Thief 4 is trash.

[New Horizon]

...making you completely invisible in narrow corridors.

 

This particular aspect of the wall hug feature, becoming invisible, was actually a known bug to the developers at the time of release. Wall hugging wasn't supposed to have made the player invisible, only slightly less visible...around the same impact as crouching. It was discovered shortly after the game was certified gold but they were forbidden from fixing it. There was a decimal off somewhere in that particular calculation. The original decrease was .7 I think. I was able to fix it in my minimalist project mod by changing the setting in the editor to .07..or it might have actually been .007. In any case, with the correction in place, the wall hug feature then functioned as intended.

 

I was a forum moderator on Ion Storm back in the day so this information came directly from a couple of the developers and they told me how to fix it.

[chakkman]

How a bug turns a feature.

[New Horizon]

How a bug turns a feature.

 

Well, it had the side effect of making it a cheat. The bug caused the light gem reading to drop into negative values which essentially told the AI that the player didn't exist...at all! The AI could physically bump into the player and not even feel them. Goes beyond being a feature. With the setting fixed, the wall hug felt far more balanced since there was a chance of being spotted.

[chakkman]

Has it never been fixed, also not in later versions? I could have sworn i got caught one or 2 times when hugging the wall when the AI bumped into me...

[New Horizon]

Has it never been fixed, also not in later versions? I could have sworn i got caught one or 2 times when hugging the wall when the AI bumped into me...

 

Nope, it was never 'officially' fixed. The devs asked for permission to fix it prior to release, but the request was denied. There was only one patch released for TDS and it only addressed the issue with difficulty levels being reset. If you happened to have a small amount of light hitting you, it may have been enough to prevent the lightgem setting from going into negative values...I ran into a few scenarios like that during my tests.

[chakkman]

Alright. Didn't really make much use of the wall hug tbh, as i'm more of a K.O. guy than a ghoster. Indeed a bit sucky if they can bump into you, and they still don't see you...

[Obsttorte]

... with the exception of loading zones.

Is this verified or just guessing. As they are planning to release this game on consoles, too, I would be doubtful about that. Actually the scene where the player opened the window with this bend metal thingy looked like loading to me, just without the loading screen.

[Springheel]

Is this verified or just guessing.

 

There is dynamic loading of new areas, but supposedly it mostly happens behind the scenes, or is hidden behind animations like opening the window. Of course, that information came before it was announced that the game would be released on current-gen consoles, so who knows whether that will change.

[Vae]

Nope, it was never 'officially' fixed. The devs asked for permission to fix it prior to release, but the request was denied. There was only one patch released for TDS and it only addressed the issue with difficulty levels being reset. If you happened to have a small amount of light hitting you, it may have been enough to prevent the lightgem setting from going into negative values...I ran into a few scenarios like that during my tests.

 

If I remember correctly, you also mentioned that the 'auto-silent crouch' was purposefully left broken, as well...It's such a shame, as this allows the player to easily circumvent the 'move silently challenge' just by crouching.

 

 

There is dynamic loading of new areas, but supposedly it mostly happens behind the scenes, or is hidden behind animations like opening the window. Of course, that information came before it was announced that the game would be released on current-gen consoles, so who knows whether that will change.

 

If they keep the animations, they'll have to make them continuously looping, in order to accomodate the older consoles and PC's...which at some point could appear ridiculous by making NuGarrett appear inept.

[stumpy]

there's usually an icon on screen saying its saving game progress, it also loads content with the same icon, it can do it while you are still playing the current map, load it into virtual memory, then load it into main memory during a cut scene. so the load is almost instant. or its loads only what you can see, and it loads more when you move in a certain direction. thats one of the reason why most console games are very linear, as they want to control what gets loaded based on what they want seen. got nothing to do with controlling what the player should/or should not see its more on memory management for the console. Or its like the 'nomad soul' game where it would constantly load and unload parts of the map just out of view of the player.

[Jonathan1247]

From what I hear, the game includes both a typical manual save option alongside it's checkpoint system.

I'd hope that developers would realize that checkpoints do not work. Hitman: Absolution struggled with this concept and it damn near ruined the entire game.

