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Thief 4 is trash.


Mystry

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Been playing this quite a bit recently and honestly I'm finding it to be pretty garbo, not that nearly all of you didn't know already.

Edited by MasterHelpo

Nonsense, tomfoolery and abject stupidity, all of which can be found on my channel. (TDM stuff included)

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Just finished at master level and I think I agree with most of the comments on here

A few niggles

Why can't I climb onto a small crate when I want to

Why can't I pick up a lantern to move it

Why do I get that really stupid popup - press V or M to dodge - which has to be clicked on before I can do anything else

Why are the routes between area so damned stupid - go through some boxes or through a window which you have to spend ages trying to find

I doubt I will be playing it again unless I decide to try playing on normal level killing everything in sight just to see what happens

 

I also hit the save looping bug where I clicked to enter one of the task areas and was bounced to the clock tower and couldn't leave it - fortunately I had a hard save a couple of levels back so didn't lose everything

While I am on that topic - who the heck thought it was a good idea to over write quick saves with auto saves

Edited by Oldjim
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Why do I get that really stupid popup - press V or M to dodge - which has to be clicked on before I can do anything else

That drove me potty as well - basically, it seems that you have to successfully flee/fight an alerted guard. If you keep reloading (as I did), the game doesn't think you've learned how to dodge. :rolleyes:

 

On the subject of fleeing (now I've raised it), I must have been doing something wrong, as the only way I managed to run away from an alerted AI was get to a higher/lower level. Just turning and running away pretty much always resulted in me getting killed. Even swooping didn't help. Anyone else find this? Or is it just further confirmation of my general incompetence in combat? (Although I can say that not only did I have several fights which I won, but there were one or two when I didn't even get any damage. *performs internal victory dance*)

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You have to break line of sight with them possibly around multiple corners. The issue is distance in my experience. Swooping helps after you round a corner or two but only if you have enough distance between you and them but it can be done on ground level.

 

When you're fleeing its hard to gauge how far behind you they are though but yeah, even without swooping if you run long enough and keep breaking line of site, they'll lose you.

 

Though like you said, just climb up something or drop down and that makes it easier given they haven't actually sEEn you climb up or drop down.

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I was just reading through some of the stats for Thief on Steam and interestingly only 13.6% of people have finished the game. And only 5.9% have completed all of the city hub missions.

 

http://steamcommunity.com/stats/239160/achievements/

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36 hours of gameplay so far.

I kept an open mind about the new Thief, even after seeing the initial videos. Very open really. You see, I actually enjoyed the third Thief game tremendously (once they fixed the difficulty bug), despite the loss of rope arrows and other quibbles. The game played really well and had an amazing atmosphere, great story and cutting edge lighting and graphics. It was my favourite game of the year - up there with HalfLife2 and DeusEx2, so I had high expectations that thief 4 would follow suit. Well, I think there's a reason it isn't called Thief 4, or even Thi4f. It bares no resemblance to the series.

It's not a bad game, there are many good aspects. I like the rat-maze of a city (needs more guards). I don't even mind the swooping, it's mainly the loss of freedom that bugs me. You can't go here, you can't go there, you can't climb this crate - there's a basket on top. The whole experience is just dumbed down for 12-year-old console players worse than Call of Duty was. By the way, thanks for bringing back the rope arrow, but give me some places I can actually use it other than the rare highlighted spar.

Someone here mentioned they didn't care about the characters. That sounds about right. I'm 36 hours into it and a story is just starting to develop. It might get more interesting though... we'll see; I'm having some fun and I plan to finish it. Perhaps I'm being overly harsh.

Pluses:

Once you disable most of the childish aids, turn down the gamma, and play on the master level, it's much better. The lock picking is the best yet - after you turn off the white helper circles (almost as good as TDM). Visually, it looks good. The city is a gloomy place, although it doesn't convey the eerie atmosphere that the rest of the series had, if that makes any sense. In many ways it feels like a beta. They have a chance to improve on things for Thief 5, if that happens, but overall I don't think it will stand out.

I give it a 6.5/10 (so far).

TDM has so much more to offer.

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I like the rat-maze of a city (needs more guards).

