Thief 4 is trash.

[Goldwell]

After being hooked up Watch Dogs I have to say the stealth element in that game is very fun. It's strange but even though watch dogs has contextual jumping as well it still feels less restrictive.. Makes me wonder if the contextual movement in Thief was done right it wouldn't be so bad.

[melrief]

The best rant is Gopher's:

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0PZbrYVlzzk

Edited June 2, 2014 by melrief

[Goldwell]

The best rant is Gopher's

(how do I embed videos in the post?)

 

You type [ media]URL HERE[ /media]

 

Make sure there is no 's' after the http in the URL too otherwise it won't work

Edited June 2, 2014 by Goldwell

[melrief]

"Woaaaa the birds!"

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vUsYCyiLers

[New Horizon]

Doesn't this guy realize that a dark light gem means you can't be seen? I mean, it's not a great game but at least know the mechanics. lol

[melrief]

Agreed on that, but the light in that game is horrendous. True that in a thief game you have a light gem but maybe in 2014 we could have an engine that properly shows lights/shadows such that you know when you are invisible without the need of the light gem. Just to be clear: when you are outside the night, unless there is a storm, you are not completely hidden no matter how good you are. It's just not realistic and quite clear from the videos. In particular when your body casts a shadow! That means "there is light!". If you add the fact that you are at 1 meter from the enemy...

 

Besides the light gem, the video is still funny: fences everywhere that can be used to climb (to "promote thievery"), Garret's feet that move without friction, your hands everywhere (no, you don't move like that when you are crouching), Erin that *jumps* on a guard by hitting him and the other guard doesn't hear anything, the "but again, I'm not just a thief" WTF, the birds etc...

[stumpy]

thats what that dumb shroud was for, to replace the light gem, (not the shroud mentioned in the logo section in game start up thats AMD's version of directx) when the edge of the screen flickers and its all clear you are in the light and when it goes dark and it restricts your view then you are in complete shadow, although the setting should be the other way around, should be clear in full shadow and restricted view in full light.

[Obsttorte]

Agreed on that, but the light in that game is horrendous. True that in a thief game you have a light gem but maybe in 2014 we could have an engine that properly shows lights/shadows such that you know when you are invisible without the need of the light gem.

I've played the game three times, and never had the light gem enabled. For me finding out whether I am visible or not did not cause any problems at all.

[melrief]

I've played the game three times, and never had the light gem enabled. For me finding out whether I am visible or not did not cause any problems at all.

 

I'm not saying that after sometime you can get used to the light system of thief 4. On contrary, it becomes quite clear at the beginning of the game where you are invisible and where not. Being able to use the shadow system of thief 4 doesn't mean it doesn't suck. With more realistic engines like the one of the new thief, also a better AI detection system should be developed. I repeat it: when you are under the moonlight and there is an enemy at 1 meter from you, there is no way he doesn't see you. That's unrealistic, in particular for a game like thief 4 in which in shadow you can actually see everything (there is no real dark in the game IMHO, everything has a gray/cyan light). My conclusion the first time I saw the game was that Garret was so used to the shadow to be able to see in the dark and the game reproduces that (dark vision). This would be ok but raises another problem: why everything is so fu**ing dark? Outside ok, but why inside more than half of the levels are dark?

 

I'm sorry Obsttorte, while I understand you enjoyed the game I still think it sucks. Indeed, it's a personal opinion, I hope you will understand my position. For me, instead of making a more realistic and brutal but satisfying thief experience, they made a game for kids. And I hate when good games, and Thief was a really good game, are rebooted into easier games because they need to sell more. That's my opinion and I honestly agree with all the rants about this game and with the metascore score. This is not thief, it has nothing of the original thief and that's a shame under every single aspect apart maybe how the city looks like. You don't want to make a thief game? Fine, call it with another name but don't ruin thief. I waited for this game for years, I don't deserve this.

 

This is how I feel:

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v7e91zzb1M0

Edited June 4, 2014 by melrief

[Springheel]

I've been confused with the shadows in Thief. I have been in areas that appear, in every way, to be brightly lit yet my lightgem is dark, and I've been in the opposite situation as well.

 

And I'm not sure the lightgem is actually tied to the visual detection system the AI uses. While the bright lightning at the start lit up my lightgem when it flashed, I could be only a few feet away from guards looking right at me, and they wouldn't notice. So either the two don't use the same system (which would be a massive design flaw IMO), or the AI have an absurd grace period that keeps them from reacting to a thief a few meters away during a lightning flash.

[Lux]

I agree with the shadows portion of this discussion. Dishonored, for me, was the same. Nothing was dark enough that you could actually hide, most everything was well lit and it really ruined a lot of the immersion and experience.

 

However, I had the opposite experience and maybe its because I was playing on Hard difficulty. You guys playing on Hard?

 

ANY time a guard got very near to me, it was over. I thought there was not only the "hide in the shadows" but also a proximity thing going on because of it.

 

If I was 2-3 feet from a guard, they would stop, bark, "...huh?..." and then see me. Without fail. I actually liked this part of the game because it added a lot of the immersion that the bad shadows failed to.

[New Horizon]

Perhaps the devs didn't take light readings from as many points on the player model as they did in Deadly Shadows. That game used 12. Given the state of the sound in the game, I wouldn't be surprised if the light system was mucked up too.

