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Since I was bored I played Thief Deadly Shadows again


Oldjim

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There is something I really quite like about TDS and I don't particularly know why, I've grown fond of it ever since playing it all that time ago. Not to mention I found The Cradle to be nothing short of brilliant.

Edited by MasterHelpo

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

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I'm interested in exploring the city hub if it's as big and full of things as they say, but mostly just that.

 

The annoying part is though they purposefully section off the city so you have to complete the campaign in order to continue unlocking parts of the city.

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I'm going to replay it once the community made gold version becomes available. I really want to experience the unbroken missions.

 

Never heard of that. Where did you get this information from? :o

"Einen giftigen Trank aus Kräutern und Wurzeln für die närrischen Städter wollen wir brauen." - Text aus einem verlassenen Heidenlager

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Never heard of that. Where did you get this information from? :o

I guess he means the inofficial upgrade. It fixes the thing with loading areas within missions, which is meant with "broken" i guess. Because apart from that, there is nothing broken with the missions really.

 

Nice to see some love for TDS here btw. :) It often gets an undeserved bashing here and more on TTLG. It's not nearly as shitty as it's made (mostly by people who played it for less than an hour...). Especially the comparison with Deus Ex 2 is funny. Yes, they run the same engine, but Thief 3's levels are way larger, and thw gameplay is way closer to the prequels. Further, there's lots of false stuff claimed, e.g. that the movement is simplified. Where? You can do anything you could in Thief 1 and 2... another thing claimed was that the head movement would be broken. Wrong too, ppl just don't get that the character moves his head first, then the body. Basically as it would be in real life, you don't have your head stationary and move your whole body as in Thief 1 and 2.

 

Lots of false assumptions imo from people who didn't give the game enough time and attention it seems. Oh well, shall they pass on the fun. :P

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Well, as Digital Nightfall once said:

 

I can see only one good thing coming from a Thief 4. Mark my words on this one. It will make people love Deadly Shadows.
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I guess he means the inofficial upgrade. It fixes the thing with loading areas within missions, which is meant with "broken" i guess. Because apart from that, there is nothing broken with the missions really.

 

Nice to see some love for TDS here btw. :) It often gets an undeserved bashing here and more on TTLG. It's not nearly as shitty as it's made (mostly by people who played it for less than an hour...). Especially the comparison with Deus Ex 2 is funny. Yes, they run the same engine, but Thief 3's levels are way larger, and thw gameplay is way closer to the prequels. Further, there's lots of false stuff claimed, e.g. that the movement is simplified. Where? You can do anything you could in Thief 1 and 2... another thing claimed was that the head movement would be broken. Wrong too, ppl just don't get that the character moves his head first, then the body. Basically as it would be in real life, you don't have your head stationary and move your whole body as in Thief 1 and 2.

 

Lots of false assumptions imo from people who didn't give the game enough time and attention it seems. Oh well, shall they pass on the fun. :P

 

It's not entirely undeserved. The movement was clumsy, the jumping was awkward. Mantling didn't always work well, climbing gloves instead of rope arrows, no swimming. And besides, gameplay trumps real life, so having a head swivel on a body in game may be more realistic, however it's not fun. There's a lag between turning around and starting to move, and the headbob made me sick until I found the guide to turn it down.

 

Other than that, I loved the game. It was Garrett, it was Thief, and the story was excellent. Mission design was pretty good too.

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I always assumed I'd taste like boot leather.

 

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I guess he means the inofficial upgrade. It fixes the thing with loading areas within missions, which is meant with "broken" i guess. Because apart from that, there is nothing broken with the missions really.

 

Nice to see some love for TDS here btw. :) It often gets an undeserved bashing here and more on TTLG. It's not nearly as shitty as it's made (mostly by people who played it for less than an hour...). Especially the comparison with Deus Ex 2 is funny. Yes, they run the same engine, but Thief 3's levels are way larger, and thw gameplay is way closer to the prequels. Further, there's lots of false stuff claimed, e.g. that the movement is simplified. Where? You can do anything you could in Thief 1 and 2... another thing claimed was that the head movement would be broken. Wrong too, ppl just don't get that the character moves his head first, then the body. Basically as it would be in real life, you don't have your head stationary and move your whole body as in Thief 1 and 2.

 

Lots of false assumptions imo from people who didn't give the game enough time and attention it seems. Oh well, shall they pass on the fun. :P

 

I don't walk like that in real life. lol My head doesn't turn first before I turn. I pivot and move. It's not, turn head, pivot body and then move. I gave TDS plenty of time and I spent a long time deconstructing the game to fix a lot of those issues, both before and after we had access to the editor.

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How hard would it have been for the developers of TDS to "stitch" the levels together on the PC version before it originally came out? I'm sure there would be some trouble, like being forced to use a single skybox on the whole level.

 

I remember in Doom 3 for the console, they chopped up the levels to fit in the RAM. This is how you are supposed to port a game to the console. You don't design small levels on the PC, you design big levels and cut them in chunks when necessary.

--- War does not decide who is right, war decides who is left.