 

While I agree with you on the design, it could have been a bit less generic. I can hardly remember where I am and where I have to go without the marker because everything looks the same and is the same gray color as well. Also the repeating conversations kill the atmosphere and the level changes while moving between logs or through windows are stupid...

 

I don't even mind the swooping, it's mainly the loss of freedom that bugs me.

 

I fully agree with you! Sometimes it's ridiculous what you can't climb.

 

I'm 36 hours into it and a story is just starting to develop.

 

Speaking of story, I don't know much myself yet, but the setting just seems too similar to other recent AAA games, like Dishonered and Bioshock Infinite: In an oppressed world the player has to find and free (and protect?) a young female sidekick while a revolution is starting in the background. Oh, and don't forget strange dream sequences from other dimensions, they are totally hot right now! At least the Thief city feels a little bit more alive than Columbia which always gave me the impression of a completely static scenery, but in my opinion Dishonered found the right middle ground regarding uniform grayness and colorfull backdrop!

Edited by wesp5
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its was said some where else that to find out what its actually happening in the game is only available via a mobile phone app that gives a lots more information about the background story. Apparently the garrett from the original 3 games died 400 years ago, and this garrett in thief 4 is a different one.

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Apparently the garrett from the original 3 games died 400 years ago, and this garrett in thief 4 is a different one.

 

I read somewhere that this becomes obvious when you find old stashes of the original Garrett that do not belong to you. Still a very stupid decision to call the new Thief Garret and the fence Basso too. That's too much of a coincidence! Together with the two colored eyes which could be a hint on the old mechanical one it seems to me they didn't know if they wanted to make a sequel or a reboot...

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http://www.gameinformer.com/b/features/archive/2014/04/07/afterwords-thief.aspx

 

 

The environments don’t seem overly large, so why are there so many loading screens in a game?

Stéphane Roy: The richness of the art and audio, which support this story-driven game, contributed to the streaming needs. Audio is super important in a game like Thief, and we wanted to provide strong ambiance and an immersive experience for the players. The environments are not overly large, but most loaded sections are a playground of over 100 meters by 100 meters without any loading, where you can experience a seamless gameplay. Part of this justification also goes with the production's desires of placing the player in a very rich, but also distinct environment in term of assets and textures. Thief is a game of light and shadow, cat and mouse gameplay – to ensure that we were having the higher definition in term of shadows, we used pre-processed data (baked lightmaps) that were unique from one area to the other.

 

The creative team on the project wanted to change a lot of these numbers to enhance the experience, so our technical team needed to come up with dedicated streaming zones to handle the swap from one area to another, where they felt that it would also support the pacing of the gameplay experience. We needed to have these loading zones in there in order to create the rich, immersive environment you see in the game.

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Heh. Baked lightmaps.

 

That should have afforded them more performance but I suspect they decided on very high resolution maps. They probably also used

the default immediate mode renderer if my hunch is correct.

 

From what I've seen, UE3 only really sings if the developers customize it. Bioshock Infinite (for example) used several different render paths including

pre-light (forward plus) and traditional forward rendering. They had custom art pipelines for each type of rendering they used. I'm sure the same

holds true for Mirror's Edge and Dishonoured. You can't just use the engine out-of-box, you've gotta put some elbow grease in there. Really AMD

probably has more egg on their face than Square Enix though. They would have been consultants on the engine design since it has Mantle support.

I've always felt that it's a mixed blessing to have a hardware vendor provide consulting because they have mixed motivations (make engine run

well on existing hardware vs sell new hardware.... hmm).

Edited by nbohr1more

Please visit TDM's IndieDB site and help promote the mod:

 

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(Yeah, shameless promotion... but traffic is traffic folks...)

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Apparently the garrett from the original 3 games died 400 years ago, and this garrett in thief 4 is a different one.

 

I've heard an allusion to this, but it sounds pretty ad hoc to me. Any references?

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That's a good interview, I wish they could have gotten into other topics more and i've been wondering how the dev's have reacted to the very mixed feedback on their game.

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I thought I would share my impressions that I posted over on QT3 a few weeks ago.

 

This game is all over the place. I finished a ghost run on Master Thief difficulty with most of the ui switched off. It's a massive, generous game that plays like it was rushed out the door. When it works, it can be enjoyable but it has too many bugs, design flaws and questionable decisions to recommend to anyone but desperate stealth fans.

