Dark Messiah Has A Bit O Thief In It

[DopeFishhh]

Just finished Dark Messiah of might and magic, very nice game based on the source engine. anyway you can max out skills on thievery/sneaking and the game plays alot like thief, you can even snipe with bows and there is a rope bow at some point (yes rope arrows ala thief). Near the end there is a suit of stealthy armor with the letter 'G' in the collar.

 

The game has alot more combat than you would normally see in thief though. Ohh yeah remember that discussion about re-animating ragdoll bodies we had a bit back, seems they've done it in this and it's pretty good quality.

 

Just somethign to look out for.

[oDDity]

Almost all RPGs have a Thief type elements in them, but none of them are remotely as satisfying as Thief, they just don't have adequate stealth game mechanics.

[SneaksieDave]

And a whole lot o' Steam in it too. Pass.

 

I'll wait (enthusiastically) for Arx2, and hope they leave the bullshit out of the equation next time.

[oDDity]

I never got around to finishing Arx 1. I don't remember the stealth mechanics being particularly accomplished in it. The man problem, as with all RPGs, is that the AI to not behave in an appropriate fashion. AI coding for proper Thief style game play is obviously too much trouble to go to for an RPG, when stealth is a small and optional part of the gameplay.

[Huckeye]

Almost all RPGs have a Thief type elements in them, but none of them are remotely as satisfying as Thief, they just don't have adequate stealth game mechanics.

 

I thought Oblivion did a fine job with Thiefiness. Good reason why given who developed the stealth aspect of it. But it also had the ambiance of Thief in the dungeons and a few other places. I tried the Dark Messiah Demo and I couldn't get a handle on the stealth system. It seemed very clunky and sporadic. If they release another Demo I'll give it another go. I am excited about Gothic 3 for now and of course the soonly released Oblivion content.

[Crispy]

I don't know about Oblivion (really gotta get around to trying that out sometime), but I do know that Morrowind's "stealth" system sucked.

 

Step 1. Save the game.

Step 2. Hold down the "hide" key while standing in plain view next to an NPC.

Step 3. Wait until the "hidden" indicator appears.

Step 4. Frob them.

Step 5. Take something from their inventory.

Step 6. Your success is determined by a dice roll. If you fail, reload, and repeat from step 2.

 

YAWN.

[Huckeye]

I don't know about Oblivion (really gotta get around to trying that out sometime), but I do know that Morrowind's "stealth" system sucked.

 

Step 1. Save the game.

Step 2. Hold down the "hide" key while standing in plain view next to an NPC.

Step 3. Wait until the "hidden" indicator appears.

Step 4. Frob them.

Step 5. Take something from their inventory.

Step 6. Your success is determined by a dice roll. If you fail, reload, and repeat from step 2.

 

YAWN.

 

Oblivion is somewhat similar though improved. (inherent in an RPG there will be failures dependent apon skill levels). Arguably this actually makes it better as you get to create the master thief from the beginning rather than just take over once he's good.

 

Oblivion adds a shadow system, sneak multipliers for combat, armor penalizes sneak, audible clues from AI, etc.

 

I recommend Oblvion hands down. (unless you just hate RPGs, Oblivion is a fantastic game) The thing I really like about Thief is the atmosphere (even more than the sneaking). I think its the sneaking that allows you to soak in the atmosphere. Oblivion does well with this. The exploration, and cave diving is where I found it to be thickest.

 

In broad daylight, wearing armor boots, you won't be able to steal in Oblivion. At least not much. It also implemented a twitch based lock picking minigame and a persuasion one too. They are'nt fantastic, but are an improvement over the Morrowind dice role. I like the persuasion skill for a Thief character becuase I figure a great Thief has got to be a smooth / fast talker.

[Forsaken]

It's very hard to combine everything in a single game. Thief is a whole separate game devoted to stealth only. Some game like Die by the Sword is completely devoted to melee combat. Now look at Oblivion, it pretty much combines 2 games in one. In order for both stealth and combat to be great there, it has to do twice as work. Not to mention everything else in there. Of course, it can't, that is why the thief part is not complete. Especially since most people don't play as a thief.

[Vadrosaul]

No One Lives Forever 2 had a Thief inspired stealth system where you would get an eyeball gauge when going into the shadows, similar to the light gem.

 

Also Butcher Bay would effectively use shadows in stealth to give away Riddick to a guard if he was backlit.

[oDDity]

I think Oblivion is the best Thief experience you'll get outside Thief. It's very underused in the game though, there are several really good Thief like missions. Once you get high in skills, it becomes too easy of course, you don't even have to try.

Outside those few quests, playing a Thief is no fun at all. It's simply far too easy to steal. Lockpicking is simple even with a skill of zero, so you can basically break in anywhere and steal anything with no difficulty at all. You can just walk right into castles in full view of the guards, wander about boldly until you find a locked door in an secluded area, then pick the lock no matter how hard it is or how little skill you have..

Again, the AI just haven't been seriously set up with a stealth game in mind, so there's little satisfaction in beating them.

