The topic description says it all. I feel massively disappointed by Thief 2014.

The trailers led me to believe I'd be getting a combination of Mirror's Edge freerunning and Thief kleptomania. (Which, incidentally, is 2/3 steps to my dream game: add either of Assassin's Creed combat and third-person freerunning, or The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay's brutal first-person melee.) That, combined with the fact that this produced by Eidos Montreal, a studio who had proven capable of taking ancient, beloved PC franchises and living up to them (Deus Ex: Human Revolution,) I didn't hesitate to jump on it.

I jumped too soon.

On its own, would I say that Thief 2014 is a bad game? No, no I would not. Thief 2014 is not a bad game. It's okay; so okay it's average. (WARNING: TVTopes link detected!)

Average is not acceptable from the likes of a Thief title, or a Deus Ex title, or a Half-Life title. It was acceptable in the form of Jame's Camereon's Avatar: the game. It is not acceptable for Thief.

Eidos Montreal needs to be ashamed of themselves The game fails to live up to the bar set by Deadly Shadows, which I know many considered to be the weakest of the original trilogy. I liked it, personally, though I never played Metal Age. Rope Arrows, worse than not existing, might as well be keys, climbing/mantling/etcetera is all basically only at designated points. Garret very early on gets a "Claw" tool which he can use in pretty much exactly the way Ezio Auditore could use his Turkish Hookblade in terms of extending his climbing, but only at very obvious designated points, which are marked with either a blue grate/glowing object (like a ladder that's juuust out of reach which the Claw can reach,) or scratch-marks on the wall, or both. Jumping is context only; only when they say Garret may leap a chasm, may he leap a chasm.

And they took away his dagger. Not only did they take away his dagger, very early on in the tutorial, when the girl he gets the Claw from (he steals it from her, which is asinine since she's his protege,) uses it to kill someone, he bitches her out for it, preaching at her about killing. What?

Is this the same Garret who, when I played Dark Project and Deadly Shadows, put the "Deadly" in the eponymous Shadows by making it his mission in life to slaughter his way through everybody who had the balls to pick up a blade?

And worse, though he blows up at her for it, he can kill just fine. He just can't use the Claw or a knife to do it, he can still shoot a bitch through the eye socket with a broadhead arrow, or use the environment to murderate them...... So, what was the point again? And worse, Garret's "Nonlethal" takedowns are fucking brutal. Like, about the only thing this shares with DXHR is the sheer brutality of the "nonlethal" takedowns. Just like a guy who gets clocked in the jaw by Adam Jensen's augmented fist, hard enough to concuss him in one hit, Garret's never been more vicious with his blackjack. There's no way half of those guys are ever waking up again, and of the ones that do, better than half of them are going to be some kind of crippled or fucked-up for life.


It just seems like they look exactly the wrong lessons from Deus Ex: Human Revolution. The hubs are vastly more closed-in and even less lively, and Adam Jensen was a better explorer-of-places than Garret was. Probably a more prolific thief, too. The consoleitis is bad, and I think it's because they pushed the graphics so far that they had to scale back on the amount of stuff they could build with them.

I would note that this is the game Dishonored should have been. While the game falls down and scrapes its knees if you compare it to Thief 2 (aka The Greatest Game in the History of Games), it's actually remarkably fun and engaging.

The story is crap. Well, mostly crap. For some reason everything had to be dark and foreboding, lacking even the humor of Garret's constant refusal to any sort of heroic call.

The game has two major negative points, and for some I can imagine these would be game-breakers. The first is contextual jumping -- Garret no longer freely jumps and tries to mantle onto things. Instead, there's a button to get him to hop over obstacles, pull himself onto ledges, jump from beam to beam, and so on. It's annoying at first, but it seems to work okay in the level design (except for the stupid-obvious hints that you can jump on certain things) and you spend (somewhat) less time misjudging things and plummeting to your death. The other is part and parcel with this, and that's the lack of free-running exploration. Half the fun in Thief 1 and 2 was the feeling of somehow "breaking" the game by managing to scale and jump you way into areas that surely were meant to be inaccessible. Rope arrows being keyed to specific locations may drive you bug-nuts.

