At0mic

So John Carmack works for Facebook now? ... OK then. I don't have much interest in Oculus Rift but I'm still pissed, if only because of people who used Kickstarter to invest in the company have basically funded a Facebook acquisition. Facebook, of all corporate giants to buy Oculus VR, it's still surprising. The $2 billion deal is comprised of $400 million in cash and 23.1 million shares of Facebook stock. The CEO is 21 years old and not wise enough to appreciate the importance of personal control over a company (something Gabe Newell does, hence why he's never sold Steam despite numerous offers and why Steam is making fat stacks and doing whatever they like with near universal love from gamers). But having said that, if someone offered you $400 million in cash for your company, you'd be set for life. Could you refuse? It'd hard to say. Maybe long term the company would be a success and make even more money while retaining control. In the end, the legendry John Carmack is now... a Facebook employee.

Damn right. I've been playing so many fan missions in the last few weeks and it feels very odd that TDM is of such a high quality and yet totally free (and properly free, no strings attached). I'd donate if they took financial donations (which I know they don't, which is fine), but I'm no mapper, so the best I can do is post here occasionally and advocate the mod whenever I can elsewhere.

I'd rather kill myself.

Just out of curiousity - if the AI notices a door is open, does this cause a hit to your stealth score (and if so, what weighting)?

I like the idea in the second picture because it communicates two bits of information at once - that you've completed a mission at least once, and (presumably) the higest level of difficult the mission was accomplished on. Makes it very easy to see at a glance which missions haven't been completed on their hardest difficulty yet as opposed to just a simple checkbox in the list.

The UI confuses the shit out of me. I'm very aware and understanding of the fact this is a powerful 3D modelling and rendering tool and hence by its very nature will be complex and have a complicated interface, but knowing this doesn't help much in the early stages. You can't just "jump in" and start using it and learning the basics through experimentation like other programs without a tutorial (a GOOD tutorial). Although I do like that it's free and seems to be under very heavy development, which is comforting. It's already proven its worth with short movies like Sintel.

INTERVENSION! And the only way I know how:

Have you considered paid DLC, micro-transactions, achievements and/or Facebook/Twitter connectivity? I hear all those things are the rage with kids these days!

I really do like the idea of a toggle key between the current weapon and the previously selected weapon. That way I could switch between the water arrow and blackjack easily without having to remember specific keys (I keep forgetting which key brings up the water arrow, so mash either 4 or 5 until I get it right).

I really don't like it when people edit their whole post out. Unless someone happened to quote them, it's impossible to know what was said and hence what direction the flow of the thread took (if any). If people regret posting something then they should consider this the next time they make a post and leave it for posterity to remind them of their own foolishness. Anyway, I'm not confident Thief 5 could do justice in the modern gaming climate. There's certainly a demand for a more classic style of Thief gameplay with doesn't require such an overly dramatic, cinematic presentation as Thief 4 has, but the more true to form a Thief game becomes, the more niche it becomes. The more niece it becomes, the smaller the audience. Smaller audience = less revenue. Games cost way too much these days to make (AAA titles at least) and it's hardly surprising if publishers think that the only way to recoup the costs of expensively developed games is to make games that are broadly accessible. Which is fine for many types of games, but I just don't see how it would do justice to a game like Thief. Often when making a game more appealing to a wider audience, you end up diluting features that made people interested in the game series to begin with. Maybe a smaller developer could do it, I dunno. But so long as Eidos holds the Thief franchise, it's going to be them that makes Thief games.

Getting rid of developers after a project has been completed isn't unusual for any development house, regardless of the reception or success of the game. Otherwise you're just paying for extra overhead that's not working on anything. There are exceptions (e.g. Valve) but as a general rule: if you want job stability, don't work for the major gaming companies.

wesp5, this is rather off-topic but your username reminds me of a fellow who made some rather neat unofficial patches for Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines...

I'm a computer engineer and work on various projects using with FPGAs (http://en.wikipedia....able_gate_array). I'm either developed designs or components to run on said FPGAs, or writing software to interface with them on computers (C/C++ being my preferred language for such purposes). It's a neat job, even if it drives me insane sometimes.

I feel bad for asking but who are those guys?

I figured there must be an alternate path as it was impossible to sneak past him. Even when I found the tunnels though, it took a while before I realised that there was a patch of water that you could swim into, as opposed to some puddles.