 

Thief is a broken, tragic, rewritten mess of a game. The plot has clearly been reworked multiple times. The Baron and Orion standing in for the Mechanists and Pagans respectively, is fine on paper but it doesn't work in execution. Since they have barely any screen time, they have to scream their motivations to the player in an awkward, rushed manner. Erin feels like a holdover from an earlier iteration of the game, when it was a straight sequel to Deadly Shadows.

 

The Thief Taker General is hilarious. I love it when he happens to find Garrett, who has just returned from a trek through a long forgotten ruin, underneath his bed at the brothel. I like the idea of Garrett having an antagonist but TTG is just awful. A bald, mustachioed villain who walks with a limp, drops f-bombs like a desperate comic, kills his underlings over trivial matters (so you know he's bad!) and has a crossbow affixed to his arm. There's way too much going on here. He feels like a one of the grotesque characters from Hitman: Absolution. Why Eidos Montreal thought he would be a good choice for the Thief universe is baffling.

 

The sound-mixing is atrocious. The worst I've ever heard in a blockbuster game. That's not hyperbole. It's broken. Sound cuts out frequently, guards across a courtyard sound like their yelling into the players ear, npcs yell ambient dialogue over Basso repeatedly during cutscenes, and Garrett's voice actor frequently pauses to his read lines. The lip-syncing is horrid. I really miss the sound propagation from the earlier titles. Unless you're walking on glass or water, it's doesn't matter where you walk, Garrett won't make a sound.

 

There are some really cool additions including blunt arrows (must-have for all future Thief games), some instances of impressive a.i. (noticing open safes, lights switching off etc...), knocking over bottles, real-world alarms (birds, dogs), the lockpicking game making a noise when you fail. It's quite enjoyable, but not without reservations. Some of the best parts of the game are undermined by, I suspect, poor play testing. After cracking a safe in tailors shop, Garrett refused to stop examining the silly earring he just nabbed. The animation was unskippable, so when the guard rounded the corner, I didn't have time to shut the safe, and he went on alert. Not cool.

 

While the city looks gorgeous, its pretty much empty. The sidequests are neat, but most of the time I'm just exploring an vacant apartment; no one's home. If I mess up the lockpicking or set off a trap 9 times out of 10 it doesn't matter. All these cool additions to the game are underused. Also, there's so many loading zones! Enter a one room apartment. Pick up a letter opener and a ring. Leave in under 20 seconds. Load for just as much. This content just slows the game down. Then there's a lack of abilities and gadgets. I like Swoop, but it's basically a grounded Blink and the rest of Garrett's abilities are essentially uniquely skinned door-openers.

 

Garrett's movement has a nice heft to it. He feels present. But moving through the world is about working out exactly what the designer wants you to do, not using your instincts or experimenting. If a rope arrow is just out of reach, don't bother trying to grab it. You need to look for a crate, or a ladder or a walk way to reach it. It's a discrete puzzle that was made for that specific instance. I wish it was like Assassin's Creed or Mirror's Edge. Instead it's an awkward compromise that isn't particularly enjoyable. Unlike Dishonored, where the designers have a set of rules that you can rely upon, Thief is about instances: These guards will patrol in this pattern no matter what. This object can be leaned around, while another identical space cannot. You can climb this crate, but not this one.

 

Such a frustrating game! It doesn't have the same love Eidos Montreal had for Deus Ex. That team got the brand. Thief doesn't play like the rest of the series. That's fine. It's been a decade since Deadly Shadows. Time moves on. But Dishonored is Thief's competition and that game, as a stealth adventure, did a better job in every respect of capturing the essence of Thief. Thief plays like it was made in 18 months. It simply wasn't ready. I hope they get the opportunity to take a long look at what happened here, evaluate and take another stab at the licence.

 

I'm really looking forward to reading a post-mortem on the game. On a podcast, Eurogamer writer Simon Parkin mentions he was told by Eidos Montreal team members that the game was rushed out the door. It certainly plays that way.

 

http://www.gamingdai...e-in-lampposts/ - 31:00

Edited by Mr. Tibbs
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Heh. Baked lightmaps.