Where the game makes up some points: first, all the helpful bullshit like "focus mode" and mini-maps and threat indicators and waypoints can all be turned off. If you want to go with just a light gem you can do it. The game even has a play mode that rewards you for this with tasty "points," which don't do much of anything but make you feel good about yourself. Likewise there are difficulty selections ranging from "kill anyone" to "can't even knock out civilians" to "if you're seen you fail" and even ironman difficulties of "if you die we delete your save game."

One minor positive: ransacking houses and grabbing opportunity loot is kind of interesting. There's plenty of lockpicking, puzzle-safe-cracking, and pick-pocketing along the way. Also there's a tension-raising "you have to check all the desk drawers to get all the loot" mentality going on. A room with a desk and a dresser and a chest might have you open 5 drawers on the desk, the wardrobe doors on the dresser, and then two other drawers below it, before picking the lock on the chest (and then opening it), and then checking behind the painting to see if there's a hidden safe. Careful searching is rewarded. Listening to the NPCs (and occasionally stealing their mail) is rewarded.

This is where I ultimately draw the line: this game is better than Dishonored in just about every way. What it reminds me of is the original Thief, which wasn't entirely sure it could sell a full first-person sneaker and so threw in a bunch of actiony non-thieving bits that dragged it down. I think if the design team learns the same lesson with this game that the original team learned (and then went on to make Thief 2, which as I mentioned is The Greatest Game in the History of Games), they might be able to make something really amazing.

Anyway, play this one, or don't. It doesn't suck.

No, it definitely doesn't suck. The problem is that it's average, or slightly above average; adequate.

That's just not good enough for a Thief title.

I've never played Thief, but I enjoyed Dishonored a ton. I'm curious what you think I'm missing in that game?

Dishonored just didn't know what it wanted to be. On one hand it was a Thief-like game that encouraged ghosting and patience, but on the other it allowed you to plow through the enemies like an insane magical murder machine (and then lightly scolded you for it).

Thief actually slows you down. You suck at fighting, so tweaking off the guards isn't an "oops, oh well, guess I'll start shooting now" event. Also, you're not throwing Bioshock-esque powers around. All-around, the gameplay is more focused around stealth.

Dishonored's most interesting part was the story surrounding the world, that was never explained -- the creepy Outsider, the whales, and so on. Thief's most interesting part is the stealing.

Gotcha. I really enjoyed Dishonored's versimilitude (and loved the setting, even if it wasn't explained). If I had time, I'd play like a thief, and if I wanted to relief stress I'd play like a bull. It sounds like I didn't 'miss' anything. However, I'll have to check out Thief sometime ('sometime' referring to 'when I have free time'. Probably 2018 or there-abouts.)

I'm going to disagree with you, as someone who played The Dark Project and The Metal Age when they launched. The game is better than Deadly Shadows, but definitely not as good as Metal Age. I'd mostly like to squelch your idea of Garret being deadly, the main point of all the games on the highest difficult has been to kill nobody. Cosh them, sure, if they are a guard you can get away with it. If you want a game where you can go around killing indiscriminately and looting places, go get Dishonored, it's a pretty decent game.

The contextual jumping (which doesn't always work right) is the only poor part of the game, although I also feel the levels needed to borrow more freedom from the vein of Hitman or Deus Ex, as they weren't free enough for me. Still, I'm up to Chapter 5 on Master difficulty, playing for now as opportunist to learn the game, then I'll go back with all the HUD turned off for ghost. In this regards especially I find the game to be a huge success. It allows entry for any skill level with a huge ceiling for how hard it can be. I wish more games did this... or just went balls to the wall with it a la Dark Souls.

Yeah, see, what hardcore players do with their time is none of my business or concern.

I don't play on Hardcore.

I play on, at most, Thief. And I say, if a son-of-a-bitch is going to carry a sword and would run me through with it, the bitch is fair game for a summary shanking.

