Thief 4

[Fidcal]

Everything about Thief 4 still nauseates me. It's everything I hate about commerce. Bad Marketing. Bad FU attitude. Supreme hypocrisy completely blocking out the potential customers from any info whatsoever then setting up a nasty little shop to try to squeeze a few more cents profit out of something that doesn't exist. Every few months I take a look to see if even a single sentence of real information has been issued about anything whatsoever to do with it. Nope. It's a complete reversal of Dark Mod which has always been open and is built by the fans for the fans with complete fan involvement and it's free and with a great editor and with endless new FMs to play each with their own style.

[rebb]

Why do i expect it to have a "Slide into Cover" and "Slide into Darkness" Button - oh well, we'll see anyway.

[LEGION]

The DLC-thing sounds too much like a console-game. So, Thief4 will be simple, maybe even more than Thief3. Only the optics and maybe sound will be good, but is that enough for Taffers? So, Eidos Montreal, I´m sure you read this, send me some promo to convince me otherwise...

 

Seriously, my feeling about Thief4 get´s worse with every "news" and month passes by. Why don´t they share what they already have? If they talk about 10 hours play-time there surely must be sth to show the fans, why they don´t do that?

[stumpy]

if it does have dlc in it then edios have deals with sony and microsoft to only release dlc to there console's the dlc wont be available to pc owners.

[ungoliant]

perhaps 6 months later we'll be able to re-purchase the Th345692f 4 607Y edition with the DLC included

[stumpy]

10 hours gameplay, its going to be short then, took 6 hours to do the angelwatch mission in thief 2.

[Serpentine]

But guys, the future is making games which are like being in the movie!

[LEGION]

Yeah, and they make you think: "Come on, let´s see this damn Credits-screen, so I can go finally and do sth that is more fun..."

 

See, what TDS has done?

[BrokenArts]

Mortal Monkey posted this over on TTLG about Thief 4. Between Thief 2 and The Dark Mod, do we really need another game to make FMs for anyway? I don't see FMs being churned out for TDS. The campaign to get the editor released are a bit embarrassing at this point. There have been more FMs for TDM in the last year than there has for TDS in the last five.

 

And jtr7 quoted Eidos's VIKTORIA about the length of the game.

 

As for the magazine reporting that T4 would be 10 hours long... it's up to you if you wish to spend your time reading this third-party information and it is also your prerogative if you wish to believe it. This kind of press is prevalent everywhere, for all forms of media, so it is unlikely to damage EM's reputation. Really, the proof is in the pudding - so just wait until you here OFFICIAL information about the game.

 

Both of which for speak, pretty much sums it up.

[demagogue]

I have a feeling T4 FMs could be easier to make than TDS ones. I don't think they're going to make the same mistake messing with the engine and tech, and the engine does have a good track record. And it will still have lots of great assets and all the gameplay in place. So I could see it taking off at least better than TDS.

 

As between T4 and the Dark Mod, that might depend on things like which gameplay & assets you prefer, which editor you prefer, how much you want or like TDM's open-source-ness, how much you want tutorials, wiki, & community support, and who knows what else. I think those of us that have already made TDM FMs will stick to it because we've already gotten over the learning-curve. Anyway, these things are always hard to predict. Be interesting to see whatever happens.

[BrokenArts]

Agreed, it will be interesting to see what REALLY happens, and what the game will produce, and be like. Its like this with every release, TONS of speculation. We'll just have to wait and see. If it sucks, we still have TDM as our Thief 4.

[SiyahParsomen]

Between Thief 2 and The Dark Mod, do we really need another game to make FMs for anyway?

 

When Thief 4 will be released, new taffers'll arise. AFAIS, Thief 2 and Darkmod have loyal mappers. I don't think there'll be a big migration from t2 and tdm mapping community to t4. Eventually, t4 has a different engine, dynamics. It's not a simple task to learn everything from the begining in mapping process. That's what happened between tdm and t2, right?

Edited September 25, 2010 by SiyahParsomen

[ungoliant]

It's not a simple task to learn everything from the begining in mapping process. That's what happened between tdm and t2, right?

 

mmmmm, I don't think so.

[Serpentine]

I don't mean to sound negative and I'm not saying this because of me working on TDM, buuuuut realistically :

 

I doubt you'll see an editor for T4, DX:HR almost certainly isn't getting an SDK and I'm quite sure they wont be packaging an editor with release or within commercial lifetime.

