jay pettitt

yumyum

There is a sense where you're kinda left asking, oh so it tells you what to do, where to go, how to solve the puzzles - but you have to keep it topped up with readily available tokens - and... seriously, that's your game?

That worries me too. Push comes to shove, features like T4's focus ability aren't there arbitrarily. They're a solution to a design problem. Take the solution away and you've still got the problem. I'm not sure how a game full of unresolved design problems promises to be a classic (or future classic) Thief experience, hardcore or otherwise.

Yeah, it's obviously nonsense. I guess it's just something he blurted out when asked to provide a soundbite to recommend the potential of the PS4.

Anyway - new (to me at least) moving picture show featuring bits of T4... And yes, Stepahne Roy announces different shades of light and dark as a next gen feature. Cor blimey gov.

I guess jtr refers to the known example from the E3 Eurogamer demo where the player receives an alert cancelling the the objective to pickpocket the guard captian when entering a new area. It's a small thing, may not even be in the final game, and maybe isn't the end of the world anyway. But it's also not as though Eidos Montreal are selling the game on the basis that there's cohesive simulated environments and emergent game play opportunities within. Push comes to shove, going back and forwards is linear. jtr bemoans what looks like very limited possibilities for the player to be creative about how he or she goes back and forward. Some might argue that a next gen Thief game should push those kinds of features harder than the previous games, not less (i.e. with limited rope arrow attachment points).

Carmack has now left the id building...

Ignorance is bliss, but only for a little while.

Rock Paper Shotgun has posted a Paul Weir interview. It doesn't clear anything up. My guess - because the original intention was that Weir was going to carefully and meticulously craft all the audio, and then left a few months later - is that it went south. But that's wild speculation.

I guess, but it sounds temporary to me. Something that would send a guard/guards into a choking fit that he recovers from after a while. But maybe it chokes them out cold. Who knows.

I guess they've got an arrow that temporarily disables guards. Kinda like a flash bomb in effect.

What confusion? I didn't think or insinuate that you were paid. I wouldn't care if you were. I think you should be, because, well, volunteering is nice and all, but it's not as though Eidos are a charity or good cause. That's what I said. I'm not confused about it. Moderating is a lot like chairing a meeting. Despite your protests to the contrary. The point of chairing a meeting is to manage a, ya know, forum for other people to speak. Trust me on that, I know of what I speak. [edit - to make it unmistakably clear for thiefessa who is still getting it wrong below] The chair moderates the meeting. Like a moderator. The secretary's role is to organise the meeting, set out the agenda and spaces for discussion, like a forum admin. The chair moderates. And (the important bit) it's a job of listening, not talking endlessly and trying to get your favoured position to the fore. And I maintain that you are between a rock and a hard place. Not for the reasons you think I said it. I don't think you're under any instruction to promote T4. I do think that managing a forum where people want to grumble puts demands on moderators to strike a balance. So far, all the misunderstandings (and others besides) are your own. But like you say, it's good you posted here and cleared them up for yourself. Well done. Also congrats on noticing that the thread title is premature. You're on a roll!

There was no confusion Viktoria. Fare thee well.

Well why not would include that 3 months from a release of a AAA title that's likely cost Eidos the thick end of $50,000000 the EM fora are attracting contributions from 5 or 6 posters a day. 2 of which are moderators. Push comes to shove, moderating is a bit like chairing a meeting. It's an exercise in listening, not talking. Having lots to say is absolutely fine. It doesn't make anyone a bad person in the slightest or any sort of way. Having lots to say is great. But it might make you not the best chair or moderator. (but it might make you the best something else) --edit-- Sorry, this is slightly complex. I'm not trying to say that a volunteer or two at the Eidos fora are singlehandedly putting off hundreds of thousands of potential punters (that'd be silly). Eidos Proper need to raise their PR game x1000 (assuming their actual game development game is better than lots would credit) and they'll sink or swim accordingly. But watching a couple of volunteer moderators try and keep it positive on the boards is kinda painful. tldr version - Thief (and it's reception) isn't your problem, you can't fix it. Again, I appreciate that you're stuck between a rock and a hard place.

