Airship Ballet

Purely psychological techniques that naysayers can't seem to look past. Serialising is purely logistical, made to let people know what intellectual property it is and to take audiences from previous titles as guaranteed sales day one. It's a business; gotta make money or no more food for you. Having said that, sequels are in no way obligated to so much as resemble those that came before it. There is almost always some tangible thread pulled through them all that unifies them, but beyond that they're their own games. Friday the 13th ended up in space and Final Fantasy uses a different universe, battle system, characters and meta in almost every game. This game is called Thief; it's a game about sneaking and it was advertised to the people who enjoyed the Thief series as well as everybody else, which is also about a thief. Similarities stop there. Like I said, no Russell, no Looking Glass, no late '90s culture, nothing. Call it a reboot, call it a spiritual successor, whatever you like, there's nothing tying it down to the original games but the name and the overly nostalgic fanbase who got sucked in by the marketing and are now pissed off because it's not Thief The Dark Metal Age Project Mark II Electric Boogaloo. It's nostalgia, it's longing for a past that is still accessible elsewhere and it's presented in the whiniest way possible in most cases. I don't really mind how negative people are about a game that doesn't exist yet: their tunnel vision only affects their enjoyment.

*cringe*

Don't think you read that last part.

Eh, just looks like somebody trying a bit too hard to be edgy. Nothing offensive, kinda like a Marilyn Manson video: shock imagery and no core to it. The monkey wrench was from Opposing Force by the way, shame on you =P

@Skaruts The problem is that people really aren't willing to be challenged nowadays; it's not an unjustified fear. You can go check out any general gaming forum you like on a game and there'll be illiterates like Garreth who can't take good advice and just rage and moan when it doesn't go their way. They condemn the company and the series and they make a net loss in sales. People never have been consistently willing to be challenged, though. The vast majority of people just straight-up aren't good at video games. You play any multiplayer game, be it co-op or competitive, and you'll find there are people you can walk over and there are people you have a tough time with, and others who just play it obsessively. It's the same as in The Gatehouse, the FM that just came out. Tons of people were struggling with the simplest of mantling at the end of the mission, and that's because they either grew up playing one type of game in particular or have vastly decreased their playtime in later life. People are, for the most part, casual gamers. You aren't going to sell copies if you don't make it possible for people to take the easy route. I'm playing Dune Legacy with the updated AI and Jesus Christ it takes an hour or two of retries until I finally manage the one mission. Average Joe McCallofDuty would have gotten angry, broken some hardware and gone to whine on IGN's forums by now. It's always been the same, though. Thief, Doom, Unreal Tournament, Quake, XCOM, Daggerfall, Anvil of Dawn... yhadda yhadda, they all have crazy easy difficulty settings if you want it like that. They also all have crazy difficult settings, same as Thiaf purportedly does. You can impose a playstyle to make it difficult if there really isn't anything built into the game but in this case there's tons you can turn off, as far as I know. Even if there wasn't, I'd play something else for difficulty and this for enjoyment. Entertainment =/= difficulty when it comes down to it. Also with regards to it having to live up to its series, that's a purely psychological thing. People always argue that devs should have called it a spin-off and that it doesn't live up to the Thief name and that on its own it'll be decent but it's tarnished the series forever so on, so forth. Well turn that around; why can't people just treat it like a spin-off? No Stephen Russell, no Looking Glass, no Builders or Keepers or whatever lore they've missed out. It's a game about a dude sneaking around a city, nabbing stuff and meeting supernatural ghoulies of the night. It's called Thief. They use it as a means to pull in people who enjoyed the series, granted, but it sure as hell isn't a sequel to the first three. Think of it differently and you suddenly take it a lot less personally. It is a different game, it isn't a Looking Glass sequel and is essentially a game in its own right. Why not treat it like one instead of mourning predecessors past?

The progression is as gradual and unnoticeable as somebody you see every day aging. I went back to play GTA IV just a few days ago and damn, it looks and plays like a PS2 game to me now. I may be cynical about the baby steps up each hugely expensive hardware upgrade is but it makes a hell of a difference over a few years. It depends on how the devs use the hardware, too. The PC will always be the prettier, higher FPS alternative but GTA V looks pretty great on ye olde 360. They may be comparatively crippled but they still hold their own in some respects. I say that as a PC master race enthusiast, too.

