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Mr. Tibbs

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Posts posted by Mr. Tibbs

  2. So, how do you guys like Prey?

    in Off-Topic

    Posted

    Had to cheat and use the web to get through this game, its a shit of of bugs and crashing so bad it force quit's the game with a memory error.

     

    That and I just discovered that tis game was not the Prey 2 that were were promised -

     

    - https://www.kotaku.com.au/2017/05/prey-shows-that-bethesdas-review-policy-is-even-bad-for-bethesda/

    - https://www.reddit.com/r/pcgaming/comments/60432n/prey_2_old_game_that_got_canceled_because_of/

     

    Thier propensity to release bug riddled games and now this... I really am growing to intensely dislike Bethesda as a studio.

    Yeah, Prey 2 was cancelled after Bethesda tried to buy Human Head Studios through milestone abuse, sadly.

     

     

    Because the publisher spent shit loads on the licence back in 2009, they forced Arkane use the name for their unrelated Shock-like reboot. They also botched the marketing so terribly that Arkane's game sold less than Prey 1 despite shipping on more platforms and costing a fucking fortune compared to Prey 2.

  9. Thief 4

    in Off-Topic

    Posted

    After cruising over to the eidos forum theres a thread saying that Thief 4 sales "exceeded" expectations... although that seems to come from the overly excitably forum trolls moderators so who knows if its true or not.

    We don't know what their internal expectations were. They massively overestimated the demand for Hitman & Tomb Raider, so maybe they set more conservative numbers for Thief (2014)? One things for sure, Square-Enix and Eidos Montreal can't be happy with the games reception considering how long it was in development for.

  10. Underworld Ascendant Kickstarter

    in Off-Topic

    Posted · Edited by Mr. Tibbs

    I'm very happy to hear that Underworld Ascendant will feature Stephen Russell. Russell's performance as Garrett is probably my favorite game character ever. His perfect delivery always manages to make me chuckle!

     

    https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/othersidegames/underworld-ascendant/posts/1136796

     

    56bc3ff0a339232fcaffaf2d950358e9_large.p

     

    It’s our pleasure to announce that Stephen L. Russell will be doing voice acting for Underworld Ascendant. Among gamers, Stephen is perhaps best known as the voice of Garrett in the original Thief games. At LookingGlass we worked closely with Stephen, where he voiced some of the more memorable characters from Thief, Thief II and System Shock 2. Stephen also did voice acting for Fallout 3 and Skyrim. We’re looking forward to working with him once again.
    • Popular Post
    • Popular Post

    How did you first hear about TDM?

    in The Dark Mod

    Posted · Edited by Mr. Tibbs

    I was browsing TTLG in 2010 after nearly 5 years away from gaming. I saw a thread about something called the Dark Mod which sounded pretty compelling. I was absolutely shocked when I realized it was actually playable and not just some ambitious pipe-dream. I mean playing HD Thief with dynamic lighting, improved physics, etc... sounds incredible but designing compelling stealth mechanics in an engine created around shooting demons in the dark is a tall order for a mod team.

     

    After checking out the tutorial, all my skepticism disappeared. Not only is The Dark Mod a brilliant re-imagining of Thief, it's one of the best stealth games ever released. Period.

    • Like 6

  13. Stealth - Games

    in Off-Topic

    Posted

    Metal Gear Solid: Ground Zeroes is out on Steam (currently 33% off). It's an excellent stealth sandbox experience. Even as someone who doesn't particularly care for the series, Ground Zeroes is a must-play for

    people who love games that support experimentation and give the player the freedom to recover from failure in a controlled environment. The port is absolutely stellar. I have a crappy i3-2100 and it runs on high at 40-60 fps.

     

  14. New Wolf Trailer

    in Off-Topic

    Posted

    Zenimax are indeed scum, however gamers as a whole aren't one to punish companies by boycotting their games. If they did, EA would be long, long out of business.

