Bluehawk
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Posts posted by Bluehawk
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On 2/2/2023 at 8:14 AM, chakkman said:
Well, at least Randy Smith did some good stuff in the meantime. Although I also see quite a decline in the line of Arkane Studio's games... Deathloop didn't grip me at all, and I'm very sceptical that Redfall will.
Are you confusing Randy Smith with Harvey Smith?
SpoilerBecause I did too.
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I tested it just now and I can reach the ladder just fine, as long as I hold down the run button while swimming.
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I always wondered about Karras's helmet in T2. Is there an in-game explanation for why it has such an elongated cranium? Is he supposed to be a mutant with a big brain, or is it just hubris? Did he steal his helmet from the "Precursors" of the Lost City and it serves as an oblique reference to skull-binding practiced in several real life ancient cultures?
Sorry if this is off-topic.
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In the Tenements there is a scholar who has left a Book of Enigmas in his room. You must seek to understand "The Octagon Weird". If you want a better hint, open the spoiler.
SpoilerThe excavation in Grunt's basement is actually directly below his neighbour's estate. The one that's "For sale" and barricaded on the street-level.
If you just want the solution, open this second spoiler.
SpoilerYou need to enter Bellingcourt's Mansion through an open window. Get up onto the roofs around Tar Street, head to Crosset Square and then climb across the chain to an open window. There you'll find a lonely wizard who has been imprisoned in his own home, and among his many strange possessions is a gargoyle with a key in its mouth.
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Spoiler
The secret key was stolen from the engineer who makes the rounds checking the three hidden switches. The key is a bypass that lets you open the two portcullises guarding the switches to the main portcullis that opens the tower. So if you want to rush the main objective, enter the mansion through the spa room windows (rope arrow required) and find the pagan's hiding spot, and then head to one of the control rooms in the center-north, use the key, pop the tower open and Bob's your uncle.
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I find the light-gem/shadow balance to be quite strange in places, where the ground beneath your feet appears pitch black on default settings, but your light-gem is glowing faintly and you'll be in such a narrow space that you can't help but aggro an enemy (the dogs in the caves are especially hard to ghost past). If you crank up the brightness and gamma, you can see the edges of shadows more clearly but the whole aesthetic of the game is ruined. Sometimes you'll open a door near a light and the baked lightmap is static but your illumination seems to be dynamic, so it looks like there's a shadow flush with the doorway but your gem will light up anyway from direct line-of-sight with the lamp. If there were stencil shadows being drawn, this ambiguity wouldn't happen, or otherwise if enemies had more levels of alert with a forgiving curve, it wouldn't be such a touchy issue.
Several times I thought to myself, "The Dark Mod did this a little bit better..." but these are still early days and I'm sure these features will be improved, since they're so fundamental. Things like light graduation and enemy sensitively levels will probably takes months or years to hone in perfectly and I'm liking what I see so far. The combat is meh, but optional, the world-building seems promising, and I love the look of the game. It's also great to hear the vocal talents of Stephen Weyte and Terri Brosius, though the VO is a bit sparse in the demo.
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Spoiler
I think it's because the creepy telescopefish face draws the player's attention away from the bottom corner, and the vignette of the glasses then covers it up.
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This might sound odd, but I wish it were easier to kill rats in the Dark Mod using the sword. Presently it feels nearly impossible and you're better off using broadheads. There are maybe only a handful of times when you need to kill a rat, like in Chronicles of Skullduggery 3 or arguably Full Moon Fever, so it's not a huge problem (or a problem at all), but in an immersive sim, skewering a stationary rat on the tip of your sword really shouldn't be so tricky.
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The teller key simply opens the front door, you got it from the keybox in the lobby. The "teller safe key" is what you need.
SpoilerA disgruntled employee in the wine cellar can help you.
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My go to answer for this question used to be Metal Gear Solid 1 for the original Playstation, but then I wondered now if I experienced it fresh for the first time today, as an adult in 2022 playing it as an old retro game on an emulator, I'd probably appreciate it academically, but not be totally enraptured by it as I was in 1999, when it was genuinely new and cutting edge for gaming, and like something I had never experienced before even in film or literature (I wasn't well-read at the time). This thought experiment would work better with recent releases that haven't had time to age yet, and don't have mountains of essays written about them to colour your expectations, but I can't think of any modern release that amazed me enough to warrant erasing them from my memory and playing them fresh again.