[New Horizon]

If I remember correctly, you also mentioned that the 'auto-silent crouch' was purposefully left broken, as well...

 

Almost. It was actually some type of power tripping by one of the producers who thought crouching should be absolutely silent. The intended design was to have the crouching footsteps slightly audible, with a very slight chance of being heard by guards. The designer working on them had them tweaked and balanced and this producer would instruct another dev to set them to zero. I guess this went back and forth a few times until the producer had one of the coders strip the audio support for crouch footsteps completely. Someone on the Eidos forums thought I was lying and tried to put them back in but quickly discovered that they couldn't do it.

[Loa4ever]

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2013-03-14-thief-4-hero-garrett-less-gothic-more-mainstream

" Our early design went a LOT more gothic - with black nails etc - but we thought that this wasn't true to the legacy of Garrett so we pulled it back a bit(...)" I thank the Triscker they gave up on this stupid idea... black nails being gothic. I'm alright with people doing what they want to their nails, but... this MAN is Guarret. Can you imagine our master thief having his nails painted? I can not... in fact I can't see the use of that on him.

[Obsttorte]

Well, in combination with a tutu ...

[Lux]

I wonder if the player will be able to use his mechanical eye zoom...without using foCus.

[Jonathan1247]

Bad news for Eidos Montreal...

[Springheel]

I wonder if the player will be able to use his mechanical eye zoom

 

His eye isn't mechanical in the reboot.

[Jonathan1247]

His eye isn't mechanical in the reboot.

 

Well... that's strange.

I've heard that his eye ties into the Focus Mode, meaning that this Focus Mode will play a part in the story.

...brilliant.

[Lux]

Ah, that article that Loa4ever linked, the second picture looked like his right eye was mechanical but... I guess not

[Springheel]

It's weird looking, and is tied to the focus ability, but it's been confirmed that it's not mechanical. My guess is that he's going to either return to the city with an eye injury or get one shortly after returning, and some kind of Keeper amulet he finds in the first mission is going to 'heal' his eye and leave him with some kind of residual powers.

[jaxa]

I never knew about the wall b/hug cheat because I almost never used it. Fun stuff. So it would work if you were fully lit?

[Jonathan1247]

It's weird looking, and is tied to the focus ability, but it's been confirmed that it's not mechanical. My guess is that he's going to either return to the city with an eye injury or get one shortly after returning, and some kind of Keeper amulet he finds in the first mission is going to 'heal' his eye and leave him with some kind of residual powers.

I doubt the Keepers will be involved. When they said that all previous factions wouldn't appear, I'm sure they meant all the factions, even one as pivotal and important as the Keepers.

Eidos Montreal has stated that Garrett was merely a street urchin, and grew into his skills out of necessity rather than being found and trained by the Keepers, at least that's what I've deduced from the somewhat contradictory and unclear interviews that they've given. If so, this is very woeful news. It would be bad enough if Garrett were not trained by the Keepers, but to not have them in the game altogether is just absurd.

[jay pettitt]

I never knew about the wall b/hug cheat because I almost never used it. Fun stuff. So it would work if you were fully lit?

 

Nope. It's a multiplier, not a binary visible/invisible thing. The bugginess is that wall hug is too effective in the dark - guards can bump into you and do a little AI bark that they've got you, then lose you again straight away and go back to searching. If you're lit to some extent or other, wall hug works pretty much as intended.

[stumpy]

the first 3 games had specific story lines written by the same one person for continuity, I don't think eidos Montreal included or contacted that person for the reboot. Its probably why the reboot contradicts everything that came before. and why their crap about sticking to the dna of the original games reads like gobbledegook, or 'talking complete bollocks'.

Edited July 24, 2013 by stumpy

[Springheel]

I doubt the Keepers will be involved. When they said that all previous factions wouldn't appear, I'm sure they meant all the factions, even one as pivotal and important as the Keepers.

 

The brothel is in a former Keeper compound, and there are still magical glyphs. I doubt you'll see any Keepers, but we know Garrett finds some kind of mystical amulet in that compound, and I bet it will be Keeper in origin.