Sometimes I wish TDM were harder

[monterto]

In a game about non-confrontation that's one hell of a mechanical aberration. There are a ton of other (far more interesting) tools you can use to bypass or eliminate a guard, but they're limited in quantity and many are risky for the user.

 

This is absolutely true.

 

Deus ex 2 comes to mind. A game where you spend most of your time hiding in vents. Why? Because they are everywhere and they require no resources. If the player simply chooses to ignore the vents or in the case of TDM, the blackjack, it's a much more engaging experience. So ask yourself if it makes a game boring or less engaging why is it even there?

[IHaveReturned]

Anyways that's my view; wanting to have something changed simply because you can't do it, is not the way to go about it. It's not broken, you just suck at it

 

Since it seems you still don't get it, I ought to be crystal clear:

 

Maybe if I put the time in I could get good at it, same as any other game. Fair and square. But when I play a game that professes to be Thief and markets itself as such, I also expect it to overlap sufficiently with my old skillset that I don't feel like I'm trying a brand new IP. But the rules have been rewritten so extensively in TDM that such is how it feels. As a veteran rather than a noob, that just turns me off, becuase each fail is an inexplicable blow to my pride. It isn't about my ability to overcome. It is about that need existing in the first place.

 

 

I say "maybe" because I just played to confirm my memories, and the TDM AI capabilities are even more ridicilous than I remembered. I'm being 2nd alerted from walking on wood on Easy, and being seen from directly behind walking on carpet. The blackjack also has reach so pathetic my biggest problem isn't helmets, but hitting the head without touching the AI. It seems the only thing working as it should is shadow stealth. The rules have been rewritten, and the result is a game I'm not sure I can be bothered mastering.

Edited October 14, 2013 by IHaveReturned

[grayman]

The rules have been rewritten, and the result is a game I'm not sure I can be bothered mastering.

 

I'm sorry your experience hasn't been a good one. If the desire to master the game isn't there, then there's nothing we can say or do to spur you on. It sounds like TDM just isn't the game for you. At least you didn't lose any money on it.

[Serpentine]

I say "maybe" because I just played to confirm my memories, and the TDM AI capabilities are even more ridicilous than I remembered. I'm being 2nd alerted from walking on wood on Easy, and being seen from directly behind walking on carpet. The blackjack also has reach so pathetic my biggest problem isn't helmets, but hitting the head without touching the AI. It seems the only thing working as it should is shadow stealth. The rules have been rewritten, and the result is a game I'm not sure I can be bothered mastering.

Might as well turn noTarget on and just walk around a map if you're not interested in playing something.

[IHaveReturned]

(This post isn't meant to offend, but is more my take of the balance of options/variables and a 'good solution')

 

It's not even down to the code.

 

These changes are nearly invisible to the player.

• How many HP does the AI have? Who cares - it's not dead yet.
  
• How far can he hear? Why does that guard hear better than that other guard?
  
• Why do the guards on this map see me all the time, but on other maps I was fine?
  
• Why does this specific AI not die, and I've killed plenty in the past with less.
  

This isn't a shooter with simple "I've been seen now I shoot him until he's dead while he runs in a straight line towards me". But we can use it as an example of sorts.

 

In general : The player has certain expectations and changing them constantly, specially when it is invisible (consider people who are challenged to notice different types of helmets!). A lot of what makes a game enjoyable comes from both the challenge, but also understanding what level that challenge was from your previous experience, and then beating that.

 

When in the shooter you manage to kill what you know is a significantly more tricky opponent, at the same time as normal gameplay, it feels way better than just mowing down a horde of the same peons. If the tricky AI was replaced with a normal peon, you lose that. If all of the peons are replaced with the tricky AI, you lose normal players. The balance in this case is explicit due to the visible difference and beating expectations around that.

 

If you think about Painkiller - The fights were well staged, they mixed up the AI types and always gave you lots of weak AI to pad it out and make it hectic, they didn't just give you the tough guys, and if they gave you a bunch of peons only, it was sort of the 'bonus round' or intro to something bigger.