I was just curious, since you said you were moving house and couldn't make any changes to the mission until you had. An awful lot of things were pulled up so if you fixed them that quickly I'd love some tips. Link's got restricted access anyway.

That second screenshot looks like it's taken out of Contrast. They look really cool, would be great for a stylized game like Mad World. A bit more noise and fading and they'll look perfect for the richest of the rich.

Moved house already?

It's quite fitting that the guy called Viktor sounds like a vampire. In terms of AI, this is looking more and more like what Skyrim was hyped to be before they reduced it to a select couple of people mutely chopping logs for days. In terms of graphics, it's looking like I'm going to have to upgrade again... That third guy who turns every sentence into a question though... pet peeve.

They're fighting the good fight as the vox populi and we're the foolish sheeples who want to judge it by its own merits rather than compare it to a game that came out 15 years ago. I'm hoping for at least as much fun as Dishonored gave me. That was easy, uninspired and generic but it was fun. A good few hours of fun is all it takes for me to feel my money was well-spent. I've had my TDP/TMA fun and I've enjoyed TDS for different reasons, now I'm having my TDM fun. To be honest I can see myself getting tired of the gameplay, just because I've played hundreds of hours of it over the past decade. Now I'll probably enjoy this for completely different reasons but I'm not going to complain about a AAA publisher releasing a dumbed-down version of an old franchise. They can still be fun and they probably will be, despite all their simplified mechanics. Compare Deus Ex to this studio's Human Revolution. The latter is way, way more simplified and I actually enjoyed it a ton more than the first. This Thief isn't going to come close to resembling its predecessors, but I know for sure I don't have a stick up my ass telling me it's a bad thing if it doesn't pander to me because I complain somewhere the devs can see it. They've already changed a load of things people have decried but all those people do is check it off and yell "next" in a 65 page circle-jerk disregarding the efforts of people who've worked at it for years, simply because it doesn't resemble old memories they have. I don't understand the mentality that the next game in the series has to play and look the same as those before it, only shinier and more optimized. Honestly, just take it for what it is and enjoy it for what it is, not for how similar it is to ye olde series. If you're so hell-bent on prejudice, why bother to make a big ol' self-indulgence thread anyway? "I'm not going to buy this but I'm sure as Hell going to let people know about it. Nothing will change during this thread; I will simply re-iterate myself and echo others who agree, thanking them for their support in this hard time. For the good of the sheeples." All this obnoxiously exaggerated hatred for trying something new that resembles the contemporary rather than the dated, and all the while the devs are seeing it and they're just: Buy it, don't buy it, say why and then leave it. I preferred it when it was near impossible to contact devs. That way, you got what you got and you either liked it or didn't, no pre-flop all-ins based on nothing concrete for months before release.

Huh, it was quite a jump compared to the slow, arbitrary upgrades we're getting fed now. I upgraded fairly quickly so I can understand the plight of those who couldn't. Still, there was plenty around to keep them entertained on 98 until they could manage it, same as there always is when you get left in the dust. I guess they never mentioned the possibility to play it on 98 if there was the slightest chance a bunch of people couldn't play it. Besides, having the shiny new technology credits on your advertisements will have the PC master race types scrambling for it.

Just looked in every combination of English/German describing that I can think of and nada. Shame, because it sounds hilarious =P Also here's a video.

There's a 65 page thread full of your hyperbole. Maybe leave it out of this one? I was in that same boat. I didn't hold it against the game, though =P

Hahaha, what? Really? Oh my... some people. "Damn that technology and its tendency to advance."

People pre-emptively slammed Heath Ledger as being completely unfitting as The Joker because he didn't resemble their preconception of the character. Look at how that turned out.

I've been sticking them into a pdf anyway, just didn't in this case because Puush has a fit. Got it to work though, updated the OP. I'm not a bad person though you can trust me.