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@ AliminiumHaste: Oh, right. Swimming wasn't there, didn't think of that. Also there's an issue when you were leaning left or right, when you got back into normal position, you had moved slightly towards the side you leaned to, which could make you fall off a ledge, when you were right on the edge. Happened to me once in the 3 times i played it through i think, so not really a serious issue.

 

And mantling didn't always work in Thief 1 & 2 also, so...

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How hard would it have been for the developers of TDS to "stitch" the levels together on the PC version before it originally came out? I'm sure there would be some trouble, like being forced to use a single skybox on the whole level.

 

Always a matter of budget i guess. Nowadays it's not such a problem, because the processing power of next gen consoles is almost on par with PC's, so you don't have to modify it much i guess. But i agree that it's a shame they had to implement console specific limitations.

Edited by chk772
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Consoles back then had such limited RAM though. Modern consoles have craploads (8 GB!). That means the above rules don't really apply anymore. There were lots of other PC games that were cut apart back then on consoles too, like Deus Ex, NOLF, etc.

 

I always liked the "player actually has a body" concept. It made me feel like I was more than just a floating camera with a weapon taped to the lower right of it. It also made the user rely on more realistic movement. For example, in a lot of FPP games, you can go up and down ladders by facing the opposite direction! You aren't subject to the laws of natural movement, like having to take the time to grab things, because you're nothing but a floating camera...

 

I've even seen people playing TDM on youtube where they tried to mount ladders facing the opposite direction. It made me laugh pretty hard.

Edited by lost_soul

--- War does not decide who is right, war decides who is left.

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I always liked the "player actually has a body" concept. It made me feel like I was more than just a floating camera with a weapon taped to the lower right of it.

Same here. Chronicles of Riddick had a similar (equal?) concept as TDS, you were able to see the body when looking down, and i think it was (don't remember exactly now) the same as in TDS, first your head turns, then your body turns. I remember it was a bit smoother than it was in TDS though, overall the controls were pretty smooth and nice.

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I enjoyed Chronicles of Riddick, but even there you were locked into ladder climbing animations, IIRC. And that's the problem. Body awareness is nice, but when trying to implement it, there is almost always going to be a conflict between body awareness and freedom of movement (case in point, the new Thief shows you opening the door with your hand, which is nice, but it also forces you to stand up and slide into position, which is not nice). In my opinion, freedom of movement should always win.

 

(and for the record, you CAN climb down a ladder backwards, it's just awkward. Besides that, there's nothing that says your body is facing the same way the camera is...it's perfectly possible to rotate your neck and torso to look behind you while climbing up or down)

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It's not entirely undeserved. The movement was clumsy, the jumping was awkward. Mantling didn't always work well, climbing gloves instead of rope arrows, no swimming. And besides, gameplay trumps real life, so having a head swivel on a body in game may be more realistic, however it's not fun. There's a lag between turning around and starting to move, and the headbob made me sick until I found the guide to turn it down.

 

Other than that, I loved the game. It was Garrett, it was Thief, and the story was excellent. Mission design was pretty good too.

+1

 

You nailed the point(s) :D

Task is not so much to see what no one has yet seen but to think what nobody has yet thought about that which everybody see. - E.S.

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I also enjoyed the body visibility in TDS.

 

I never thought of the angle change while down climbing a ladder using the forward key and looking down.

 

T1/T2/TDM thief climbs down ladders upside down / headfirst! Sliding board! :-)

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The thing about body visibilty is, that it doesn't simulate real life body awareness really well, especially if it stiffens movement due to lack of certain animations. In real life we know where our limbs are even without seeing them, and we can move them without having to look at them. The way many games try to simulate body awareness is by actually making and animating a body model for the player, where there's a camera stuck to the head. This limits mobility like crazy, and eventually makes it impossible for the player to do certain things they would be able to in the real world. I find that highly immersion-breaking.

For example, when balancing tight beams in any fps without visible body, I just imagine my character to put one foot infront of the other, whereas in (admitedly older) games with a visible body, I would see a totally normal walk animation. Thiaf goes even so far as to shove the visible body right in your face (literally), just to show off. The fact that I'd never hold my hands like the way nuGarret does, does again break my immersion a lot. The only games I can think of that did body awareness well were Mount & Blade, ArmA and maybe Hitman, since they usually had pretty stiff movement systems anyway, which also fit into the general design of these games.

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Try Chronicles of Riddick Escape from Butcher Bay or Assault on Dark Athena. Really, it works perfectly, and neither limits mobility, nor is it "immersion-breaking". In fact, it gives you a lot more physical awareness, if there's such a thing. Remember the times when there were no shadows, or just shadows in form of a circle under your character, or AI game characters? Games benefitted so much from the introduction of these, because it feels much more real having them. Same with body visibility. I think what lost_soul said hits the nail. You feel like "more than just a floating camera with a weapon taped to the lower right of it".

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Try Chronicles of Riddick Escape from Butcher Bay or Assault on Dark Athena. Really, it works perfectly, and neither limits mobility,

 

How can you say it doesn't limit mobility when it has scripted, 3rd person ladder sequences? I'm pretty sure it also had 3rd person door-opening animations in some cases.

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