 

It's also why I think the real take-away portion of a book like Donald A. Normal - The Design of Everyday Things is something that crosses a lot of everyday topics, and shows that problems are often designer created. In my view : by trying to appeal to the 'everything is possible', but without balancing it out with what are realistic use-cases (open ended on purpose). Then again ~game devs~ like to pick apart books like that for the tiny semantics.

 

In all : Difficulty changes require visibility to be appreciated. The mapper controls the environment, the most visible of all, use of which is better than twiddling spawn args.

Wait, wait, wait. Am I reading this right? The individual mapper has enormous freedom in what capabilities they give each AI?

 

How is that not an enormous problem? Skill is all about the world being predictable, about feats being repeatable. If the same guard model has vastly different abilities from mission to mission, yet looks and acts the same, how does one evolve skill at defeating him? Hell, how can one face him fairly for the first time at all? This sounds like a feature that basically requires abuse of the save-function to overcome pure chance, rather than use of skill.

[AluminumHaste]

First of all, no that's wrong, it is not marketed as Thief. Here, from the front page:

 

THE DARK MOD 2.0 is a free, first-person stealth game inspired by the Thief series by Looking Glass Studios. It recreates the essence of the original Thief games on a more modern engine.

 

You are doing it wrong, absolutely, completely wrong. If you are so close to the AI that you can't hit them without bumping into them, as you say here:

 

The blackjack also has reach so pathetic my biggest problem isn't helmets, but hitting the head without touching the AI.

 

Then that's wrong. Watch my video again and really WATCH it. I don't get close to them, I'm still about 3 feet away, maybe more when I blackjack them.

Hell, I blackjacked an AI sitting in a chair, across a desk while I was on the windowsill!!!!!!!!!!!!

 

You've already been told that the Thief skillset for blackjacking is useless here, and for good reason. The Thief 1/2 AI were pants on head retardedly easy to blackjack, what skillset are you talking about possessing?

 

Also I just tried 5 different maps, and walking up behind AI for as long as I could before they detected something and turned around to see what it was. So that's dirt, wood, stone, grass and carpet texture. The carpet texture I was able to RUN up behind an AI and he didn't go above alert level 1.

The others were a mixed bag with wood and stone being the worst. With those I had enough time to get right up behind them and blackjack, but if I waited a few seconds more then game over, they turned to see what was sneaking up behind them.

[grayman]

Wait, wait, wait. Am I reading this right? The individual mapper has enormous freedom in what capabilities they give each AI?

 

It's not as bad as you make it out to be. All AI are given a variety of capabilities, and they of course vary in the places where it's reasonable for them to vary. Guards with swords are courageous, unarmed peasants flee if confronted. Noble ladies walk more slowly than nearly everyone else.

 

Most mappers simply stick with the default capabilities that come with the AI they use. Only in particular cases where an AI has a certain role to fulfill--perhaps he's drunk, or perhaps he's a mute suicidal guard--will those capabilities get modified to fit the role. But those are dictated by the story the mapper is telling. Mappers aren't dialing capabilities up and down willy-nilly.

 

It's certainly possible for you to meet what looks like the same guard in two different missions, but you ought to assume that they won't necessarily be the same guard, or behave the same, or be equally aware of their surroundings. In 90% of the cases, they'll be darn close to each other, though.

 

TDM is a toolset. The mappers control the story, its presentation, the actors, the light and shadows, helmetheads, etc. We've given them a large toolbox, but we don't dictate how they select the tools from that toolbox.

 

If you could muster the will to play a few missions, you'll see that the actors really aren't that much different, except in the cases where the storyline says they need to be.

[Serpentine]

Wait, wait, wait. Am I reading this right? The individual mapper has enormous freedom in what capabilities they give each AI?

I was replying to a previous post asking for more flexibility in what difficulty could modify, seemingly on a per-AI basis.

 

Edit : Edited the post to make it show that it was replying to someone, reduce confusion

[SirGen]

I was replying to a previous post asking for more flexibility in what difficulty could modify, seemingly on a per-AI basis.

