Playing Experiences (First Impressions)

[Norbert]

The following is just a bunch of random remarks. Maybe one of the things I bring up is useful for the developers. I'd never played Thief or any other stealth video game before giving TDM 2.00 a try yesterday. I played it on a GenuineIntel dual core CPU @2.40GHz with 2 GB memory, under GNU/Linux Mint 15, and with an Asus GTX 650 Ti Boost DCII OC 2GB graphics card. TDM is an impressive piece of software and it's quite entertaining and good-looking. Anyway, let's see...

 

- The game started in a low resolution. I changed it to 16:9 and 1920x1080, but it was difficult to see whether I'd correctly picked 1920x1080 because the numbers are white on a yellow background, even when I moved the mouse away.

 

- For the Training Mission, being able to select "Training", "Training" or "Training" is just weird. What's the difference. The description is the same for all three. My guess is that they're all the same and that it's just where "Easy", "Medium" and "Hard" or whatever usually are. But as a new player you don't know that and it's just weird. It should have one "Training", not three. If these three are truly different, it should at the very least say "Training 1", "Training 2" and "Training 3".

 

- I started the Training Mission. The loading time is too long. From clicking "Start Mission" (bar appears) to "Preparing to start mission, please wait" takes 45 seconds, and the whole thing until "Mission Loaded" is 2 minutes and 2 seconds (122 seconds). Later, I ran into a similar problem with The Tears of St. Lucia.

 

- I started the game and the audio was clearly lagging. By reading the "The sound lags behind the picture" entry of the FAQ in your Wiki I was able to fix this problem.

 

- The game told me to read the book. What the game does constantly is tell you to use certain keys (like "the 'use' key"), but not the actual mouse buttons or keys. The game lists the actual mouse buttons and keys in on the Settings screen, so it knows this information and could say something like "to flip pages, use previous and next weapon _(currently set as mouse wheel down and mouse wheel up)_" or whatever. The same goes for changing lock picks, the game could tell the player what actual keys to use. Another example: "You need to crouch now _(currently set as x)_."

 

- I wanted to write down some notes and wasn't able to use Alt+Tab, not even when temporarily entering the game's menu. In, for example, Half-Life 2, you can go the menu and the game releases the mouse. Also, TDM blacked out my secondary monitor, which meant I could no longer follow an IRC chat stream. I'm basically stuck in TDM. I want to see my IRC chat stream, move my mouse away from the game while in the menu, be able to Alt-Tab to an editor to make notes, and so on.

 

- The text in the upper left disappears way to fast. Not just too fast, but way too fast. When entering the room with the vault, for example, I was only halfway reading it and it's gone. I tried getting the text back by walking out of the room and back in. Didn't work. I looked for a setting to increase the time the text is being displayed. Didn't find it. This is a problem, because in some instances I just missed the instructions and didn't know what to do next.

 

- While looking through the Settings for what I described above, I saw the Stereo setting for audio. I was curious what other settings the game supports, so I clicked that entry. I went to Surround 7.1 and that was when the game crashed (core dump). I had just finished lock picking the most difficult door and hadn't saved the game yet. I restarted the game, but all I got was a segmentation fault. I deleted what I guessed was the config file (I sorted the files by date, and figured the config was what changed last) and could start the game again.

 

- A buddy of mine was here yesterday. I suggested he could try out the game. "Do you want Dutch text instead," I asked him, knowing he would probably prefer this and I'd seen a language setting for it in the Settings. "Yes," he said. We've both been searching for it for quite some time and simply couldn't find it. We both looked for it together. "Maybe click that?" "No..." We couldn't find it. Later I accidentally ran into the language settings again. Under "Video". In my opinion, that's a weird location for language settings.