 

Hacking together the UT3 editor to work with their packages is most likely possible at some level if you have someone keen on spending a lot of time reversing and without a leaked beta or something I doubt it would be very stable/useful even once done. However seeing as people will be doing this from T4 and HR sides, maybe something will come of it... but the guys that tried for those Batman games gave up.

 

SE also don't like the option/news of releasing modding tools as it could potentially decrease DLC sales. None of the western devs that have published under them have released and editor/SDK(including devs who were previously very community friendly), all of them have/are releasing DLCs.

[Melan]

I have a feeling T4 FMs could be easier to make than TDS ones. I don't think they're going to make the same mistake messing with the engine and tech, and the engine does have a good track record. And it will still have lots of great assets and all the gameplay in place. So I could see it taking off at least better than TDS.

Doesn't their engine rely heavily on static meshes built with external modelling tools? Because if that is the case, that's an extra barrier you have to jump over. Unfortunately, modern engines have largely moved from in-editor to imported architecture. Plus what Serpentine said (even if I think FMs have helped extend the older Thief games' longevity by at least a bit - those are probably not too big numbers).

 

I don't have high hopes, although of course I'd be interested what people could make in an engine like that. What we have seen of DX:HR has been nothing but spectacular.

[stumpy]

thief 4 is on the crystal dynamics engine with havoc physics (the one 'tomb raider - Underworld' was made with), you need 3dmax current full version to make anything for that engine, and seeing how much problem ion storm had with havoc to package their physic engine with TDS am pretty sure the current havoc physic engine usable licence is way beyond anyones pocket. And valves current blowback towards microsoft means that any dlc makeable by players will be blocked by microsoft.

[Serpentine]

Ah interesting, seems they are using CD's engine.

 

I remember seeing a whole bunch of job offers for UE3 work a while back and after Arkham assumed they'd continue.

[demagogue]

I thought it was the Crystal Dynamics engine too; it just stood to reason if they're building DX:HR on it, they'd carry that momentum over into T4. But can somebody post an official link to what engine they're using? I just did a google search and found some forum saying a EM dev posted on his Facebook update that it'd be the UE3 engine after all, but it's a year old.

 

I guess UE3 is more mod friendly. Nobody can make maps for Tomb Raider Underworld since there's no editor or SDK available, and they have a long-established modding community as old as ours with a lot more maps (so they have even more claim to demand an editor from SE than we do). But people have been able to make Mirror's Edge maps on the UE3 editor even without an SDK; a few fans were clever enough to rig the vanilla UE3 editor to do it. But not for other games like Mass Effect on UE3 or Bioshock on UE2.5. But at least with UE3 there's a chance.

[stumpy]

i dont know I was just posting off 2 year old information, maybe the stealth they want to work in thief 4 they couldn't get to work, it being line of sight stealth in the crystal dynamic engine, and they're going to use the unreal engine because they know they can get it to work in that, although that probably means small levels again cause the xbox cant handle large unreal levels.

[MoroseTroll]

Well, it seems that Thief 4 won't use Crystal Dynamics Engine (thanks to clearing for this URL). Unreal Engine 3, I suppose? If so, then there will be a weak hope that Eidos will someday release an editor for Thief 4.

[Fidcal]

I can't make much sense of that.

 

"Release is minimum 2 years away" but further down he is talking next Feb/March (though I'm not sure if he is still talking about Thief.

 

A team of 95 to 150 full time paid workers with all professional resources available? Hard to believe all that lot could be working on one game. They're not building a moon rocket. Basically doing what the Dark Mod team did, producing a mod, assets, etc. designing levels. I think Dark Mod had 3 or 4 coders working part time at best.

[Melan]

The Feb/March date should be for DX: Human Revolution, which is close to completion (and looks kinda cool).

 

A lot of those full-time employees will probably be working on assets, cinematics (does Square's team count in the figure?) and maybe QA. Games have grown a lot in the last decade, not really to their advantage.

[MoroseTroll]

Fidcal: Games are very complicated these days. Do you remember that Assassin's Creed 2 had a team of 450 people? Call of Duty: Black Ops has about 300 people in its team. So Thief 4's "95 to 150" team is just a medium one.

Edited November 8, 2010 by MoroseTroll

[ungoliant]

personally i believe since they haven't updated the "placeholder" thiaf logo, and no other assets have been made public yet, that this must mean at least 80% of human resources are devoted to creating a new logo. maybe when they get back to doing some real work, they'll figure out the other 20% of the devs have been doing foolish things like implementing a "sneak" button and making 90% of the gameplay 3rd person, and fix things up a bit better.

 

I'm expecting a really great @#$%ing logo though.