 

Edit : Edited the post to make it show that it was replying to someone, reduce confusion

I'm not sure if we understand each other, but I didn't want to modify each AI separately. I wanted to adjust the players health separately from the AI's health. On the hardest combat difficulty level, guards kill me in 1 hit. It takes me 3-5 hits to kill them. On the easiest difficulty they kill me in about 2 hits and I kill them in about 3. I would like to modify how many hits I can take on average, and how many the average guard will take on average separately. Again, I may be entirely misunderstanding your posts, and I am not always good at conveying my thoughts Edited October 14, 2013 by SirGen

[Boxsmith]

Having an unlimited resource does not necessarily mean that using it is easy. Simply having the blackjack does not automatically knock out every guard. One must still use their skills to sneak up and swing the thing at the right place on the target. This is where level design comes into play e.g. patrol routes and placement of cover, be it shadows or physical cover.

 

I think you're vastly overstating the difficulty of using the blackjack, but that's neither here nor there. The bulk of my argument isn't about difficulty, exactly. It's about what's more fun and serves the fantasy thief is built around (although difficulty definitely plays into this, not so much in its intensity but more in its distribution). Thief was made under a really contrarian mindset. It was designed as the opposite of the shooter, which is all about direct engagement with the enemy. Thief is about concealment and indirection, but I think the blackjack stands in stark contrast to that principle because it is a tool for directly attacking the enemy. If your game is about avoiding guards, confrontation should be something the player resorts to, not his usual MO. Unlimited knockouts are immediately risky, but they drastically reduce risk in the long term by removing a major threat without long-term cost. This suggests to the player that blackjacking left and right should be his default setting. Not only does that undermine the game's verisimilitude (you know you've built more than one body pile in your time) and eliminate a lot of strategy from knockouts, it's really not the most fun you can have with the game.

 

You remember this guy in Bafford's basement?

 

 

There's no way to squeeze by him through the doorway, and even if you could, the area around him is really well-illuminated, so you'd likely be noticed. Faced with this setup, and seeing no way to sneak by, I'm guessing your first instinct is to go for that satisfying thunk across the back of his skull. It feels pretty sneaky, and there's a pleasing element of catharsis to it. This being the first level, we can forgive how easy it is.

 

How do we get around the gormless mook if we take away the blackjack, though? Clearly we have to make him move out of the way somehow without anyone getting hurt. We look around the room and find that there are shelves of stuff we can throw around. While the flooring is mostly soft and quiet, there's a stretch of metal plating within earshot of the guard. A pesky torch is mounted on a nearby column, making the room a little too bright for comfort. Putting that together, we've got a potential distraction. So we douse the torch, which lets us position ourselves to make a safer and faster escape, grab a shovel lying around (for optimal noise), then toss the thing. CLANG. The guard gets kinda spooked and decides to check it out, leaving the doorway. You get an opening, and moving carefully so as not to attract attention in your direction, proceed upstairs.

 

By getting rid of the blackjack in that scenario, we've introduced tension (a suspicious, moving guard), problem solving, greater engagement with the environment, and thiefy trickery to a very simple enemy encounter. It's not that much harder in practice, but it is a lot more fun than the formulaic creep & thwack.

 

Exactly. There are plenty of ways to make the blackjack almost unusable, simply by having AI in pairs, without obvious ways to get behind them. Or use really loud surfaces so that you can't sneak up on them. If you still manage to knock them out, you've earned it.

 

You can totally get around this stuff with competent level design, yeah. I'm not denying that. I just think the blackjack is pretty out of place and not very fun. The reason I hate shooters is that my primary means of interaction with the environment is the business end of a rifle, and I can seldom use that to do anything meaningful. All I can do is shoot dudes to keep moving. Thief and TDM are different, though. They build a really elaborate simulation and some very versatile yet concise mechanisms through which I can engage that simulation. The extent to which I can exercise agency in Thief is rarely found in games, but everything about the blackjack directs the player to the narrow conclusion that KOs are his go-to solution. It's not a far cry from taking cover behind a waist-high crate to get a headshot, and I don't think it does justice to the game's strengths.