Still, there is good potential for making really Thiefy Fms in Oblivion. I'm not sure why you'd want to though, considering the much better options like TDS and TDM and the old Dark Engine.

[Huckeye]

Underused is a great term. Sounds like I enjoyed it more than you did, but I saw early previews of it where you could sneak up on people having conversations and get quests by hearing gossip... I was very excited about those situations where 'thiefing' all around the game world would have its benefits. As you said they were not nearly as often as I hoped. I still really enjoy playing the entire game as a Thief and I thought the dark brotherhood quests were amazing. (Thieves guild were cool too, but I felt a little lacking and the fence system needed more improvements).

 

My wife actually hated the game until she saw the 'thief' elements and then decided to play it just for sneaking through towns and looting folks. then the storyline drew her in and she spent a few dozen hours playing the game.

 

But I don't get bored easy. Guess that's why after 10 years I'm still playing games made for Windows 95/98.

[oDDity]

I wouldn't say playing a Thief is so much fun in this, but playing an archer/ranger/assassin type who steals a bit on the side is certainly fun.

I'm playing it again with about 40 different mods installed (a few of which are actually collections of mods in themselves), which makes it a far better game than when I played the vanilla version. Bethesda made some very strange game mechanic and 'balance' decisions, all of which have been rectified in the various mods.

[Forsaken]

I guess it was a commercial move of Bethesda's, they hoped that the fans will patch everything up. Mind you, they did.

 

And the problem with Thief is that you have to be good at it or it won't make sense.

Edited November 8, 2006 by Forsaken

[Domarius]

You can just walk right into castles in full view of the guards, wander about boldly until you find a locked door in an secluded area, then pick the lock no matter how hard it is or how little skill you have..

God dammit. That's no better than Morrowind.

[oDDity]

Well, I suppose the idea is that the main area of the castle is open to the public, but there are doors leading off from it that are locked. If you're discovered in one of the off-limits areas, you are either told to leave, and they'll follow you around until you do, or if it's somewhere like the master's bedroom, you're confronted and given the choice to either go to jail, pay a fine or resist arrest.

The problem is it's just too easy to avoid guards once you get high in sneak, and there aren't many guards anyway, usually one or maybe two patrolling the whole private areas. There is somewhat of a Thief element to it, sneaking around castles reminds me a lot of something like Baffords.

 

It's a lot more fun actually getting caught and then resisting arrest and fighting the guards, or making a run for it. They do follow you through the load zones, so getting away can be tricky. Once you are spotted, that's it,. you can't just run a few rooms away and hide behind a crate, or in a dark corner, the guards all magically know exactly where you are after that, so you have to leave the building and run for it.

As for the actual sneaking and thieving parts, there's really no challenge or satisfaction to it at all, other than getting free stuff.

I have loot mods installed which means that you do have a chance of finding some decent loot now, which keeps it interesting.

[thestemmer]

There are mods that make it both more difficult to sneak and more difficult to pick locks, if you're interested. There's one particularly good one called "more realistic sneaking" that makes your sneaking skill much more dependant on the amount of light in the area. There's another one that makes harder locks unpickable until you get to a certain skill level.

 

Personally I think the biggest AI limitation in Oblivion is the fact that guards don't respond to environmental stimuli very well. They'll go ballistic if they notice you sneaking around the castle armory, but if they come into a room and you're standing over the dead body of the countess, they'll fuss a little bit but won't go after you unless they actually saw you commit the crime. I saw one hilarous situation where somebody filled the guard's food box with poison apples. At mealtime, the guards would take an apple from the box, take a few bites out of it, and then keel over dead (the ragdoll physics were great for this, by the way -- there's nothing funnier than seeing a guard's head roll sideways as he dies sitting in his chair, or his body fall backwards as he expires on a bench).

 

Anyway, she proceeded to wipe out pretty much the entire garrison in this way. Every time a guard would die, she would throw their body on a pile in the middle of the floor. When the guards came in, they would complain about it for a second or two, and then get distracted and go eat another apple. By the end, you could barely walk on the floor for all the bodies. And all of this with her character just sitting and watching, dressed up in full ninja regalia, not looking suspicious at all.

Edited November 8, 2006 by thestemmer

[Forsaken]

That's hilarious! :lol:

 

But, as I said, Thief is only interesting when you are good at it. They make it hard - no one will play Thief except Thief fans.

 

Btw, Oddity, since you are the "you-play-TDP-the-wrong-way" guy, can you tell me if Garret is permitted to carry a piece of paper and pencil(chalk, whatever)?

 

Because I really don't understand how am I supposed to memorise EVERYTHING. Maybe you can. I can't. And without that I can't avoid all the guards, and I can't blackjack them cuz you said that's wrong, so I'm totaly without options.

[Domarius]

@oDDity: Yeah that highlights the thing I hate about these stat based games. YOU should get high in sneak, not the character. Don't get me wrong, I'm looking forward to trying out Oblivion and seeing all the interesting things it can do, but fundamentally, to me, any game that increments some internal counter so that the more you do it, the easier it gets, is a stupid game. Games are supposed to get harder as you go on.