I'd argue that the general shift towards a more cinematic style of presentation in games has resulted in this determination by developers to deliberately limit the decisions that can be made by a player. Back in the days of Quake 1/2 for example, the concept of an invisible wall to block player progress was non-existent. Indeed, you could bypass whole areas with a well-executed rocket jump if you wanted, and the game wouldn't give a crap because it didn't matter. From what I understand the idea of rocket jumping wasn't really thought by the developers in Quake 1, but players came up with it anyway and despite the use of laser grids and other mechanisms to prevent its use in the sequel, there's still many areas that can be bypassed or manipulated using rocket jumps in Q2. In other words, iD didn't feel it necessary to block skilled players doing things their way to make progress. Why would they? Rocket jumping is fun, and indeed there's a particular secret in Quake 2 made specifically for rocket jumpers. But now, since games are in many ways just highly interactive movies (not all games of course, just a lot), if the player deliberately or inadvertently breaks something, it'll spoil the immersion or atmosphere or whatever the developers intended, and that's bad since since the guided movie-like aspect is so (apparently) important to games nowadays. Maybe I'm just talking out of my arse, but that's what I see as being the reason for the deliberate limitations imposed in a game like Thief 4.

True. To its credit, Dishonored tried to balance having as much free movement as possible while still preventing the player from getting stuck somewhere or blinking outside of the map or something. They use steep rooftops to justify being unable to get past them, and invisible walls for the rest. It's not complete freedom, but it's a reasonable balance I can accept and it's still miles ahead of what Thief 4 allows. There's one situation where I did actually manage to get myself fucked up in Dishonored - I blinked through a gap between two invisible wall and had trouble getting back. Eventually worked out a way to mantle myself (it was a set of pipes in an early level that you weren't suppose to get onto I guess) but still, if this was a game like TDM I'd just type "noclip" in the pull-down console and fix the problem myself.

With regards to being able to jump/mantle everywhere as opposed to only at set areas, some argue that having complete freedom of movement might allow the player to get somewhere that was not considered by the level designer - with the possibility of "breaking" the game (seeing missing textures you're not supposed to see in the first place, getting stuck and unable to backtrack, etc). It's true that these things could happen, but how then does Dishonored manage to allow that level of movement freedom? Maybe they spent a heck of a lot of time and effort to ensure people couldn't break the game while still allowing full movement possible. That's what you'd expect developers to do with a AAA title - that why you pay them full price, to do that leg work, not to take the lazy, easy road of limiting the player. Anyway, perhaps I'm stuck in an old-school mentality, but I honestly don't care if I end up getting stuck in level geometry or see dodgy textures due to me jumping/mantling up to an areas that wasn't expected for players to get to. It doesn't ruin my impression of the game, and in fact we should be ENCOURAGING such behaviour from players. I believe the term some people like to use is "emergent gameplay" - gameplay that ends up happening that the developers never considered. This sticking of the player to a completely linear path, boxing them in, ensuring that "oh no no, you shouldn't try going there, go here instead" just smacks of caring more about presentation rather than what the gamer could accomplish.

It's a new game, it's a big release, it's a sequel to a series that people here might just have a slight interest in. Of course it's gonna be talked about for months on end. I don't even give a shit about playing the game, but as I've gotten older I've realised something very important - it's very easy to just not enter threads that you have no interest in. It doesn't hurt, trust me.

I'm generally a blackjack-loving hooligan, but on the rare occasion that there's a mission where you are allowed to kill on the Difficult skill level, I let loose with my bow and arrow. Given it's pretty rare to be allowed to kill on Difficult, I rather enjoy the occasion to gurantee a stealth score of 0 through, shall we say, direct means. I'm aware how it's not really thief-like behaviour, but it's the exception rather than the rule, and the effect of an arrow to the face is quite effective and even satisfying for a game that doesn't generally promote such gameplay.

Unfortunately though, it can't and won't be judged on its own merits. It's got a set of previous games to be compared to (and it will). It's like when Deus Ex: Invisible War came out; it got bashed because compared to the original Deus Ex it was mostly trash, but on its own without any legacy to consider it's probably OK (Human Revolution was a much better game though, regardless of whether it was compared or not). You can try judging it on its own merits, but don't be surprised if the fans who liked the previous games are unable to judge it solely. If it had a different name, then it would probably have faired better in reviews as people familiar with previous Thief titles wouldn't be predisposed, conscious or not, of what to expect. Bah, Internet forums are excellent at turning the most mundane of topics into issues of life and death and personal pride.

Hehe. Yes well, there's nothing really wrong with discussion about philosophy. The issue is that when someone posts a comment about how a company of a former series of games might be "spinning in their grave", I doubt they were expecting to be jumped on. They probably were only try to argue that Looking Glass' legacy had been damaged by a substandard successor made by another developer (in their opinion of course). The OP didn't expect a reaction like yours though, which to be fair is quite tame compared to other forums.

I haven't played Thief 4, but what you describe sounds exactly like what they did with Far Cry 3. In that game you can perform a "manual save" via a menu save option or a function key, but in reality all it's doing is saving the last checkpoint and NOT a literal save of your actual point in the game as you'd expect. This got a bit confusing until I realised what was happening, and really there's no point of the save function then since checkpoints are saved automatically anyway and if you die you just go back to them. If you quit, the last checkpoint is loaded, so manual saves are pointless.

The Internet is all about taking innocent comments and blowing them up into a philosophical discussion. There's a reason I don't bother with most forums anymore.