 

If you have to make it "almost unusable" to have fun, why is it in the game?

Edited October 14, 2013 by Boxsmith

[grayman]

If you have to make it "almost unusable" to have fun, why is it in the game?

 

Probably because the original design discussions concluded that it should be there.

 

We can't remove it at this point, so it seems pointless to revisit its role in the game.

 

The only recourse is to mount a campaign to have future mission authors omit the blackjack.

[Boxsmith]

Yeah, I know.

 

I'm just voicing my thoughts on the matter. Worst case scenario, a constructive discussion takes place that makes me re-evaluate my conclusion and refines my critical faculties everyone froths at the mouth and categorically rejects my opinion because this is the internet. Best case scenario, people hear me out, give it a shot and it turns out to be pretty damn fun.

Edited October 14, 2013 by Boxsmith

[SirGen]

I think you're vastly overstating the difficulty of using the blackjack, but that's neither here nor there. The bulk of my argument isn't about difficulty, exactly. It's about what's more fun and serves the fantasy thief is built around (although difficulty definitely plays into this, not so much in its intensity but more in its distribution). Thief was made under a really contrarian mindset. It was designed as the opposite of the shooter, which is all about direct engagement with the enemy. Thief is about concealment and indirection, but I think the blackjack stands in stark contrast to that principle because it is a tool for directly attacking the enemy. If your game is about avoiding guards, confrontation should be something the player resorts to, not his usual MO. Unlimited knockouts are immediately risky, but they drastically reduce risk in the long term by removing a major threat without long-term cost. This suggests to the player that blackjacking left and right should be his default setting. Not only does that undermine the game's verisimilitude (you know you've built more than one body pile in your time) and eliminate a lot of strategy from knockouts, it's really not the most fun you can have with the game.

 

You remember this guy in Bafford's basement?

 

 

There's no way to squeeze by him through the doorway, and even if you could, the area around him is really well-illuminated, so you'd likely be noticed. Faced with this setup, and seeing no way to sneak by, I'm guessing your first instinct is to go for that satisfying thunk across the back of his skull. It feels pretty sneaky, and there's a pleasing element of catharsis to it. This being the first level, we can forgive how easy it is.

 

How do we get around the gormless mook if we take away the blackjack, though? Clearly we have to make him move out of the way somehow without anyone getting hurt. We look around the room and find that there are shelves of stuff we can throw around. While the flooring is mostly soft and quiet, there's a stretch of metal plating within earshot of the guard. A pesky torch is mounted on a nearby column, making the room a little too bright for comfort. Putting that together, we've got a potential distraction. So we douse the torch, which lets us position ourselves to make a safer and faster escape, grab a shovel lying around (for optimal noise), then toss the thing. CLANG. The guard gets kinda spooked and decides to check it out, leaving the doorway. You get an opening, and moving carefully so as not to attract attention in your direction, proceed upstairs.

 

By getting rid of the blackjack in that scenario, we've introduced tension (a suspicious, moving guard), problem solving, greater engagement with the environment, and thiefy trickery to a very simple enemy encounter. It's not that much harder in practice, but it is a lot more fun than the formulaic creep & thwack.

 

 

 

You can totally get around this stuff with competent level design, yeah. I'm not denying that. I just think the blackjack is pretty out of place and not very fun. The reason I hate shooters is that my primary means of interaction with the environment is the business end of a rifle, and I can seldom use that to do anything meaningful. All I can do is shoot dudes to keep moving. Thief and TDM are different, though. They build a really elaborate simulation and some very versatile yet concise mechanisms through which I can engage that simulation. The extent to which I can exercise agency in Thief is rarely found in games, but everything about the blackjack directs the player to the narrow conclusion that KOs are his go-to solution. It's not a far cry from taking cover behind a waist-high crate to get a headshot, and I don't think it does justice to the game's strengths.

 

If you have to make it "almost unusable" to have fun, why is it in the game?