But on the other hand, I didn't play Thief Gold and TMA until long after their release and they definitely still hold up today as fresh experiences, regardless of how "dated" they look, sound and feel, so maybe MGS would still amaze me... I'm just not sure. I'd definitely recognize more of the references and rip-offs Kojima was leaning on and it would be a different experience regardless.
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Melan's 3rd mission in the Penny Dreadful series, "Erasing the Trail", has a hidden memorial to Lady Rowena, a much-celebrated FM author for Thief 1 and 2, who passed away in 2016, not long before this mission was published.
To access the memorial:
SpoilerHead down to Canon St. in the south-west and look to the alley on the left of the church. Climb up to the statues and press a button in one of the eyes, then head to the garden behind the church and look for a door which has just opened. You'll have to get through a few traps to reach the final chamber, where you'll be rewarded with useful tools and the memorial.
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I think dropping ray-tracing into Thief 1 and 2's levels would ruin their designed shadows and make sneaking around impossible, but a new game built from the ground up with raytracing in mind could be interesting.
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One problem I had when replaying this mission recently was that fighting the skeleton in the shop would sometimes attract the attention of the guards on the street, so I had to quickload two or three times just for that opening sequence. And also the guards walking through the rain and thunder don't seem to have their hearing appropriately handicapped, so the player is at an unfair disadvantage generally when sneaking through those noisy environments.
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I can tell you where Tobin's apartment is, if you really want to spoil the sweet and fleeting joy of independent discovery... Do not open this spoiler tag lest you be stricken with incurable melancholy.
SpoilerFirst you need to enter Burgage House, which you can do by going to Black Briar Park, climbing up the water tank by the green light and getting onto the balcony. Once inside the building, go up the first flight of stairs and then look up to find some interior windows overlooking the stairwell, lit subtly by a candle. Climb up inside to find Tobin's apartment.
Now for your next challenge, find the secret skeleton key that opens every door and chest in the mission.
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I noticed a funny quirk in this mission due to the new female protagonist. Guards have an idle animation where they'll stretch their arms out to get the kinks out of their shoulders or whatever and play a grunt sound, but in the ai_sfx.sndshd file, one of the avaliable oggs for "tdm_stretch" is "player_tired_1.ogg". That file among others is replaced by the new voice actress, so occasionally you'll hear male guards gasp like a woman before going back to their usual mumbling and grumbling.
Regardless, I think the actress did a good job nailing a balance between being hopeful for the future and maybe a little naive but also calloused by her life of crime, not just a gender-swapped Corbin/Garrett and not a retread of Zaya from T2X. There's room for character development if she appears in a sequel, maybe visiting Northdale some day
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To get through the checkpoint requires a more face-to-face solution than the typical thief scenario.
SpoilerYou need to find a written letter of safe conduct to show to the guard behind the steel door. Then he'll open the gate.
SpoilerTo find the letter, look in the fireplace of a certain lord who lives near the Bear and Belcher Inn.
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I notice in 1.1 performance improvements generally across the map, roughly 10 fps better in the busiest areas and even 30+ in simpler interiors.
I think I've found a broken readable though. In the "Moonlit Manse" there's a spilled book with four pages to read. Three of them are fine, but when I frob the right-most page, the 2D sprite for the paper doesn't pop up, and I suddenly can't frob anything anymore, nor open my inventory window, or mantle up on ledges. I can fix this by reloading a save, and the bug is repeatable.
Spoiler
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16 hours ago, Wellingtoncrab said:
Would you mind sharing your rough hardware config so I have a reference?
Intel Core i7-2600K, 4 cores, 3.40GHz
ATI/AMD Radeon R9 390 (8 GB GDDR5)
32 GB DDR3 physical memory
I prefer to play at my native desktop resolution of 2560x1440, with low AO, low soft shadows, stencil shadows, no AA, medium LODs. I know my machine is about 5-10 years old now in parts, so I don't really have grounds to complain. I think the "problem" might just come down to lots of particle effects and a little bit of over-draw in the visportals. Sometimes exterior meshes like distant towers bleed into the interior scenes.