Like I said. I hope they're paying you. I think you're doing a font line public relations job (and 24/7 apparently, going by your posting rate) at a key time for a product potentially worth 10s if not 100s of $millions to them. I think they're taking you for a fool / for granted if they're not. tbh though, while we're here, the amount of posting that you do over there and the way that you try and 'correct' and supervise the direction discussions just makes it a not very nice place to talk (or read) about Thief. I was minded to resuscitate my account the other week because of the way you and MT were behaving when some kid was making some fair point about something or other. I know it's a tricky job getting the balance right, but there it is. Sorry. I fear you forget that you're not just a taffer but also a moderator. Perhaps it would be best if EM did pay staff (who weren't dedicated fans of said franchise) to do the moderating so you and everyone else can speak their mind freely and equally. --edit-- Also it occurs that I probably should have just pm'd that last paragraph 'cos it's borderline personal. For the benefit of everyone else though - jay has no interest in bashing EM fora or their volunteer moderators. Trying to keep that place welcoming for everyone - including people who aren't grumpy pissed-off taffers - is tricky as hell I'm sure and I'd rather it was Viktoria doing it than me.

I hope to hell they're paying Viktoria, 'cos she's on there day and night.

umm, the effect it has in your picture is to brighten the shadow, creating an anomaly where the the shadow cast by the table is noticeably brighter than the shaded parts of said table. Which looks a mite weird.

Err, I'm not sure anyone is hating on DX:HR (or splinter cell). There's a world of difference between hating and gushing. blatant sign posting seems to be a thing. I suspect there's at least some method behind the madness. In a world where game controllers having pretty much killed off z-axis play you probably need to scream 'look at the great big pipe! perhaps you can go up there' I remember the Dishonored devs saying that one of the issues that arose from focus testing was that when they had a guard tell players they're not allowed go upstairs in Lady Boyles' mansion, players assumed they couldn't go up stairs. Games have been telling players that they can't deviate from the linear predetermined path for the best part of a decade.

I never imagined, for example, that the factory early in Deus Ex was an actual factory. Their were factory themed areas: store rooms, some offices, Some, err, 'labs'. But there wasn't a narrative being told in the level design that connected them in any way. No products were seen being produced and found in varying states of completion for example. Just corridor / arena / corridor / arena over and over. Considering Eidos Montreal were bigging up the systems simulation side of DX:HR in their PR, it's a shame they didn't try harder to simulate cohesive places rather than rooms.

There's much more to sound than music. Environmental audio especially was really poor.

Amazingly written? I found it utterly forgettable. Paper thin characters and plots in uninspired locations. It was nice enough as a thinking mans cover based shooter mind - a sort of Splinter Cell with Deus Ex style rpg elements on the side that worked surprisingly well. But give it a few years I doubt it'll be remembered as one of the greats. And aside from some inoffensive muzak, the audio work was pretty much non existent. That bothers me with Thief around the corner.

Last I heard there was some squabbling over what defined a QTE and a claim that Thief 4 didn't contain any. Ducking and diving through the burning bridge, for example, apparently contains no QTEs - with Garrett performing contextual actions as he navigates through that section. Though I suspect some will find it a bit too scripted - even if the scripts are fired by context rather than wrote.

Looking very nice. Some trim looks too much like facade in ghouse4.jpg. And I guess the arris where the arched ceiling meets an area of flat ceiling in ghouse3.jpg jumps out as fake - could that line be broken with a bit of detail or something. But yeah, nice work. It's got a kind of naturalness to the lighting and textures that seems to evade a lot of what we get to see in TDM. Almost like something SlipTip might tease people with.

The first three aren't disputes. Buying a CD (or MP3 or whatever) doesn't give you a right to distribute copies. If it's vanilla Dark Mod content, the arty stuff is released under a creative commons license that allows you to make non-commercial attributed copies. So yes, you have a license. It's possible that some missions contain content released under other licenses though. Fair Use includes review, but that probably doesn't include a play through - because the principle purpose isn't you saying 'I like/dislike this mission'. (But as a general thing, fair use isn't intended to allow you to use copyrighted material. It's intended to prevent copyright holders abusing their rights. If a photograph of a street scene happened, quite incidentally, to include, say, a shop sign - Fair Use would prevent the owner of the sign the photographer can't use the photograph or should pay him. But that's not what you're doing. Your use isn't incidental. It's deliberate and intentional.) The content isn't in the public domain and is protected by copyright laws. This is largely guesswork on my part. But I'd imagine that music publishers and TV channels are anal about copyright, and thus Youtube will auto scan for music/TV that might be copyrighted. Where as Video Game publishers probably aren't (or at least not in the same way) - which is why there's oodles of Let's Play vids over the intertubes, but no Let's Watch TV vids. Technically they probably are infringing copyright and the copyright owner could choose to act, but games publishers seem happy to let them continue. I don't think you could claim that a vid of you playing a game was an original creative work and the art and music and level designs were only incidental.

Me thinks Eidos Montreal maybe wouldn't be using 4shared.com to distribute its beta releases.