[Lux]

There were a couple times during my playthrough that the gem was full bright and I was in shadow and a couple times when I was in light that it was dark. Maybe they just made and area map and when you went in to that area it triggered the gem state... that would be about equal effort to what they did on the audio.

[stumpy]

I hid a body in a shadow that the light gem said was full dark and a guard saw the body from 10 feet away, they were not carrying a light source its like the body I left in darkness was in full light for the guard. But the same guard had walked past me hidden in the same shadow 10 minutes before.

[AluminumHaste]

Lol TDM has the same problem.

[melrief]

TDM hasn't been developed full time for 5 years by a professional studio with the background of Eidos. Said that, TDM AI is still more consistent than Thief 4 and I can hide bodies in the dark without problems. In one of my recent gameplay I fall from a roof, a guard sees me and I have to knock-out it to avoid the alarm. After that, I left the body of the guard in the dark (real dark) and nobody noticed the body:

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=TwB4GVVVe6E#t=2077

 

The problem with TDM sometime is the sound (in the video I fell from a roof...), but nothing too bad. It's just a little bit inconsistent depending on the mission and what you are doing.

Edited June 3, 2014 by melrief

[Springheel]

The problem with TDM sometime is the sound

 

That problem will be fixed in 2.02...some people will be surprised by how well AI hear now that it's fixed.

[melrief]

That problem will be fixed in 2.02...some people will be surprised by how well AI hear now that it's fixed.

 

OT: the TDM team is amazing, thanks. I hope to find some time in the future, I've almost finished my studies, to help the project somehow.

Edited June 4, 2014 by melrief

[AluminumHaste]

Nothing wrong with the AI, it's just that unconscious AI have different detection algorithms than the player, so guards will notice other AI, whereas they will walk right by you in the same shadow.

[Goldwell]

An interesting explanation of Thief (2014) storyline in 6 minutes

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gxgkidorJIY

 

In theory the story doesn't actually sound to bad, I guess it was just the execution which sucked

Edited June 12, 2014 by Goldwell

[Airship Ballet]

50% off on Steam for the weekend, probably going to end up under a fiver in the Summer sale.

[Filizitas]

Everyone seems to hate thief 4 XD Maybe its just the thing of the name. Its not a real thief anymore and broke with the classic style. I wont get in a trap like i got with Alien Isolation... Waiting until this game is pretty cheap.

[Rio_Walker]

I played it twice. Maybe it's because I finished first Dishonored not long before playing for the second time, with clean hands, and sought another thrill of picking open a safe while Target is roaming the same room.
The first time, I did run around killing guards, but eventually I couldn't get past a mission and quit. The second time, I just threw my hat in the wind and used WeMod. Once you're invisible to everything, ghosting isn't an issue =|

Are there some cool tricks in this game? Yeah. I liked seeing my hands (a real kink at this point) fumble for a hidden switch, or smoothly yoink purses off guards. Focus was cheating, really, but I didn't hate it exactly. I just thought that this is Tomb Raider reboot/Arkham all over again.

Hub? Nice, shame nothing we collect mean anything.

Vendors out in the "open"? Hey, that feels like I'm actually in that world.

What I hated was the ending. Or that Chase sequence.

Loading screens masked as "cutscenes"? Ugh...

The plot holes not helping either. But the worst thing are "Hidden" areas in the overworld. I think even with the guide, I haven't found all of them.

But at least I finished it.

[lowenz]

Happy Necrobirthday to Thief 2014 (NOT *4*  )

Edited March 18 by lowenz

[Xolvix]

Since I'm bored and haven't posted in a while and yet still finished Thief 4 a few times, I feel compelled to post.

In response to a number of observations @Rio_Walker made:

• Seeing your hands and all the animations newGarrett would do was fun... at first. But given all the looting and environmental interactions the game has it really did slow things down a lot, especially when the game would occasionally realign the player just perfectly before playing an animation to open a drawer. If they had an option to disable these animations or speed them up significantly I'd have been happy.
• I've played using the Custom difficulty with the option to disable focus and the experience is kinda mixed. While it does make things a bit more traditional without the superpower ability to find loot more easily, it does seem like the game is designed very much for focus and disabling it can hide things you never even knew were present. If it weren't for the focus for example, I would never have noticed the "special" candles hidden around the city that talk when you light them.
• This game reminds me of a movie that has been reshot several times with footage from separate reshoots blended together with bad editing. It's painfully clear the story has been chopped and changed over the many years of its development and there's assets in the game that clearly had greater importance in a previous iteration but for which their plot points were cut. The most obvious example is the automatons. There's a dude who provides missions on obtaining pieces for one he's building, but apart from that there's also signs in other areas they had more importance (e.g. you see rooms full of them when going up an elevator, the Baron has disassembled ones on tables in his cutscene, etc.) Some plot elements just feel not fleshed out because they had to cobble together something to create this Frankenstein's monster of a game from so many elements.
• The ending sucks and is incredibly abrupt. Do we even know what the deal is with that half-built ship? Probably another abandoned plot point.

With all of its problems, I still kinda like it in so far as its general gameplay. But it doesn't have the longevity of something like TDM or the classic Thief games especially with all the user missions available for them. Oh well, maybe I'm just pining for what it could have been in the hands of a better developer.