     

    As for the game itself, I shall withhold judgement until someone like TotalBiscuit and/or NerdCubed can give it a go.

     

    Good point. I was just saying that I won't be supporting them. To me, Wolfy looks like the team took Dishonored, removed any ambiance, story, or meaning and cribbed from Inglorious Basterds and Man in the High Castle instead. They don't have the chops to pull off an interesting setting and the mechanics look dull. Hands-on reports are appropriately underwhelming.

  15. New Wolf Trailer

    in Off-Topic

    Posted

    Neat trailer, shame about the game. I'll never support Bethesda again after the Prey 2 fiasco and the latest Oculus nonsense. Zenimax has some of the worst business practices in the games industry.

     

    http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303948104579534013624548846

    http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2013-06-03-ex-human-head-developer-attacks-lie-that-prey-2-was-only-ever-just-a-demo

    http://au.ign.com/articles/2013/06/05/what-went-wrong-with-human-heads-prey-2

     

    Luckily, Wolfy looks derivative; mechanically and thematically vapid so it won't be hard giving this one a pass.

  17. Thief 4 is trash.

    in Off-Topic

    Posted · Edited by Mr. Tibbs

    I thought I would share my impressions that I posted over on QT3 a few weeks ago.

     

    This game is all over the place. I finished a ghost run on Master Thief difficulty with most of the ui switched off. It's a massive, generous game that plays like it was rushed out the door. When it works, it can be enjoyable but it has too many bugs, design flaws and questionable decisions to recommend to anyone but desperate stealth fans.

     

    Thief is a broken, tragic, rewritten mess of a game. The plot has clearly been reworked multiple times. The Baron and Orion standing in for the Mechanists and Pagans respectively, is fine on paper but it doesn't work in execution. Since they have barely any screen time, they have to scream their motivations to the player in an awkward, rushed manner. Erin feels like a holdover from an earlier iteration of the game, when it was a straight sequel to Deadly Shadows.

     

    The Thief Taker General is hilarious. I love it when he happens to find Garrett, who has just returned from a trek through a long forgotten ruin, underneath his bed at the brothel. I like the idea of Garrett having an antagonist but TTG is just awful. A bald, mustachioed villain who walks with a limp, drops f-bombs like a desperate comic, kills his underlings over trivial matters (so you know he's bad!) and has a crossbow affixed to his arm. There's way too much going on here. He feels like a one of the grotesque characters from Hitman: Absolution. Why Eidos Montreal thought he would be a good choice for the Thief universe is baffling.

     

    The sound-mixing is atrocious. The worst I've ever heard in a blockbuster game. That's not hyperbole. It's broken. Sound cuts out frequently, guards across a courtyard sound like their yelling into the players ear, npcs yell ambient dialogue over Basso repeatedly during cutscenes, and Garrett's voice actor frequently pauses to his read lines. The lip-syncing is horrid. I really miss the sound propagation from the earlier titles. Unless you're walking on glass or water, it's doesn't matter where you walk, Garrett won't make a sound.

     

    There are some really cool additions including blunt arrows (must-have for all future Thief games), some instances of impressive a.i. (noticing open safes, lights switching off etc...), knocking over bottles, real-world alarms (birds, dogs), the lockpicking game making a noise when you fail. It's quite enjoyable, but not without reservations. Some of the best parts of the game are undermined by, I suspect, poor play testing. After cracking a safe in tailors shop, Garrett refused to stop examining the silly earring he just nabbed. The animation was unskippable, so when the guard rounded the corner, I didn't have time to shut the safe, and he went on alert. Not cool.

     

    While the city looks gorgeous, its pretty much empty. The sidequests are neat, but most of the time I'm just exploring an vacant apartment; no one's home. If I mess up the lockpicking or set off a trap 9 times out of 10 it doesn't matter. All these cool additions to the game are underused. Also, there's so many loading zones! Enter a one room apartment. Pick up a letter opener and a ring. Leave in under 20 seconds. Load for just as much. This content just slows the game down. Then there's a lack of abilities and gadgets. I like Swoop, but it's basically a grounded Blink and the rest of Garrett's abilities are essentially uniquely skinned door-openers.

