Door handles...love or hate them?

[Sotha]

The knives aren't coming out. Maybe everyone has strong feeling on their side of the argument and are trying to prove it, but nobody has attacked anybody until you told me I was condescending and considered my view superior.

 

Luckily I have a better sense of humor...

 

You've made more condescending remarks regarding the vert contest stories by every other author while floating your own boat about how terrific your mediocre story was than I've made in the entire 4 years I've been here.

You even wanted to vote for your own mission which shows lack of taste imo, so whatever.

 

ROTFL, and this wasn't a knife? This is getting more silly by the minute. I wonder what I did to make a quarrel with you and deserve such a growl.. Apparently something with that long gone vertical contest seems to bother you, since you pick it up so eagerly? Would you like to discuss about our feelings more clearly so we can settle what is bothering you? Let me fetch my black leather couch.

[nbohr1more]

You need to settle this via a "Seasons Contest" entry...

 

[Springheel]

'dumbing down' is not a condescending comment

 

It's not? Can you use "dumbing down" in a way that carries a positive connotation?

 

I have no problem with your general argument about handles--there is certainly merit in it. But that term is obviously going to get people's back up.

[Komag]

I've just played the first two Rockbourg missions, and they have lots of real looking doors that end up being unfrobbable, and I found that I preferred that to the totally fake texture doors. So in this case I prefer handles.

 

It will be up to the map author to avoid placing unfrobbable doors in hard to reach locations that players will struggle to reach only to be terribly disappointed. At least the author could include some little loot treasure on the sill or nearby so the player at least gets some reward for the venture.

[Briareos H]

In Thief there was a general design decision (with a few exceptions) to use door textures without handles for unfrobbable doors. This was maybe partly done to reduce polycount but in the end all the players used it as a general cue and it has become a reflex not to push into that direction. Now, having a door which can't be distinguished from a non frobbable one means you'll have to get closer and see whether you can frob it or not. It makes sense, especially for a game which boasts higher visual fidelity. A door without handle will stick out like a sore thumb if it's surrounded by detailed architecture.

 

What I see as the problem is the requirement to get in frobbing position to know whether this area is out-limits by mapper's design. It is forcing you to ready your only way of interacting with the world just to see it fail, telling you that you won't be able to reach beyond. This is pretty immersion-breaking in my case.

 

So the issue is to decide between the loss of immersion in not knowing whether you'll get a result as you get ready for interaction and the loss of immersion in non-realistic/inconsistent visual design, hardly a "dumbing down" issue. Visual issues are less important personally so I would theoretically favour doors without handles. Unfortunately this must be a design decision at mod level which is impossible to enforce, so in the end I don't have an opinion for this poll.

[Maethius]

Interesting... I would say I have mixed feelings on the matter.

 

First, in my experience, decorative doors appear 90% or more of the time in city street maps, correct? Usually these maps have a few specific locations to loot that are story/side story related. If an area were truly, fully mapped, a master thief could potentially break into 100% of the spaces. Using flat doors to indicate where you can go speeds the game along in such places. In the old Thief games, I still found myself checking almost every door, almost as a story element, just to be sure. These doors were almost never a part of the story; I was looking for side quests and bonus loot. It's more realistic to have them, even if it slows the game. A crawl, a quick "click" or nothing to frob, tells me there's nothing there... keep moving. I'm fine with that.

 

Within building maps, the use of decorative, unopenable doors seems... lame. I"m already IN your house... and the front door should have been the toughest nut to crack! To me it is a cardinal sin to be in a mansion and have doors that I can never open; just a personal thing.

 

So, in the end, I say use them... but be a good mapper, and use them WELL. If a street is littered with doors that don't open, that's fine... so long as you do what was done in some of the cooler T1/T2 maps; building porches, recesses, stairs up or down, etc, to offer good hiding spaces in. Oh, and maybe let us in once in a while!