Here are some examples, with n_ShowTris on 0, 1 and 2.
SpoilerIn Percy's Potables
SpoilerIn the central hallway of Burgage House
SpoilerIn the alley outside the starting apartment, looking toward the blacksmith's shop. All the shadows and haze hide a great deal...
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Well I didn't get terribly great performance. I was frequently hovering around 30 fps even in simple interiors, for some reason. However, this is one of the greater FMs ever released so far for the Dark Mod, in my opinion. It's architecture and layout, difficulty balance, unique gameplay, readables and lore, all excellent across the board. Lots of opportunity for alternative routes and solutions - for example, I finished the mission with three sets of lockpicks and two sets of "peculiar glasses". So many little stories to discover and threads left open to interpretation or maybe a sequel... It's also a great twist on the usual plague quarter mission.
SpoilerI especially like how much of the plague quarter is not occupied by the undead, but instead two groups of squatters rummaging through the ruins, just like the player.... but then there is a supernatural presence deeper in the neighbourhood. And how the older architecture in the plague quarter means more moonlight to contend with - you move through that space differently than in Red Rook. I laughed out loud when I cracked the code for the Sanguine Dawn and discovered it was basically just an empty club house full of mundane furniture, and the objective list even said "you grew no closer to understanding it secrets". That encapsulates the "less is more" story-telling throughout.
Am I right in assuming that there isn't really a "client" hiring the player character? That he lived in the "forgotten house" before the outbreak of whatever and the painting is his to retrieve. The Iris he's writing to is dead and he's still grieving for her. That's my interpretation.
It took me a good long while to figure out how to end the mission after finding too many mementos. I thought first I had to return to the house, or the church catacombs, those didn't work. Then I returned to "Thief's End" and the "Improbable Sanctuary", those didn't work. Only when I fell off a roof and died did I discover that suicide is the PC's only escape... And then I reloaded anyway and discovered that when you die you can sent to either the Improbable Sanctuary or to the "Communion Chamber" Twin Peaks reference place... possibly depending if you failed the optional no-kills objective, but I don't know what the wider implication there is. Maybe the phrasing of the objective could be clarified for the player so they know they need to die, though I understand you wanted it to be a secret ending of sorts.
I scored it 5/5/5.
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On the hardest difficulty there's an objective forbidding knockouts and kills, but it doesn't seem to register for all NPCs. For example, the civilian in red on fleet st. or the cook and servants on the ground floor of the mansion can all be knocked out or killed without triggering the fail-state, but killing most/all guards works correctly.
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Spoiler
The security cage is in "Odbert's Cellar" the wine shop at the bottom of the stairs, south of your apartment. You enter through a ground-level window.
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I wish the last time I interacted with him wasn't just to complain about some irrelevant point on emergent gameplay, that was maybe an annoyance he could have done without. My condolences to his family, and my respects to all the great things he created.
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My framerate jumped from about a steady average of 30 throughout the map to 50-60. Great patch.
The mission itself is excellent too, by the way.
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Fan Mission: The House of deLisle
in Fan Missions
Posted
The five mushrooms can be found:
One in the basement, in the second wine-cellar that appears after you steal the medallion. For an added bonus, pay attention to the shadows being cast by the candle on top of the wine rack.
One can be found on the ground floor in the front parlour.
One is on the second floor, next to the fireplace, possibly the hardest to get.
Two are found in the attic: one in the dead thief's hiding place and the other in the far corner, forcing you to go around all the clutter in the middle.
I really enjoyed this mission on my first playthrough, but when I replayed it a second time to try and get all loot and secrets and ghost it, I ran into some nasty RNG that basically soft-locked me.
After you start the fire in the library, the enemies are aggro'd and come running into the hallway. Sometimes you'll get lucky and they'll diserpse again at random, but in my case, I had the headless father from downstairs, the wife and two spiders all stuck on an open door and running in circles. Impossible to pass stealthily lol
I'm surprised a little that we didn't get to hear the baby weird screams as described in the journal, or enter the baby's room with the crib at some point, but the imagination may be scarier than anything you can easily achieve in the game engine. A great little mission to play on the 31st, short and sweet but chewy like taffy.