henke on 29/4/2022 at 16:35
I played through Thief 2014 for a 3rd time and this is what I learned:
uuuuuhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh....
the ending? Still very bad. I think I'm most upset that after the credits have rolled, and the game dumps me back in the city, when I go to see Basso he's just like "hi Garrett" not even acknowledging all the crazy shit that happened. Come on man, I NEED CLOSURE!
The spooky asylum level is the level with the best storytelling, mainly because most of it isn't related to the boring main plot. It lets you piece together the dark history of the place through logs, and that's always fun.
I'm pretty sure "sloop" is something you eat.
The HANDSTUFF in this game is perhaps the best HANDSTUFF in all of gaming (and no I'm not talking about the pinchcocks down by the docks). I was playing Dying Light 2 recently and when you pick stuff up in that game the character just waves his hand in the air in front of you and then the object disappears from the world and pops into your inventory, and y'know it's kinda crazy with all the advancements in game-graphics how few FPS games bother trying to make your characters hands look like they're actually interacting with objects in the gameworld. RDR2 certainly made sure your hands touched stuff, but there the animations were too slow. I feel like Thief 2014 struck a good balance between realistic handstuff and also moving along at a good speed. I am currently trying to revolutionize Videogame Handstuff by bring it to (
https://twitter.com/Henrik_Hermans/status/1517837701562707969) THE NEXT LEVEL. I mainly started replaying Thief for research purposes but ended up kinda getting into it.
Mr.Duck on 29/4/2022 at 18:15
Man, I finished Elden Ring and I just don't know what to do with my life anymore. Derp. ;3
demagogue on 30/4/2022 at 05:50
Continue to make regular posts about the demon bosses you defeat in your head. :devil:
Mr.Duck on 30/4/2022 at 06:22
Such a battle is nigh endless...
(Hohoho)
Thirith on 1/5/2022 at 16:15
henke, I believe it was you who revisited the 2014 Thief recently, right? I thought I'd install that one and give it another chance, but I have to admit there are few games I've played that have put me off as immediately as this one, and the reason is how bad traversal and just generally being in the world feels. With a game like this, I want immediacy in my controls, I want to be in control of where and how my character moves, yet this game constantly takes control away from me in small ways that nonetheless add up to a pretty bad gamefeel. Grab an object? I press E and my character does a half-second animation, leaning in, grabbing the thing and leaning back again. Everything feels contextual, but never in a way that makes me feel like I'm in control; instead, it feels like the game keeps playing these ultra-short first-person cutscenes to me. It's possible that it's just the tutorial that is this bad, but if I don't enjoy moving through the world, then I won't enjoy the game.
I may give it another chance again in a while, but the first impression Thief's left is that it's not a game I'd enjoy playing.
Anarchic Fox on 1/5/2022 at 19:29
I do remember the instant "cling" of loot stolen adding to the fantasy of being a master thief, in the first two games. Pick up them baubles without even stopping in your tracks. :)
For my part, after a long exhausted period of no games, I almost finished Disco Elysium -- only to face a recurrent crash in the endgame. My fault for running Linux, though it's amazing the Steam compatibility program (Proton, a fork of WINE) worked well enough to get me this far. If I can't resolve it I'll just watch a video at some point.
Then I picked up Vampire Survivors, which is a twin-stick shooter that's missing a stick. Your weapons fire automatically, but all have positioning quirks that will keep you on the run from encroaching monsters. You can earn gold to earn modest upgrades (small compared to the in-level ones) and unlock characters. Around the mid-game of each run a flood of monsters runs you down unless you've managed to build one of the powerful item combinations, which are sadly difficult to intuit. I lucked into getting five of them in a run by sheer chance, which gave me enough information to figure out most of the others. Unfortunately I burned through the early-access content in half a day, but hey, it was only three bucks.
It's strange, since the last game I played prior to the absence was Inscryption, where I had the opposite problem: I was terrible at its card game and could make no headway. I'm still going to retry it at some point.
Tomi on 1/5/2022 at 20:03
I prefer the New-Thief way actually, but there are simply way too many things to steal in that game! The animation looks nice and it's so short that you don't really "lose control" of the character, but when you have to pick up a hundred little objects (some of them don't really even feel like they're worth stealing) that are scattered around all over the place, it's no longer that cool. It's quantity over quality when it comes to treasures in Thief. The old games did it a bit better at least.
I really need to replay Thi4f. I've said this many times over the years, so I forced myself to click the install button a moment ago - that at least takes me one step closer to actually playing it. :p Previously I played the game with Focus disabled, but I kind of felt that I was missing out on something. I think I'll keep it enabled this time and see what it's like. I'm quite looking forward to this actually!
Pyrian on 1/5/2022 at 20:35
Ugh, that always bothered me in the Dishonored series. I'd see some treasure over yonder, go through heck and high water to get there, creep in, and get 3 pennies and a nickel. They said in an interview that people liked picking up treasure, so they made more treasure to pick up. I think that was missing the point.
Renault on 2/5/2022 at 03:08
Always thought it was funny that "Garrett" had a quote in Thi4f where he says "It's not how much you steal, it's what you steal" - and he then proceeds to loot a bunch of ink bottles, letter openers, and ashtrays.
Thirith on 2/5/2022 at 07:27
In the Dishonored games I didn't generally feel that it wasn't worth exploring. Sure, the monetary reward wasn't always great, but it gave me much more of a sense of the place and the people, and the environmental design was varied enough to indicate who the people were whose placed you broke into, added to which there were usually goodies of one kind or another to find. Based on the tutorial at least (which I admit may not be entirely indicative of the game as a whole), Thief (2014) is much more the kind of game where you explore everything to find loot adding up to two dozen gold coins.
On a different note: Rusty Lake Paradise, while being more of the same (namely surreal, uncanny, and darkly funny puzzlers lasting a couple of hours), was very enjoyable. I have to admit that I had to look up some of the solutions; sometimes my brain understands what a puzzle is about, sometimes I find that I'm looking at completely the wrong thing for ten minutes without even understanding that I should be focusing on, say, the number of legs on the various flies or the pitch at which they buzz when you click on them. Still, the puzzles have an internal logic that, once you get into the strangeness of the Rusty Lake games, is fairly coherent. I wouldn't want to play more than one of these in a row, but they're just what's needed if I play one of them every half a year or so in between more lengthy games.