 

- I ended up sword fighting (melee) in the Training Mission and it remains unclear to me how to defend against attacks, especially against hammer attacks. I know I need to click the middle mouse button after moving the mouse in a certain direction. The main problem is that two hits from an enemy kill me. Every time I need to re-enter the fighting area just to get killed again. In my opinion, it would be better if my character would just say "Auch" and the screen would flash red, or whatever. I need the enemy to attack me in just 1 way ten times in a row. Then I can figure out how to defend against that particular attack. Next, he should attack in another way ten times, so once again I have time to figure out what the appropriate defense is. Now it's just *bam*, *bam*, restart, *bam*, *bam*, restart, and so on. At some point I just walked away from the whole sword fighting thing.

 

- I started playing The Tears of St. Lucia and got stuck pretty quickly. I think what would be good is if the game had an actual training mission that would constantly tell the player what to do. Shoot an arrow there, club the man there, move into the shadow here, duck there, climb up to that window here, pick up that there. Basically, when to do what in actual missions. I had to watch YouTube videos to figure out how to play missions.

[161803398874989]

At some point I just walked away from the whole sword fighting thing.

Heh, me too. I never bother to fight anyways. It's either just quickload or bailamanjaro.

 

- I started playing The Tears of St. Lucia and got stuck pretty quickly. I think what would be good is if the game had an actual training mission that would constantly tell the player what to do. Shoot an arrow there, club the man there, move into the shadow here, duck there, climb up to that window here, pick up that there. Basically, when to do what in actual missions. I had to watch YouTube videos to figure out how to play missions.

I figured this out myself, but that's probably because I like to make things hard. You get used to it really quickly though.

 

Should I ever get a computer that can run DarkRadiant, I'll probably give mapping a shot and this would be on the list.

[Araneidae]

Some nice observations here.

 

- The game started in a low resolution.

Yes. I think I've seen some discussion on the forums about this, but certainly the initial graphical defaults are difficult to reconfigure.

 

- I started the Training Mission. The loading time is too long.

Alas, that's par for the course. However, reloading a mission from a save is a lot quicker, so it's not disastrous. Be grateful you don't have to sit through a publisher's video instead!

 

- I wanted to write down some notes and wasn't able to use Alt+Tab

It's a shame, isn't it? This is the one point where the Wine version is actually superior!

 

- I ended up sword fighting (melee) in the Training Mission

I've actually not bothered to learn how to melee fight. There's one mission I know of where you need to defend against attack, otherwise if you're fighting, you're doing it wrong!

 

- I started playing The Tears of St. Lucia and got stuck pretty quickly.

I agree: as a starting mission it's bloody hard, particularly getting

that damned key

to begin with.

 

I love the idea of a hand holding training mission for beginners!

[MurcDusen]

You might try Awaiting The Storm for a start instead, it's pretty short, kinda linear and relatively easy (it can be a bit hardware hungry in the beginning area though...)

[Jinix]

Personally I prefer to play WITHOUT hints, screen help, info boxes or whatever.

The less "help" the more better the discovery.

You are not supposed to fight as you are a thief not a fighter so swordplay is not such a good idea.... especially as the guards have the avantage of steel armor for protection.

Those games that have little info boxes on the NPCs and red or green circles are a complete turn off for me so I don't play them.

As to having a 'chat' with someone while playing that would completely ruin my enjoyment. I like to play in the dark during the wee hours when everyone is asleep and without any interruptions.

As to the various 'glitches'.... well my take on that is these are bloody great games put out by amazingly clever people who do all this work for fans of the oldThief games to enjoy... and for free even.

I

[RJFerret]

Lots of great feedback there. I just die fighting too, so run or flashbomb or reload instead. Would having training AIs do no damage help or give wrong impression? I think you are supposed to learn not to fight toe to toe. I said the same on pop up info texts, and I'm a fast reader. Windowed mode dragged full screen permits alt tabbing. I was able to do St. Lucia not realizing I'd missed another way and half of the map! Yay for Youtube. It seems the best, albeit time consuming hint source. Forum respondants often give spoilers instead of hints.

[161803398874989]

You should very explicitly say you want hints. People here will understand that.