It's not my place to say that you have the spirit of the game wrong, after all, I intentionally played through The Dark Project sword fighting every enemy possible (which was quite difficult, I might add), but Garret has always been paid to steal, not kill. Hence the title being Thief and not Assassin. Amsuingly they attempt to sell that point at the start of the game with Erin, and then proceed to give you a "challenge" in the first mission to headshot 4 threats. C'est la vie.

Remember, they're not cops, they're hostile combatants who will just as soon hang you after you surrendered as run you through if you engage them in a fight. So look at it from the Shadowrun point of view: neutralizing them is the most efficient way to get the job done, and they aren't by any stretch of the word "innocent." Ergo, lethal force is fully justified in dealing with the Guards of The City. After all, they won't hesitate to employ lethal force against you, and if you surrender, all you have to look forward to is (maybe, if it's convenient) a kangaroo court, and then a short drop and quick stop.

So, take those facts together, and the way I see it, every Baron's Guard floating facedown in the sewers or lying in a pool of blood with an arrow sticking through his eye socket is a good thing. Makes the streets a little safer for "blackhands" like Garret, not to mention the commoners they're busy abusing and oppressing.

Since they took away my knife, I've made it a point to hammer the guys I take down with my blackjack a few more times in the head. Hopefully as insurance that they won't ever wake up again, or if they do, they'll be a drooling cripple unable to raise their sword to anyone ever again.



Garret could probably make the lateral career shift to a white hood with relative ease, but he'd need to learn the importance of fighting (and sneaking, and stealing,) for something beyond his own personal gain, much like Edward Kenway.




That was not amusing to me at all, it was preachy. It was like the devs were using Garret to tell me that my preferred playstyle is incorrect somehow. Especially since the Baron's Guards have about as much moral weight to their lives as the Eelbiters. (See above.)

Frankly, Erin had the right of it. I like to imagine that after her death, Garret's starting to see things the way she did.

I meant amusing in the ironic sense. He IS preachy about his profession and not taking money to kill, yet getting 4 headshots in the first mission provides you with money...

Certainly the guards in the game are far from innocent, but also like in Shadowrun, there are multiple ways to neutralize a threat. A cosh to the back of the head and dragging them into a dark corner keeps them from being a threat and would also keep your own heat down to an extent because they are merely looking for a Taffer, not a murderer.

I'm certainly not one to advocate that everyone should try and ghost every level, it's a huge pain in the ass for the most part. But in that way the game reminds me alot of Hitman. You can try and find the perfect way to get through a level and complete your objective without being seen or leaving evidence, or you can go in guns blazing and accomplish the job. Both work, but one is considered superior by the setting.

Are you sure those were the games you played?


And screw the dagger, I want Constantine's sword back.

Maybe someone with a grudge against the guards is paying for the privledge of seeing guards sprout fletching from their faces?

That would make him an assassin, though.



It doesn't really matter. They go after Taffers and Murderers the same way, and unlike Shadowrun, they don't have the ability to leverage the surveillance state against one person if that person gives them a reason to do so. They're not tracking Garret down by the RFID chips in his latest shank of boar, after all.




I'll ghost past the guards if there's no way to off them without triggering an open conflict. As you said: this isn't Assassin's Creed, Garret can't take four guys in a stand-up fight. Not even if one of them goes down to an arrow in the face in the opening salvo.

But if it's possible for me to get the jump on someone, cosh him in the head and dump him in the darkness/dump him over a railing (hopefully into something that would be lethal,) or just beat him in the head a few extra times, so be it.

If you were dedicated enough, taking on 4 at once was quite possible in Dark Project and Metal Age... plus with Thi4f (so glad they did away with that title) you can upgrade your focus to allow for quick takedowns in combat with the blackjack.

Part of this, and part of the reason there has been no thief game since the originals, there just isn't a huge market for stealth games. Sure there is some outliers, the splinter cell series comes to mind but even that is really combative compared to thiefs standpoint of "You arer seen, now you are fucked and there is nothing you can do about it because you are not a magic murder hobo, you are a thief."

