Interesting Thief retrospective

[Doc_Brown]

Stumbled across this today, and while I don't agree with all his points I would still recommend giving the video a watch.  He makes some insightful observations not only about the classic Thief games compared to 2014's, but also game design in general from back then versus now.

[Silver Sorrow]

He does make some excellent points. For example, with the 2014 catastrophe, I too felt like I was running through a modern shooter...quest markers and no-consequence gameplay. Get caught? Run away and hide in a cupboard! Don't wanna sneak? Kill everyone!



Additionally, Gopher has a video in which he gripes about how ludicrous that game's stealth is. Pretty funny.

[Doc_Brown]

He does make some excellent points. For example, with the 2014 catastrophe, I too felt like I was running through a modern shooter...quest markers and no-consequence gameplay. Get caught? Run away and hide in a cupboard! Don't wanna sneak? Kill everyone!

The part that hurts the most are those interviews with the 2014 developers.  I remember being cautiously optimistic at the time, but looking at them now it's blatantly obvious how little they grasped/cared about what they were doing.

Additionally, Gopher has a video in which he gripes about how ludicrous that game's stealth is. Pretty funny.

He's got a great voice, too.  It may just be me, but I tend to gravitate to YouTubers who are not only entertaining/informative but also pleasing to the ear (like favoring Markiplier over PewDiePie, say).  I'll have to give some of Gopher's other work a listen...

[Starfox]

OK, I must say I agree with most of the argumentation when it comes to comparing Thief to Thief (the other one). Obviously the latest Thief tried to much to copy the other games in the industry -- in other terms to please the largest crowd.

With that said, I don't fully agree with the idea that all games should be like Thief (although I tend to agree on the fact that all stealth games should be inspired by Thief). What works in Thief wouldn't necessarily work in other games and vice-versa. Take the objective arrow for example (or rather the objective locator because not all games feature an arrow); the absence of it work beautifully in Thief with the partially drawn map but that works because the levels are designed for it to work. Same can be said of Morrowind (that also didn't feature any kind of objective locator) but because the dialogues were designed for that. Characters that would give you a quest would generally give you directions (Go North until you can see the mount blabla then turn East until the cave of... etc. etc.) but this was when characters were only dialoguing with you via text (that could be easily written at no additional cost). All this disappeared with the introduction of spoken dialogues (because recording studio hours cost a lot as well as voice actors). And seriously, you don't want to go through an extended world like Skyrim or The Witcher 3 with just "Go find this thing in that place" and no directions at all (unless you want to spend the next 3 years running all other the place).

However in Thief (2014) the presence of a locator was unnecessary and confused things. The city was designed in such a way that most of the time if you followed the indicator you ended up in a dead end or going through hoops that you could avoid. So when I played the game I just tuned it out after a while so confusing it was and started to do the same thing I did in the old Thief, drawing my own mental map. And yes really, you could play the new Thief without looking at the in game map. It's not like it was so vast that you could definitely get lost.

Still I wouldn't want every game out there to be Thief. Because Thief is a special formula dedicated to a special genre a formula that I love but I also love diversity in my games. I am however for giving the choice to players to get rid of all the helpers if they want: which was the case in Thief 2014 but then, the game wasn't designed to get rid of all the helpers -- as Gopher discovered in the other video.

I agree with Gopher by the way, when I play Thief (the originals I mean) I always have a mindset that is utterly different of the one I have when playing any other game. I too don't support to hit the reload key in Thief. I play missions like if they were the real thing and in Thief unless you do something utterly stupid that gets you killed, you can generally go through a whole mission without reloading once because this is a stealth game (an a well designed stealth game). In other kind of games you expect (though don't welcome) dying occasionally. It's part of the game but in a stealth game... no way. That shouldn't happen unless you do something very stupid like... running on a tiled floor to blackjack a guard?

But sure Thief 2014 is a different beast... I hope Gopher sent his video to the culprits... 

[Doc_Brown]

I've been watching Mark Brown's videos of late, and his latest just so happens to be about what he calls Immersive Sims: games like System Shock, Thief, and Deus Ex (among others). 

Of the videos mentioned in this thread, it's probably my favorite so far.   

[Starfox]

I like the term Immersive Sim (although I generally tend to use sim to describe other kind of programs). But great presentation of what those games are.