Same time they stop putting in airducts that are 3 feet on a side.
I personally think Thief 2 is the best game ever made - I can’t think of any levels in that game that were not fun to play (I loved the Bank Mission) and they solved the first games “monster” problems by adding in the mechanoids from the x-hammerites. Dammit, I can’t believe my disc got scratched, I want to play that game again now.
Anyway, I think Splinter Cell was good over all - it was better then trying to sneak around in Deus Ex was at least.
Does anyone know if any work had been started on Thief 2 Gold when Looking Glass went belly up?
Reviews (formal or informal) can tell you that there’s a problem with parts of a game – but they’re often pretty bad at identifying what that problem really is, much less how to fix it.
Between Thief I & II, there were many design discussions at LG about the whole “monster issue”. The concensus conclusion reached (which I believe to have been essentially correct) was that the problem was not “monsters” or “undead”, per se, but the lack of AI-state feedback being perceived by the player. A really experienced player (like most of us in QA) was able to perceive the difference between Burrick-grunts that meant “I’m suspicious” and “I’m just making an idle sound”. Naive players didn’t (and shouldn’t have been expected to) have that degree of familiarity. Without that AI-state information, it was much more difficult to sneak around the non-human opponents, and many people didn’t bother trying. For Thief II, this was primarily addressed by having the new “monsters” (the mechanicals) give easily identifiable speech feedback as to their current state of alertness.
I have a vague memory (I could be wrong on this) that they also pulled in the “sense radius” for Zombies in Thief: Gold considerably, which helped encourage stealth gameplay more. This may explain the common phenomenom you see of Thief fans enjoying the undead missions far more on their second time through; if their first time was with the original release, and their second time was the Gold, those missions are more fun (and stealth-able).
Work had certainly been “started”, but I don’t think very much had gotten done before the ax fell. The Lead Designer (Sara Verelli (sp?)) is now working in my office, so I’ll try to remember to ask her…
I haven’t played SC because I’m not all that hot for third-person games, but I’ll weigh in on the Thief monster thing.
I’ve played through both T1 and T2 many times, and can say that initally, I hated the monsters in T1. But on subsequent play-throughs, I discovered why (and learned to love them): they scared the shit out of me. I was mistaking dislike for fearful aversion. Bonehoard and Return to the Cathedral are two great examples of this.
Any game that can actually instill fear in me to nearly the point of a phobia gets an A+ grade in my book.
Yep, Return to the Cathedral is one of the scariest gaming moments I can recall, along with the “They Hunger” mod for Half-Life, and “Haunted House” on the 2600…
This is fascinating. I certainly can see how this would ruin the sense of sneaking for some people. It’s neat to see how LG analyzed this. Of course, I think that for some people this analysis is a total waste of time.
For me though, I don’t give a fat turd whether or not the monsters said “grunt”, “gruuunnnnnt”, “snort”, “snort I say”, or “whachotalkinboutgarret.”
That wasn’t what bothered me. What bothered me was that they were MONSTERS. I wanted the game to essentially confine itself to being about thievery and infiltration of normal structures. Not monster caves, and not zombie-zones. It was purely psychological. I just didn’t like that direction.
Now the robots, those I could get behind. I can’t explain why I felt like there was a difference, but I just did. Maybe I’m just fooling myself.
But it was so cool how the robots were steam driven! I mean, that fit EXACTLY into the medieval/emergent industrial revolution concept articulated in both games.
To get back to Splinter Cell though, I’d much rather play a monster mission in thief than the meat packing plant level of SC.
Work had certainly been “started”, but I don’t think very much had gotten done before the ax fell. The Lead Designer (Sara Verelli (sp?)) is now working in my office, so I’ll try to remember to ask her…[/quote]
I finally got a spare moment to quiz her. T2G was definitely being worked on. There were to be three new levels, which were spec’d out and had designers working on them. Sadly, the money ran out before any of it was remotely close to finished.