I think a lot of people miss that when they talk about the Thief series and put them up on a pedestal. It's especially ironic to me as this game mentions Dues Ex, because the original Deus Ex did more to kill the pure stealth genre then anything as it was cool to have options and game developers picked up on that.

I do absolutely agree with you that dishonored world mythos was the most intriguing and frustratingly unexplored part of that game. They used it as an excuse to do interesting set pieces when it could have been so much more.

Ghosting has never been about being a right or wrong way of playing the game.

Ghosting has always been about the challenge.

Can you get through the entire level without anyone even realizing you were there? Even better, with a 100% loot completion?



-k

To be fair, there were levels where it was literally impossible... as was 100% loot in general.

What really annoys the hell out of me is that they've attached money to it.

For instance, I did the second Ector client job not long ago: A simple job, sending you to a small pawn-shop on the docks, to steal a piece of the machine man from Oxheart Perry the pawnbroker.

The Ghost objective, of course, was to not be detected at all: the Opportunity objective as to use one environmental exploit, and the Predator objective was to head-shot three Threats.

It was a small mission, really, a nice, enjoyable side-heist. Oxheart Perry had a two-story building, with his bedroom above, pawn shop on the ground floor, and a basement below, with a crane and winch over a hole in the quay it was built on, to move heavy crates into and out of his basement.

I took the time to completely fucking ace the mission: Undetected, headshot everybody, etcetera.

When I got to the end, I tallied things up. My reward from Ector for the return of his machine man's piece was 160g. From the various coinpurses, gold and silver shlock I'd pulled out of his pawnbroker, I got 208 gold.
For going undetected (the Ghost reward,) I received 350 gold coins.
For doing one environmental exploit - shooting a pulley to drop a crate into the basement of Oxheart Perry's shop, so as to create a climbable path up and down - I received 100 gold.
For assassinating four men and a dog, I got 85 gold coins.
For completely cleaning Oxheart Perry out, I got 215 gold. I would like to stress that this 215 gold was not the value of the things I stole from Oxheart Perry, which was 208 gold. This 215 gold is an entirely different 215 gold, which I received for cleaning Oxheart Perry out entirely, 100%.

Basically, then, Garret conjured 750 gold pieces out of thin air, more than three times the combined value of all the things he stole from Oxheart Perry's shop, and more than twice that value and the value of the job itself. I got more money for cleaning Oxheart out than I actually did for selling the things I cleaned him out of. Meanwhile, shooting a blunt arrow into a pulley was worth 15 gold more than the lives of four men and a dog.

That's what torques me off, the bonus money. If you play badly - say, you make a noise and the dog goes off, then you kill everybody but not with headshots, you miss the pulley and you overlook one measly little 3g ashtray, you make a paltry pittance that almost definitely wasn't worth Garret's time. But for pleasing the narrator or something, Garret gets showered with money.

I don't like that. I'd prefer that the challenges be strictly for bragging rights, and the actual payout be in the form of loot in the level, rather than the loot in the level being merely a side-show and worth literally less than you get simply for cleaning it all out.

Worse - that mission doesn't have a rating assigned to it. I believe normally you can only get the Ghost/Predator/Opportunist bonus if you also complete the mission in that style.

I enjoyed Thief 2 although I didn't finish it. I called it "Commando" though as a joke because you could one hit guards and kill them if they were unawares with broadhead arrows. And if you were detected and had to flee you could pepper them with arrows to the face while you fled until they died. Hilariously before each mission I would buy the full stock of Broadhead Arrows. I felt it was more like a commando than a thief as it was often easier to exterminate the guards than sneak around them for an extended period of time.

I haven't played Metal Gear Solid since #2, but isn't that a stealth game?

Technically? although there were more stealth elements in MGS3, even though it drove me crazy.

Yeah. That pisses me off even more. I just did chapter 4, without getting spotted, picked nearly all the pockets, and headshot a lot of people, and I only got the bonus for the headshots.