The difficulty of blackjacking varies from player to player. You might be much better at it than I am. I personally enjoy knocking out a guard from time to time. I also enjoy a good sword fight every now and then. I sometimes try not to knock out anyone, or douse any lights. (You can read about this in one of my previous posts on this thread.) It comes down to preference. You could just decide not to use the blackjack. I do something similar. I won't allow myself to douse a torch unless I do it at point blank.

[Sotha]

Howsabout a conclusion for the discussion?

 

1) There are plenty of difficulty adjustments: mission difficulty and all the difficulty controls in the objective screens (ai vision, combat settings, lockpicking settings and more!) There really isn't a need to add any more! Lets spend the energy elsewhere. Limited manpower and difficulty reason 2) and 3) below.

 

2) The mapper is ultimately the main actor when it comes to difficulty. Have all light relightable, teleport two revenants around the player in flanking positions and see how the most skilled player doesn't last two seconds. Or make the enemies wield rubber ducks so that they inflict 1 damage per hit. Some missions are easier and some are more challenging. I love the variety. Difficulty is more on the mapper side than the mod side. The mod does not need ten million difficulty sliders, it will be only confusing to have too many.

 

3) If the new players would use the time and energy they use to complain here in actually learning and playing the game, they most certainly would know the basics of how blackjacking works in TDM.

[SirGen]

Yeah, I know.

 

I'm just voicing my thoughts on the matter. Worst case scenario, a constructive discussion takes place that makes me re-evaluate my conclusion and refines my critical faculties everyone froths at the mouth and categorically rejects my opinion because this is the internet. Best case scenario, people hear me out, give it a shot and it turns out to be pretty damn fun.

I have no ill will toward you. Nor do I think your opinion is stupid. I just have a different opinion

[Boxsmith]

No worries, man. That wasn't directed at you at all (or anyone in this thread so far, for that matter). You've been very civil and I appreciate that.

 

The difficulty of blackjacking varies from player to player. You might be much better at it than I am. I personally enjoy knocking out a guard from time to time. I also enjoy a good sword fight every now and then. I sometimes try not to knock out anyone, or douse any lights. (You can read about this in one of my previous posts on this thread.) It comes down to preference. You could just decide not to use the blackjack. I do something similar. I won't allow myself to douse a torch unless I do it at point blank.

 

You can impose artificial constraints upon yourself, sure. After 13-ish years with Thief I find myself doing that too; I change, but the game doesn't, so I kind of have to make my own challenges.

 

I've conceded that knockouts are satisfying in their own way already. What I'm saying, though, is that designing missions without a blackjack can lead do something a lot more fun, dynamic and faithful to what makes the Thief formula good (I'm pretty sure we actually agree on what that is). Thief gives you the freedom to engage it your way, and not necessarily the precise way the designer intended. I think as it stands, the blackjack is an unfortunate indicator to the contrary. It doesn't tell a newbie that "this is a game about solving problems your way," it says that "this is a game about clubbing heads" because it's such a one size fits all solution. Ironically, removing an option actually opened me up to a lot more.

Edited October 14, 2013 by Boxsmith

[grayman]

3) If the new players would use the time and energy they use to complain here in actually learning and playing the game, they most certainly would know the basics of how blackjacking works in TDM.

 

Amen. Outa here.

[Melan]

It's not as bad as you make it out to be. All AI are given a variety of capabilities, and they of course vary in the places where it's reasonable for them to vary. Guards with swords are courageous, unarmed peasants flee if confronted. Noble ladies walk more slowly than nearly everyone else.

 

Most mappers simply stick with the default capabilities that come with the AI they use. Only in particular cases where an AI has a certain role to fulfill--perhaps he's drunk, or perhaps he's a mute suicidal guard--will those capabilities get modified to fit the role. But those are dictated by the story the mapper is telling. Mappers aren't dialing capabilities up and down willy-nilly.

Actually, it is much easier - and much more common - to modify AI capabilities in Dromed (senses, combat skill, as well as the infamous 'time warp' which gives haunts their fearsome speed). It is trivial, and people are using it left and right. In comparison, TDM is a lot more 'what you see is what you get'.