In RPGs were they use these counters, to make it harder they have to compensate for the counter ticking up and make it MORE harder, so a portion of the difficulty increase negates the counter, and the remaining difficulty is the ACTUAL difficulty increase. So what's the point of the counter if you just cancel it out?

 

Discovering weapons and equipping them is a direct reward of exploration and defeating some boss (like in Zelda), but being rewarded for repetition is no better than the Poker-mon.

 

I just feel like saying "why am I doing this?" when I find myself mining through hoards of rats and bugs just to be eligable to equip a certain item or some crap. It turns me right off.

 

Diablo is the only fun version of this I've ever encountered. The game is shamelessly based around it, and provides seemlingly endless enemies and items and ways to organise your items, so you can play it when you just feel like a bit of mindless entertainment.

 

@thestemmer: Heh, that story illustrates that even if it's not realistic, if you just throw in more of the right variables, interesting stuff can happen anyway.

[thestemmer]

Domarius: take a look at this mod for Oblivion:

 

Oscuro's Oblivion Overhaul

 

It's a mod for Oblivion that makes it so enemies are no longer scaled to your level. It improves that value of the game immensely, and it's also very well-balanced. I wouldn't play without it.

 

If you're interested in a few other mods that will vastly improve your Oblivion playing experience, PM me and I'll send you a list.

[Domarius]

That would be awesome - you could just post them in a new thread for everyone's benefit

 

I'm telling my brothers about this mod. They already play it and share my sentiments, so they're gonna love this.

[oDDity]

I@ve a ton of mods as well, but one of te problems is sifting through the literally thousands of mods to find the few decent ones that actually improve your game. It took me about 5 hours to install the game, find all the mods I thought I would like, and get down to actually playing.

THEre are compatability issues between alot of them as well, and they have to be loaded in a certain order if you want certain parts of one mod to override another, so you need a mod manager app. It's quite a pain in the ass.

Anyway, I enjoyed it much more thistime, now that all the NPCs and creatures aren't leveling along with me, it's now more like a normal RPG where there are very hard enemies you can't kill at level one, but you can get up to level 20 and have a chance against them, and can kill lower level things in one hit by then.

I've also m0d that makes a lot more AI spawn, so instead of a lone wolf you have a pack of 5 or 6 wolves, or large herds of deer, or a group of 7-8 bandits to deal with.

Everyone knows (apart from Bethesda obviously) that having a level 15 player fighting 10 level 5 bandits is much more fun that fighting 1 level 20 bandit with a million HP so you have to shoot him 50 times.

Of course, they were so liberal when it came to poly counts - some of the guards have 15-20,000 polys each and 5 or 6 textures maps, that having 10 at once does tend to drag the system down a bit.

THey don't seem to have understood the idea that normal maps mean you can save some polygons. They seem to have gone for a belt and braces approach.

THey dont' seem to have utilised normal maps at all, as far as I can see, they just used the nvidia normal mapper to make normal maps from texture details, rather than normal mapping high res geometry onto low res geometry.

[DopeFishhh]

The sneaking in dark messiah puts oblivion's to shame, it actually comes very close to thief itself. If there was a toolset for it making FM's would be possible. the only difference is that the game usually throws you into combat heavy situations, for instance you have to take out cyclops's and you don't get much choice in the matter. Because it uses steam is absolutely no excuse for avoiding it.

 

Oblivion was a huge disapointment for me and alot of my friends, we all thought morrowind was much better than oblivion for many different reasons. We spent alot of time with different morrowind mods but just simply didn't have the patients with oblivion mods.

[Huckeye]

So what's the point of the counter if you just cancel it out?

 

I feel like every game does this. In any first person shooter you stumble across a new fancy weapon and think, "ah, things will get easier now" only to find that all the enemies are harder and you actually COULD'NT get past them without the new weapon. I feel like RPGs are a little better in that you can find an UBER Master Sword of Butt Whooping +29 and still come across rats and spiders as well as bosses.

 

Even in survivor horror games, if you ever come across a new weapon or lots of supplies, my first thought is, Oh crap! they are giving me this for a reason. I think almost every game I have ever played gets harder to compensate new weapons / skills and I have often wondered, what's the point?

 

Dopefishhh, is steam mandatory or optional? I thought it was an option, but I need to make sure. Thanks.

[oDDity]

The sneaking in dark messiah puts oblivion's to shame, it actually comes very close to thief itself. If there was a toolset for it making FM's would be possible. the only difference is that the game usually throws you into combat heavy situations, for instance you have to take out cyclops's and you don't get much choice in the matter. Because it uses steam is absolutely no excuse for avoiding it.

 

It can't be that good, it only got 6.7 at gamespot, which is a terrible score for that site. They regularly overmark average generic games, very little scores below 8, so the fact this got such a shit score doesn't say much for it. From the review,it sounded like a dumbed down kiddie game.

I think I'lll play NWN 2 instead.

[Domarius]

I know managing all the mods can be a pain. So I'm just going with this Oblivion Overhaul one and leaving it at that It sounds awesome enough.