If you're gonna reward people for doing things that are fucktastically hard, reward them for ALL the objectives they pull off! >_<

Ugh, for fuck's sake.

I just completed chapter 5, undetected, trying to fucking Ghost it.

And it called me an Opportunist instead of a Ghost, because I had to use a lot of environmental stuff... Because how the hell else are you supposed to move people and monsters away from loot?! Or turn off the lights so they don't see you? Huh?!

I might as well have just shot everyone through the head. >_<

Ghosting means not turning off lights (or in the case of electric ones, turning them back on) as well as closing doors and cupboards and trunks. It's supposed to be like you were never there... minus the loot that you stole.

That's fucking retarded.

Urrrrrrrgh. >_<

Ghosting generally took more patience than I had in the Thief games unless I was willing to save scum. Instead I found it a much better challenge to do something more akin to the challenge option in this of chapter saves only and no alerts.

After that asylum hell, I just went through the next level having reverted to type, and exterminated everybody. It was much more satisfying.

The asylum, sadly, wasn't nearly as good as the cathedral of Dark Project or the Cradle of Deadly Shadows.

I did most of Hitman Absolution ghosting except for bits where the game didn't allow it, not getting a single person noticing me and killing only my targets (even then only with environmental kills). Took ages but it was challenging.

Ghosting requires a very patient and deliberate mindset, often sitting in the dark for long periods just figuring out guard patrol patterns and lighted areas. It is not for everybody.

I agree about the Asylum not being as good as the "horror" levels of previous Thief games. Shalebridge Cradle was probably my favorite scary level out of any game I've played, including games that are entirely based on horror.


-k

It is arguably the perfect horror level. Although that said, when I first played The Dark Project and got to the cathedral where you steal the eye, at 2300 with the lights out and sound up, I nearly shit myself a couple of times.

This post inspired me to install Thief 3 and play it through again. I'm enjoying it a lot although there's the aspect of comedy whereby people chase you with murderous intent and then relax in a few minutes and go back to patrolling, but that's pretty much universal in games.

I realized that I never played further than the Abysmal Gale level my first time through. I just finished that level last night and on the whole am really enjoying the atmosphere and feel of the game. Those zombies were terrific!

I remember back in the day lots of people expressed preference for Thief 2 over Thief 3, but having played both I have to say I'm really having a good time with Thief 3.

The most fun thing I remember about Thief 2 is how you could destroy the patrol robots once you deactivated them by beating them for a really long time with your blackjack.

Maybe I'm just being a hipster, but I still prefer The Dark Project.

I really get into the classic games more than I do the more contemporary ones. I think that having the graphics be a little rougher lets your imagination get a little more active.

Also, it seemed like it was easier to interact seamlessly with settings; maybe that's an Ion Storm trademark. As in, easier to mess with NPCs by manipulating objects, easier to create giant battles between the city guard and the hunters, and so on.

I feel like with today's games the graphics are better but it's harder to cause random mischief and chaos that kind of spirals out of control organically.

I'm all set to play Shalebridge Cradle level now. After it has been talked up so much on this board my expectations are sky high.

I made the mistake of playing Shalebridge at 1 in the morning with most of the lights off.



You'll want to read all the notes for the full effect.

That goes for most Thief games, I suppose.



-k

Phew! Finished Shalebridge.

It is indeed a masterpiece and far scarier than other horror or survival horror games I have played; even those with inflated graphics and system requirements. The sense of exploration and wonder was akin to physically going through a well done haunted house for Halloween or exploring a creepy abandoned building. I also appreciated the surrealism and fantastical setting created.

In the end I felt that it went a little bit long and the last bit had the potential to become more frustrating than scary. However I appreciate that this was an artistic risk taken by the design team to also create the sense of being trapped in a location. On the whole they did a good job of evoking the feeling of being trapped in a bad dream.

On the whole I am surprised that this level is not more famous or hasn't been included in more hall of fame type articles.

Once again DSF has enriched my life by pointing out the true lost gems of classic gaming. In my older age I find myself increasingly getting bored quickly with modern games but these true classics I can keep coming back to.