 

While I don't know what these are :), can they really be the reason that many one or two room levels are seperate loads? Without any NPCs in them as well, which both makes the city seem dead and the game wasting loading time! It almost looks to me that they were added as an afterthough after the main city hub was already finished, to add at least some a little bit of freedom to the world.

 

Also while that interview was a nice read, especially concerning the similarities to Dishonored that I noticed too, the explanation about the rope arrows was quite stupid! Didn't they know that in the original Thief games and TDM you can get your rope arrows back in most cases? In Thief you are forced to use them only in precalculated places and you loose them at the same time too...

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Well, I wondered if T4 would make some of the Thief purists look at TDM in a different way, and it looks like it has.

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may contain spoilers

 

off the thief 4 wiki

http://thief.wikia.com/wiki/Thief_(reboot)

 

In the new game, City is set after 842 of the NRy ("year of Northcrest rule/reign") calendar, it exists in a time of new industrial revolution, it contains several references to the old Games as history of the city (those events having occurred under the BRy or year of Bresling rule/reign) some 300-400 years before (Thief the Dark Project's events occurred at about 434, and The Metal Age at about 435-436 or so).

 

off the steam forums

 

Garret's Mechanical Eye... It's one of the collectables inside the Moira Asylum. Down in the prison. Infact there is a side story related to it through the letters, in which you learn that old Garrett from like four hundred years in the past was probably imprisoned there, before he lost his eye.

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http://www.gameinfor...ords-thief.aspx

The environments don’t seem overly large, so why are there so many loading screens in a game?

Stéphane Roy: The richness of the art and audio, which support this story-driven game, contributed to the streaming needs. Audio is super important in a game like Thief, and we wanted to provide strong ambiance and an immersive experience for the players. The environments are not overly large, but most loaded sections are a playground of over 100 meters by 100 meters without any loading, where you can experience a seamless gameplay. Part of this justification also goes with the production's desires of placing the player in a very rich, but also distinct environment in term of assets and textures. Thief is a game of light and shadow, cat and mouse gameplay – to ensure that we were having the higher definition in term of shadows, we used pre-processed data (baked lightmaps) that were unique from one area to the other.

 

The creative team on the project wanted to change a lot of these numbers to enhance the experience, so our technical team needed to come up with dedicated streaming zones to handle the swap from one area to another, where they felt that it would also support the pacing of the gameplay experience. We needed to have these loading zones in there in order to create the rich, immersive environment you see in the game.

 

Audio is super important in a game like Thief, and we wanted to provide strong ambiance and an immersive experience for the players.

 

Audio is super important in a Thief game? Is tHAt why they botched it so badly? Laughable.

 

[...]placing the player in a very rich, but also distinct environment in term of assets and textures.

 

We needed to have these loading zones in there in order to create the rich, immersive environment you see in the game.

 

"distinct environment" in combination with "immersive environment"... also laughable considering the entire game is modularized and not distinct save for a few sections and you can't really use the word "immersive" when you can't even interact with the majority of objects around you. Can't climb on many many things, can't rope arrow to where ever, oh and this bottle you can pick up and throw but those bottles? ...no not those. Very immersive.

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  • 1 month later...

<rant>

Oh my god...that's not Garret, tell me it's not Garret and they used another name. WTF?! It steals because it's what it does? What that even means? I'm so disappointed not only by the game itself, not being free to move in a stealth game is like not being able to shoot when you want in a FPS, but and in particular how they have ruined Garret. If you don't like the nature of a character just change the fu**ing main character and leave it alone. Even the past story of Garret has been changed! What, the Keepers weren't not *emo* enough? Oh, I've just found the right adjactive for Thief 4: it's an emo game made for children. Fu*k the new game, Garret was one of the best character ever made.

 

One last thing: if Garret, for some strange reason, has to choose an apprentice (why? Why? What were they thinking?), he would NEVER choose an emotional driven and istintive person. Just no. Part of being a thief is to be patient and clever, acting like a ormon-crazed teenager IS NOT the best way to go (unless you are in a stupid game).

</rant>

System76 Gazelle professional with Intel® Core i7-3610QM CPU @ 2.30GHz, 8GB ram and Intel HD Graphics 4000

 

https://www.system76.com/laptops/model/gazp8

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