thief 3, continued
May. 30th, 2004 08:20 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
solipsistnationMy impressions of Thief: Deadly Shadows continue.
So, after the initial "robbin' some people" missions, we get into The Plot.
First off, the bad.
The Pagans are ANNOYING. The occasional muttered stuff from the first 2 games suddenly turned into full-blown conversations in the most obnoxious patois I have ever encountered. Ick. It makes me want to club them viciously, although now I mostly don't get to.
I'm tired of running around in the city now. There isn't enough variation between the days-- a few things regenerate (notably, elemental arrows show up in the same places nightly, and some loot sources regenerate if you come back the next evening), but overall, it's all about the same.
Shopkeepers are also irritating. Amusing once, and then not any more.
I suppose it all comes down to my inherent distaste for things I have to do more than once. Giving me the same city streets but with different people roaming it (possibly with different attitudes toward ol' Garrett) is kind of interesting, but it ends up being the same streets as it was last time, and the same sorts of challenges, and so on. I suppose, again, this is personal taste. The various districts are relatively small, compared to, say, the giant cityscape from the two or three city levels in the first games-- "Framed" and the follow-people levels, in particular, which had HUGE city areas to roam and explore). I can only go bonk the same people a couple of times before it gets old. Sure, having new people show up in what is, effectively, "your city" is a neat simulation of having newcomers to a city with which a master thief is intimately familiar, but, um... I guess I'd rather have more different challenges than just the same sorts of things over and over. I might like it better if you could really reach the roofs of the city and make your way through the city well above street level (a la the rooftop level in Thief 2), but you can't.
Every couple of missions a new neighborhood opens up for exploration-- the Docks, the Old Quarter, and eventually something whose name I currently forget-- and there are some side-missions along the way that appear to be part of the city map rather than actual missions, per se, but you still end up running through the same streets pretty often. Partially this is becuase of the various fences in the city, each one will refuse a particular type of loot. One of them refuses artwork, one of them doesn't deal with coinage (and I'm not sure why stacks of coins don't immediately turn into gold-- perhaps the city's underground economy works strictly through credit, or perhaps I've been spending too much time reading the economic parts of The Confusion). You can then go and buy any arrows and equipment you might require beyond what you find just lying around the city.
This mechanism for acquiring water arrows and so on leads to a bit of game imbalance. In the first two games, various items like gas bombs and fire arrows were carefully rationed, in order to preserve game balance (or, really, in order to make it harder). If I can just go to a Thief Stuff Emporium and buy up a dozen fire arrows (and there are limits, but for most things they are fairly high, and I've never run out of gas bombs, even though I can only carry 5 of them at once, or flashbombs, or water arrows), it means I am less likely to carefully consider my options and find interesting ways to use the enviroment or otherwise work around the limitations imposed by the game developers. Being forced to work around limitations is what made the original games fun-- as a result, this is less fun.
The lack of rope arrows is sorely felt (especially because in the original games you could reuse them, if you were careful about retrieving them). They were a really amazing and innovative game mechanic, and made quite a few interesting methods of exploration possible. You could fire them into wood walls in a staggered pattern and climb very very high, or reach obscure ledges, or any number of other things. Rope arrows were easily the most fun part of the first two games.
Here they have been replaced by climbing gloves (and I really don't buy the "uh, we couldn't figure out how to make them work" excuse from the developers. if Looking Glass could do it with their own cheesy little engine, why can't you, with the mighty power of the hacked-up Unreal engine and the Havok physics engine, and all the mighty techie tools at your disposal? i'm skeptical). Climbing gloves let you climb stone walls like Spider-Man. It's actually pretty limited. You don't get to move around support pillars, and the types of wall you can climb is pretty limited. Where rope arrows would only work in wood, climbing gloves only work on worked stone. There's a lot of it out there, but often it's framed by wood or by stone that you can't climb, and so on. It's pretty touchy, and doesn't quite let you own the level as much as you might think. I preferred rope arrows.
Oh, and Garrett has forgotten how to swim, and if he falls or jumps into water over his head, immediately drowns. Feh.
