skacky

Did any of you really thought this could have turned to be any better than Deadly Shadows? At least TDS had a clear design document. Thi4f doesn't.

There's this one with very funny bits: http://t.co/Qs9EiVdM2U

I'm originally from Bitche, France (that's a real city) which has a medieval citadel, and I've been living in Montpellier for almost 6 years now.

The blue is way too strong imo. I'd recommend you tone it down and make it more pale.

I've always been interested in seeing how an arabic/oriental setting would work in Thief/TDM.

I would have liked it better if the choice of textures was more coherent and if they were properly aligned this time around. The latter is very easy to do with NewDark now since you can fine tune alignment, which wasn't possible before. Still, the textures themselves are for the most part very good.

That's a false argument in the case of Thi4f, IMO. Stealth was not an established genre back then and developers and publishers alike were not really sure how to market the game at that time. Stealth gained a lot of popularity after Thief 2 and there's, what, an almost 10 year gap between TDS and Thi4f? They have no excuses for doing what they did in the recent trailers, especially when they say that we can play very stealthily. They never showed that, only violence. But hey the devs said they wanted to have the modern audience, and it's almost exclusively made of dudebros wanking each others off about their K/D ratio on Call of Duty.

Yeah I watched that yesterday. I think the worst thing in that is definitely the abominable voice acting.

Goddamn, you guys are killing it! These can't come soon enough.

I'm sorry, but no. I'm not talking about places, I'm talking about overall story direction here. Both games have an exiled hero; Corvo was sentenced to prison and was going to hang, and Garrett decided to exile himself. They both return to their respective cities after something tragic happened; the death of Empress Kaldwin for Corvo, and Erin's death for Garrett. Both cities are now ruled by a tyrannical power; the Lord Regent Burrows in Dishonored and the Baron in Thief. Both cities are suffering from a plague; the rat plague in Dunwall and "the Gloom" in The City. Both heroes use supernatural powers; the powers given by the Outsider for Corvo, and some stupid-ass powers coming from God knows where for Garrett (he was not gifted with supernatural powers in the original games). Both games are the theater of an ongoing revolution; the Royalists in Dishonored and Orion's group in Thief. Both games have an old lady who is a myth; Granny Rags for Dunwall and The Queen of Beggars for The City. You could say she's reminiscent of The Hag, but The Hag was a monster. You see where I'm going now?

I feel like Arkane should really sue Eidos Montreal for plagiarism at this point. The similarities between this and Dishonored are really really obvious now. They even have a Granny Rags character for Christ's sake.

New blood, heh. Congrats on the release!

I don't even remember how many years (is it 5 or 6?) this game spent in development, and I can see it still hasn't progressed much.

Doom has bad level design? If you'd said Doom 2 I'd agree (because it felt uninspired and was a mess, even if the last few levels are brilliant), but Doom is excellence in level design even today, especially Knee Deep in the Dead and Thy Flesh Consumed. The amount of stuff they managed to squeeze in an engine that couldn't stack rooms is truly mind-boggling and most of the levels are non-linear and encourage exploration a lot. Quake has even better level design in that regard with some really original layouts (Ziggurat Vertigo anyone?). Blood, yeah. I can agree more or less. The rest I don't know, I really like how the levels are in Fallout 1/2 and Silent Hill, but the mechanics of the latter are a lot more of a problem than the level design in my opinion (the camera angles for instance).

As I said I like DX:HR, but I think the level design relied way too much on repeated setpieces/puzzles and that didn't make stealth worthwhile at all in my eyes, since once you get used to these setpieces you see them everywhere. I really like Splinter Cell too (especially Chaos Theory, the rest not so much), but the stealth in Chaos Theory is a lot more strict and difficult. The game can punish you very quickly for your mistakes and the AI can be diabolical, which isn't the case in HR. Games that were released before 2000.

Dude, seriously. I'm not talking about visually identical rooms (if that is what you thought I was saying), I'm talking about rooms using the exact same gameplay patterns over and over again. And believe me it is exactly the same with Dishonored. In every room you have pipes/lamps/stuff up high you can get to, stuff you can crawl under or rat holes. I have finished that game several times with the DLCs too, and it is always the same thing. Actually I think the best example of this is Bioshock Infinite, it's a great example of how to not design your level. Also, I cannot name many older games that had horrible level design, but I'd be curious to know which ones you think had bad level design.

Serpentine explains it better than me. Every room in DXHR is exactly the same as the previous room. You have very obvious setpieces in every room, but pretty much all modern games suffer from this (even Dishonored). Older games were a lot more vague in these setpieces, and the imagination went wild.

Like every cover-based stealth games, you can abuse cover so much it's not even fun. The maps are very artificial with the same stealth paths every time, without fail. Every time you see some entrance you can use, you can be sure that if you see another one in another map you can use it too, and these are made very obvious since they all use the same kind of models every time. The enemies have really poor vision too, even on Give Me Deus Ex, and let's not talk about the radar augment that spoils all the fun. But hey the stealth was also pretty terrible in DX too so I guess that's that. I dislike plots where you are the "super chosen one" and the endings are really really bad. You can see the "twists" in the plot come from miles away (the part in Singapore for example is pretty bad). Nah seriously it's not good. The game has lots of pros but the stealth and the plot are not.

Come on now, I like HR but stealth was absolutely abysmal in that game, and the plot was rubbish.

A Machine for Pigs wasn't made by Frictional if that's what you're asking, and it shows because there is no tension and no anguish throughout.

A Machine for Pigs sucks, avoid if you liked The Dark Descent. Condemned is a really really creepy game if that's your thing, same with the Penumbra series, and Vampire Bloodlines is one of the best games ever (though you have to patch it first or you'll be in a world of pain). Painkiller is a cool FPS but avoid the addons like the plague, Soul Reaver is a classic, and F.E.A.R. 1 has the best close quarters combat I've ever seen in an FPS. Natural Selection 2 is a great multiplayer game and They Bleed Pixels is a cool but insanely difficult platformer with combat. Other than that there's nothing really exciting. Oh yes and I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream is a classic. Everyone should play that.

There's something wrong going on above the doorway in the third picture.

Holy hell Biker that looks amazing! It's a shame these arches against the walls on screenshot 4 aren't models, because it does look very flat.

That wasn't the case. Loot glint appeared with Thief 3 and almost everyone thinks it was a bad idea.