 

And another point: blackjacking is an easy strategy for the expert player. But when I was playing Thief for the first time - very little FPS experience, and no familiarity with the game - it was still extremely challenging. And I was playing on Normal. Thief is a hard game. We are only good at it because some of us have had more than 15 years of practice. Nowadays, I mostly sneak around the AI without going for KOs.

[demagogue]

There's a cvar you can add in-game that will fail the mission if you KO somebody, if you want to force no-KO on yourself as a challenge. Somebody was posting about that just recently, so you could search for it.

 

I wanted to say something about mappers that change AI attributes. I think if it makes a gameplay difference, the onus should be on the mapper to really give some indication in the fiction or some other way that this AI is special and not how you might expect. And if they don't do that, then it's grounds for saying it's a design flub. But you know in real life, people are individuals and you can't always know what to expect until you meet them & see how they act too. So it's not always a bad thing either.

 

In my view, I like a little variety in rulesetting among FMs, not too much that I can't play normally, but enough that the gameplay personality of different FMs comes out different ways. An easy example is what to do with fake doors (a non-frobable object, no knob, just a texture, etc). I'm happy with different FMs doing it different ways because each way express a little different personality and even worldview, and letting an FM express its own personality is most important to me. I could say a similar thing with how AI are treated differently too.

[chakkman]

Sometimes i wish TDM were hatder

I don't. Some missions are freaking hardcore, especially the ones in which the map designer forces me to ghost on expert difficulty (which is a major design flaw imo, why not let the player decide how he wants to play...).

[Springheel]

So ask yourself if it makes a game boring or less engaging why is it even there?

 

Because to a lot of people it doesn't make the game boring or less engaging.

 

By getting rid of the blackjack in that scenario, we've introduced tension (a suspicious, moving guard), problem solving, greater engagement with the environment, and thiefy trickery to a very simple enemy encounter. It's not that much harder in practice, but it is a lot more fun than the formulaic creep & thwack.

 

You've picked an example where blackjacking is obvious and easy. There are plenty of cases where it requires problem solving and tension.

 

If you have to make it "almost unusable" to have fun, why is it in the game?

 

I didn't say you had to do that to make it fun. I just said it's easy to do, if you want to. I personally like blackjacking; I find it challenging enough to keep my interest (depending on the map) but I don't feel like I have to use it. Obviously you feel differently, and that's fine.

[Obsttorte]

I don't. Some missions are freaking hardcore, especially the ones in which the map designer forces me to ghost on expert difficulty (which is a major design flaw imo, why not let the player decide how he wants to play...).

You can always play under a lower difficulty level, so I would consider this only a flaw if it were enforced under all difficulty levels, and even then only if there is no logical explanation for that.

[chakkman]

The difficulty of blackjacking varies from player to player. You might be much better at it than I am. I personally enjoy knocking out a guard from time to time. I also enjoy a good sword fight every now and then. I sometimes try not to knock out anyone, or douse any lights. (You can read about this in one of my previous posts on this thread.) It comes down to preference. You could just decide not to use the blackjack. I do something similar. I won't allow myself to douse a torch unless I do it at point blank.

Well, of course it's down to preference, but a sword fight? Can't imagine a thief sneaking into some mansion, moving from shadow to shadow, only to get into a sword fight the next moment. The moment i have to use the sword, is the moment i will quick load, because for me, it ruins the whole mission when i get caught or seen.

[Springheel]

Some of my favourite moments in missions occur after being caught, and having to escape by the skin of my teeth.

[chakkman]

You can always play under a lower difficulty level, so I would consider this only a flaw if it were enforced under all difficulty levels, and even then only if there is no logical explanation for that.

It would be more acceptable, if the scenario would go along with it, say the mission would be laid out for a "Don't be seen, don't be heard" approach. But in a normal mission, i don't understand a mission objective like "Don't KO or kill anyone". I mean, why? They don't see your face anyway when you blackjack them...