And as far as level design goes, levels overall are really small. While I don't want more levels like the thieve's guild lair from Thief Gold, which was WAY TOO BIG and not interesting enough, the levels in Thief 3 are much smaller than even the smallish levels from the first two games. Larger buildings are even broken into two parts, which load separately and have portals dividing them, and even so they tend to be pretty small. One particular level takes place in the mansion of a pirate captain, and it's notably smaller than even ol' Bafford's place from the first level of Thief: The Dark Project. The tradeoff here is that the world is more detailed, although it doesn't really seem like there are more things to move around or more objects or that there's much to make up for the smaller environments. Object density is similar, but with smaller levels, there are fewer of them. Also, even with the Havok physics engine, there aren't a lot of things around that really use the physics engine. There's one setpiece in a pagan area where you can drop a huge gear on a couple of people, but overall, there isn't much that requires detailed physics simulation. Perhaps this will change later, but for now I'm underwhelmed. It's neat, but not really important to the game.
Okay, so, that's the bad. Here's the good.
You get lots of insight into the Keepers. The plot is a little predictable, but not too bad. There are some things that I suspect have been foreshadowed that I'm REALLY not looking forward to. (hint: watch the statues VERY closely.)
The level design, within the limits of tinyness, is very good. Everything feels like it should. The Hammerite areas are very obviously theirs, and the pagan areas are all set within overgrown and collapsed areas of the city. The books are interesting and well-written, although... Well, okay, back to things that seem not quite right.
The Pagans and Hammerites seem exaggerated from how they were portrayed in the first two games. The books here seem... Well, more vigorous than they ought to be. The Hammerites always seemed at least a little benevolent, even if they really did like beating people a little more than perhaps they ought. The Pagans, also, had something going on besides wiping out the city dwellers-- the ghosts in Thief 2 went a long way toward making them much more human and vulnerable than they'd seemed after Thief 1. (of course, you hardly saw any actual pagans in the first game, just ratbeasts and other critters.)
I guess I'm mostly viewing Thief: Deadly Shadows from the perspective of somebody who really loved the original two games. I'm going to be very very hard to please, because I so enjoyed the first two games. In fact, they've become definining points in my life, like when some people talk about music that changed their lives. I remember when I played Thief the first time, and the possibilities of computer gaming became apparant. Every other game with stealth aspects since then has been weighed against Thief and found wanting. Now that Looking Glass is gone and the original Thief team has dispersed, I'm not sure there's any way we could really see a third Thief game that would REALLY be the third Thief game in the way I want it to be.
Thief: Deadly Shadows is superficially the third in the series. It may even tell the third part of Garrett's story in much the same way that the Looking Glass people would have wanted. With the people who have developed it, I think it's closer than it would have been had any other group of people (barring a Looking Glass reunion) gotten together to make Thief 3. Still, it's really not the same game. It's very very close, and in a lot of ways, it is Thief 3, but in certain other ways, its not. And maybe most people won't notice or care. It's entirely possible that I'm the only person who would even think so.
All that aside, I am enjoying it. I'm not going to stop playing it, or cast the CDs aside and throw myself on my bed and weep at the unjustice of it all. There are parts of the game that are really an improvement over the original games. It's nice to see the City in real graphics, and it's great to hear Garrett speak again, in the voice of Stephen Russell. Dan Thron's cinematics are interesting and creepy. The Keepers are enigmatic and just as annoying as in the originals. Hiding pressed against the wall, watching a guard walk unknowingly past and waiting for the perfect second to jump out and knock him unconscious with well-timed blow to the head is as breathless as ever. I think that substituting a dagger for a sword was a good decision (barring the whole Constantine's Sword thing). The city still hums along in the distance, making me think of machines talking to themselves in the night, only watched over by a few weary maintainers and workmen. Pale moonlight through stained-glass windows illuminates the vaulted spaces of the Hammerite chapels and cathedrals with a beautiful creamy light, in which fleck of dust dance and sparkle. There are scenes that I pause and just look at, with guards patrolling in front of machines, or pacing back and forth in front of fires, their shadows projected huge and flickery on rock walls nearby. The game itself is beautiful, and it captures the feel of sliding through shadows, barely daring to breathe for fear of discovery better than the originals. It even looks like they got Dan Thron and his buddies to design some of the windows and other textures-- the ornate stained glass looks like it sprang from his hand.