When I was a teengaer I was really into anything and everything Fantasy, regardless of its quality. I read a lot of meaningful classics for English, the stuff all English courses teach because they're too lazy to deviate from the masses of notes they and others in their community have already made. So yeah, I read Fantasy a lot to get away from all that and just enjoy a care-free adventure story with no particular agenda or message to give out other than the unavoidable didacticism of the format. Just before university I wrote a huge, huge, novel-length story. I was pretty depressed at the time and I used writing as escapism, mostly. I kept myself busy with it and had a bunch of fun! I foolishly told my Fantasy-addicted fiancée about this a few months ago and she immediately insisted that I translate it from Finnish for her to read. Now obviously she's biased but she really enjoys it and I, again foolishly, let her know about another version of it. That version was written while I was in university over the first three years and was a lot more adult, a bit more visceral and grittier. The frame narrative of the first was of a main character re-telling the story to a student wanting to write their paper on him, and the narrative of the latter is just third-person FID. The former is a relatively unreliable narration as it paints a prettier picture than the real re-telling and the few years I'd grown since the first had made me really want to re-write it more maturely. So, I'm now just starting to translate the second and got the first chapter done last night. This version, the second one, starts after the prologue of the first, and so is missing a bit of context without reading that. I may upload the original's prologue or just re-write it in this style, who knows? It was while re-reading Moonbo's awesome companion story to Requiem that I figured there could be an audience for it here. If there are any Fantasy fans among you--and I'm sure there are many--you're welcome to have a read! I don't expect reviews or criticism at all, I just think it could be a neat opportunity to have it put to a use other than sitting on my hard drive and being read solely by my better half. I've put up a little poll as to whether or not you'd like to read more and whether or not you'd like it by the chapter or whatever. Beyond that, I'm not after praise or condemnation to the fiery pits or lofty paradise of Fantasy Heaven or Hell because they were both written about a decade ago now. Feel free to tear it apart or lap it up; there's no chance to hurt or bolster my feelings because it's a project in the past from a fairly dark time in my life. It's done and gone, but it'd be a shame to let it go to waste! Download link: http://puu.sh/6Tl9d.doc http://puu.sh/6TOt1.pdf

And then you woke up. Dev teams don't hire people to make a wardrobe, a cove or a puzzle, but: Tomb Raider L.A. Noire Design DESIGNERS 2 Timur Anoshechkin Brian Berryhill James Carlton Lyza Dator Christopher Glerum Jean-Francois Guastalla Darren Lim Angela Lin Dean Longmore Samuel Maniscalco Adam Markham Andrew Orman Conrad Ramakers Jennifer Sandercock Tim Stobo Jarrad Trudgen Shane Wicke Mark Wilson Jason Yamada ADDITIONAL DESIGN 2 Travis Draper Leena Ganguli Brad Keyes Donald Kirkland Viljar Sommerbakk LEAD - INTERIORS Sam Henman INTERIORS 2 Kevin Baker Thomas Diakomichalis Jianxiong (Kent) Li Ben Muller Carl Ross CLUES & PROPS 2 Fiona Bird Andrew Hamilton Gordon Kam Anella Petrie Brad Price Gabriel Rodriguez Skyrim Lead Level Designer Jeff Browne Level Design Daryl Brigner Joel Burgess Steve Cornett Ryan Jenkins Andrew Langlois Justin Schram World Art Cory Edwards Tony Greco Daniel T. Lee Nate Purkeypile Rashad Redic Ryan Sears Clara Struthers Rafael Vargas Robert Wisnewski Lead Environment Art Noah Berry Environment Art Andy Barron Ryan Salvatore Megan Sawyer Additional Environment Art Gabrielle Adams Alex Schwartz-Rudd Christopher Zdana Lemme guess, uncredited? =P

Just the tip.

In that case, good luck! It may not be practical but having a sword with your achievement etched into it is still a pretty cool commemoration.

Are you a Dr? If so I want to see your top hat and sword.

Affirmatory, both my day job and my other: network [security] manager/vidya game QA tester. One is more computer-intensive, the other is just a means for me to produce write-ups.