     

    Garrett's movement has a nice heft to it. He feels present. But moving through the world is about working out exactly what the designer wants you to do, not using your instincts or experimenting. If a rope arrow is just out of reach, don't bother trying to grab it. You need to look for a crate, or a ladder or a walk way to reach it. It's a discrete puzzle that was made for that specific instance. I wish it was like Assassin's Creed or Mirror's Edge. Instead it's an awkward compromise that isn't particularly enjoyable. Unlike Dishonored, where the designers have a set of rules that you can rely upon, Thief is about instances: These guards will patrol in this pattern no matter what. This object can be leaned around, while another identical space cannot. You can climb this crate, but not this one.

     

    Such a frustrating game! It doesn't have the same love Eidos Montreal had for Deus Ex. That team got the brand. Thief doesn't play like the rest of the series. That's fine. It's been a decade since Deadly Shadows. Time moves on. But Dishonored is Thief's competition and that game, as a stealth adventure, did a better job in every respect of capturing the essence of Thief. Thief plays like it was made in 18 months. It simply wasn't ready. I hope they get the opportunity to take a long look at what happened here, evaluate and take another stab at the licence.

     

    I'm really looking forward to reading a post-mortem on the game. On a podcast, Eurogamer writer Simon Parkin mentions he was told by Eidos Montreal team members that the game was rushed out the door. It certainly plays that way.

     

    http://www.gamingdai...e-in-lampposts/ - 31:00

    • Like 1

  18. Thief 4 is trash.

    in Off-Topic

    Posted

    http://www.gameinformer.com/b/features/archive/2014/04/07/afterwords-thief.aspx

     

     

    The environments don’t seem overly large, so why are there so many loading screens in a game?

    Stéphane Roy: The richness of the art and audio, which support this story-driven game, contributed to the streaming needs. Audio is super important in a game like Thief, and we wanted to provide strong ambiance and an immersive experience for the players. The environments are not overly large, but most loaded sections are a playground of over 100 meters by 100 meters without any loading, where you can experience a seamless gameplay. Part of this justification also goes with the production's desires of placing the player in a very rich, but also distinct environment in term of assets and textures. Thief is a game of light and shadow, cat and mouse gameplay – to ensure that we were having the higher definition in term of shadows, we used pre-processed data (baked lightmaps) that were unique from one area to the other.

     

    The creative team on the project wanted to change a lot of these numbers to enhance the experience, so our technical team needed to come up with dedicated streaming zones to handle the swap from one area to another, where they felt that it would also support the pacing of the gameplay experience. We needed to have these loading zones in there in order to create the rich, immersive environment you see in the game.

    • Like 2

  19. Signal Ops

    in Off-Topic

    Posted

    It's pretty neat. The multi-perspective squad gameplay concept goes back to an Amiga game called Hired Guns. There was an attempt at an Unreal 1 era game that was basically finished but never saw release since the team couldn't secure a publisher after Psygnosis left the PC scene.

     

  23. A new way of looking at Thief 4

    in Off-Topic

    Posted

    It's a game targeted at the masses. It's a AAA game produced by a AAA dev and a AAA publisher . I don't know what people expected other than mediocrity, despite them picking up a stellar franchise. Just look at what they did to Final Fantasy.

    Absolutely ridiculous. There are lots of great AAA games. Dishonored proved it possible to make an immersive-sim style game popular without compromising. Heck, Eidos Montreal did a great job with bringing Deus Ex to a modern audience.

     

    As Platinumoxicity said over on TTLG:

     

    Yeah, at first I was preparing to see a bad Thief game, but to my surprise it might turn out to be just a bad game in general.

     

    http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=772097

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