I think I'm somewhere near halfway through the game. There are three or four different threads are unfolding around me as I make my way through the city, and I suspect that the game may change another couple of times along the way as I move toward its conclusion. I'm still looking forward to the next several hours of gaming. I'm certainly not going to stop playing just because it doesn't match up to my highest and most demanding of expectations. Although I still think it's a little too easy, it's still challenging, beautiful, and interesting, and that's what I ask from my games.
...and now, back to the city... I have some Keepers to outmaneuver and some offices to loot.
So, after the initial "robbin' some people" missions, we get into The Plot.
First off, the bad.
The Pagans are ANNOYING. The occasional muttered stuff from the first 2 games suddenly turned into full-blown conversations in the most obnoxious patois I have ever encountered. Ick. It makes me want to club them viciously, although now I mostly don't get to.
I'm tired of running around in the city now. There isn't enough variation between the days-- a few things regenerate (notably, elemental arrows show up in the same places nightly, and some loot sources regenerate if you come back the next evening), but overall, it's all about the same.
Shopkeepers are also irritating. Amusing once, and then not any more.
I suppose it all comes down to my inherent distaste for things I have to do more than once. Giving me the same city streets but with different people roaming it (possibly with different attitudes toward ol' Garrett) is kind of interesting, but it ends up being the same streets as it was last time, and the same sorts of challenges, and so on. I suppose, again, this is personal taste. The various districts are relatively small, compared to, say, the giant cityscape from the two or three city levels in the first games-- "Framed" and the follow-people levels, in particular, which had HUGE city areas to roam and explore). I can only go bonk the same people a couple of times before it gets old. Sure, having new people show up in what is, effectively, "your city" is a neat simulation of having newcomers to a city with which a master thief is intimately familiar, but, um... I guess I'd rather have more different challenges than just the same sorts of things over and over. I might like it better if you could really reach the roofs of the city and make your way through the city well above street level (a la the rooftop level in Thief 2), but you can't.
Every couple of missions a new neighborhood opens up for exploration-- the Docks, the Old Quarter, and eventually something whose name I currently forget-- and there are some side-missions along the way that appear to be part of the city map rather than actual missions, per se, but you still end up running through the same streets pretty often. Partially this is becuase of the various fences in the city, each one will refuse a particular type of loot. One of them refuses artwork, one of them doesn't deal with coinage (and I'm not sure why stacks of coins don't immediately turn into gold-- perhaps the city's underground economy works strictly through credit, or perhaps I've been spending too much time reading the economic parts of The Confusion). You can then go and buy any arrows and equipment you might require beyond what you find just lying around the city.
This mechanism for acquiring water arrows and so on leads to a bit of game imbalance. In the first two games, various items like gas bombs and fire arrows were carefully rationed, in order to preserve game balance (or, really, in order to make it harder). If I can just go to a Thief Stuff Emporium and buy up a dozen fire arrows (and there are limits, but for most things they are fairly high, and I've never run out of gas bombs, even though I can only carry 5 of them at once, or flashbombs, or water arrows), it means I am less likely to carefully consider my options and find interesting ways to use the enviroment or otherwise work around the limitations imposed by the game developers. Being forced to work around limitations is what made the original games fun-- as a result, this is less fun.
The lack of rope arrows is sorely felt (especially because in the original games you could reuse them, if you were careful about retrieving them). They were a really amazing and innovative game mechanic, and made quite a few interesting methods of exploration possible. You could fire them into wood walls in a staggered pattern and climb very very high, or reach obscure ledges, or any number of other things. Rope arrows were easily the most fun part of the first two games.
Here they have been replaced by climbing gloves (and I really don't buy the "uh, we couldn't figure out how to make them work" excuse from the developers. if Looking Glass could do it with their own cheesy little engine, why can't you, with the mighty power of the hacked-up Unreal engine and the Havok physics engine, and all the mighty techie tools at your disposal? i'm skeptical). Climbing gloves let you climb stone walls like Spider-Man. It's actually pretty limited. You don't get to move around support pillars, and the types of wall you can climb is pretty limited. Where rope arrows would only work in wood, climbing gloves only work on worked stone. There's a lot of it out there, but often it's framed by wood or by stone that you can't climb, and so on. It's pretty touchy, and doesn't quite let you own the level as much as you might think. I preferred rope arrows.
Oh, and Garrett has forgotten how to swim, and if he falls or jumps into water over his head, immediately drowns. Feh.
