate. When Thief game out, PC gaming and console gaming were pretty separate -- very little overlap, and games developed differently. It was this climate that gave us Thief and Metal Gear Solid in the same year -- two very different approaches to stealth, two very different approaches to storytelling. These days, there's a lot more overlap in libraries, and there's a lot more games coming out all the time. Let's be real, Thief as a game was forgotten pretty quickly -- I remember seeing boxes for it, then they were gone. That was 1998 -- Half-Life rolled in that year too, y'know. Thief has a cult following -- literally, in some cases. :erg: Half-Life was, in contrast, wildly successful, and the rest is history. I think the reason DXHR did so well is that it was a prequel, meaning it didn't have the baggage of two games' worth of canon that last saw a new entry a whole 7 years prior, enabling new fans to jump in, but Deus Ex, I think, has also always been more popular than Thief ever was. More to the point, as negative the reaction to DXIW was, and deservedly so, the larger fanbase -- most of which is not on TTLG -- is not friggin' crazycakes. So when DXHR got leaked, the reaction was overall much more positive because the fanbase wasn't half as insular or consolidated as the Thiefgen autism ward. Most of us here I think welcome new blood, but some of you guys are going to have to deal with the fact that just because someone got into Thief through the reboot doesn't make them any less a true fan than you. Because otherwise, I think Thief will remain a "cult" game, immediately forgotten, because anyone wanting to get into the fandom will have been chased off -- after all, and this is my main point that I've taken an impressive amount of time to get to, there's plenty of other games for people to get into and Thief doesn't have the kind of pre-existing pull Deus Ex did. Alternately they'll just go and make their own fandom without the purview of the zealots telling them how to be true fans. Horror of horrors, they might even get on tumblr and write slash fiction!

SubJeff on 17/3/2013 at 22:37

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Very well said. It's good to see an island of sanity here. That's a nice synopsis of the situation.

Just one thing; yo yo where all the biatches paragraphs at?


Goldmoon, this is either some master level trolling or you really, really need help.

jtr7 on 18/3/2013 at 00:08

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:(

I'm not sure why it's a sin to keep Thief forums centered around Thief. It's not General Gaming, where any and all games video that have no connection to Looking Glass, on a forum celebrating and remembering Looking Glass, have a home. I don't know how these boards are more insular than any other dedicated board. I don't understand why Thief is expected to be an exception and even take a backseat. I don't know why people from dedicated boards are unable to feel free to speak in the general and community boards, and why the general and community boards are insular and unwelcoming. Two sides of the same coin. The same "blame" for all. I see no exception other than the membership size of the FM community under the Thief heading versus every other dedicated board, and how they've just settled there where they can talk freely most of the time like nowhere else.


There are tens of millions of people who feel the industry is, for all its size and variety, insular exclusionary. A portion of them never knew Thief would be its own genre and that we'd rely on each other for more gaming opportunities. We are not welcome elsewhere so we naturally collect in groups, and don't have to explain ourselves, and can just be. We can't do that in insular GenGaming. If faced with the attitudes here that we find exclusionary there, it can only be tense and volatile, and then, because its humanity doing its thing, they feel like victims, but it's the same thing, different side of the coin.


This thread's title lends itself to Thief-specific talk, and talk is not open-ended when restrictions are placed on the Thiefy goals. We only have old Thief, and a smidge new, so we speak what we know, and that includes the effects of TDS, the separating of old and new titles until things simmer down and they can be brought together. It's way too early to bring it all together since the game's not even out. It will make no sense for old and new Thief fora to be blended into one if there's little to talk about that isn't comparison or contrast, and that actually isn't too fun for anybody but in brief.

jtr7 on 19/3/2013 at 08:41

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In wondering how much of a reboot this is and how much of a sequel it is, the mention of The Baron in Thief brings some things to mind.

TDS gave a surname to a Baron. TDP mentions a previous admired Baron and his less admirable greedy grandson. It was never clear if Baron Bresling was the name of any Baron mentioned in TDP or TMA, let alone the Baron in TDS. Before TDS, the Baron was away at war and Sheriff Elect Gorman Truart had too much free run of The City behind the Baron's back. There was never any mention of the end of the war with Blackbrook. TDS simply never brought it up, while mentioning the Baron a couple of times. No mention of war, Blackbrook, veterans, or what the excuse for the fighting was about, other than to profit monetarily (TDP). One of the huge generic statues in Wieldstrom Museum, wearing the Coethe Medallion, reminded a patron noble of the current (TDS) Baron himself. How much of this will play into Thief, and how much is rebooted, we'll see.




Also, an image from the EM Open House, 2009, showing grainy, tiny, Thiefy concept art, not included (http://forums.eidosgames.com/showpost.php?p=1218009&postcount=43) in this thread:
http://i7.photobucket.com/albums/y267/theonlyrossaroni/CIMG1300.jpg

jtr7 on 20/3/2013 at 10:47

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Story is important for the team that made Deus Ex: Human Revolution. Mary DeMarle and her writing team are not working on Thief[4], but EM did get a writer who worked on all three Thief games, so my guess has been that it's Terri Brosius, who's called herself a game-writer for the last few years. Most of the devs helped write the old stories, but in TDS, Terri was the one doing most of the work. In TDP/Gold, Laura Baldwin did a huge part of the writing (cockney, pirate, pagan, Bear Pits), as did Terri and Randy Smith, with the rest all adding bits and tweaks. Ken Levine wrote what he calls "The Trickster Poem", but I can't be sure which one it is. Laura did the Ritual, but I think he might mean the Legend of the Trickster famous cutscene speech with the eye of stone and the eye of flesh. Laura Baldwin and Mike Chrzanowski and Emil Pagliarulo did a lot of writing for TMA, while Randy and Terri and the rest did good portions.