And as far as level design goes, levels overall are really small. While I don't want more levels like the thieve's guild lair from Thief Gold, which was WAY TOO BIG and not interesting enough, the levels in Thief 3 are much smaller than even the smallish levels from the first two games. Larger buildings are even broken into two parts, which load separately and have portals dividing them, and even so they tend to be pretty small. One particular level takes place in the mansion of a pirate captain, and it's notably smaller than even ol' Bafford's place from the first level of Thief: The Dark Project. The tradeoff here is that the world is more detailed, although it doesn't really seem like there are more things to move around or more objects or that there's much to make up for the smaller environments. Object density is similar, but with smaller levels, there are fewer of them. Also, even with the Havok physics engine, there aren't a lot of things around that really use the physics engine. There's one setpiece in a pagan area where you can drop a huge gear on a couple of people, but overall, there isn't much that requires detailed physics simulation. Perhaps this will change later, but for now I'm underwhelmed. It's neat, but not really important to the game.
Okay, so, that's the bad. Here's the good.
You get lots of insight into the Keepers. The plot is a little predictable, but not too bad. There are some things that I suspect have been foreshadowed that I'm REALLY not looking forward to. (hint: watch the statues VERY closely.)
The level design, within the limits of tinyness, is very good. Everything feels like it should. The Hammerite areas are very obviously theirs, and the pagan areas are all set within overgrown and collapsed areas of the city. The books are interesting and well-written, although... Well, okay, back to things that seem not quite right.
The Pagans and Hammerites seem exaggerated from how they were portrayed in the first two games. The books here seem... Well, more vigorous than they ought to be. The Hammerites always seemed at least a little benevolent, even if they really did like beating people a little more than perhaps they ought. The Pagans, also, had something going on besides wiping out the city dwellers-- the ghosts in Thief 2 went a long way toward making them much more human and vulnerable than they'd seemed after Thief 1. (of course, you hardly saw any actual pagans in the first game, just ratbeasts and other critters.)
I guess I'm mostly viewing Thief: Deadly Shadows from the perspective of somebody who really loved the original two games. I'm going to be very very hard to please, because I so enjoyed the first two games. In fact, they've become definining points in my life, like when some people talk about music that changed their lives. I remember when I played Thief the first time, and the possibilities of computer gaming became apparant. Every other game with stealth aspects since then has been weighed against Thief and found wanting. Now that Looking Glass is gone and the original Thief team has dispersed, I'm not sure there's any way we could really see a third Thief game that would REALLY be the third Thief game in the way I want it to be.
Thief: Deadly Shadows is superficially the third in the series. It may even tell the third part of Garrett's story in much the same way that the Looking Glass people would have wanted. With the people who have developed it, I think it's closer than it would have been had any other group of people (barring a Looking Glass reunion) gotten together to make Thief 3. Still, it's really not the same game. It's very very close, and in a lot of ways, it is Thief 3, but in certain other ways, its not. And maybe most people won't notice or care. It's entirely possible that I'm the only person who would even think so.
All that aside, I am enjoying it. I'm not going to stop playing it, or cast the CDs aside and throw myself on my bed and weep at the unjustice of it all. There are parts of the game that are really an improvement over the original games. It's nice to see the City in real graphics, and it's great to hear Garrett speak again, in the voice of Stephen Russell. Dan Thron's cinematics are interesting and creepy. The Keepers are enigmatic and just as annoying as in the originals. Hiding pressed against the wall, watching a guard walk unknowingly past and waiting for the perfect second to jump out and knock him unconscious with well-timed blow to the head is as breathless as ever. I think that substituting a dagger for a sword was a good decision (barring the whole Constantine's Sword thing). The city still hums along in the distance, making me think of machines talking to themselves in the night, only watched over by a few weary maintainers and workmen. Pale moonlight through stained-glass windows illuminates the vaulted spaces of the Hammerite chapels and cathedrals with a beautiful creamy light, in which fleck of dust dance and sparkle. There are scenes that I pause and just look at, with guards patrolling in front of machines, or pacing back and forth in front of fires, their shadows projected huge and flickery on rock walls nearby. The game itself is beautiful, and it captures the feel of sliding through shadows, barely daring to breathe for fear of discovery better than the originals. It even looks like they got Dan Thron and his buddies to design some of the windows and other textures-- the ornate stained glass looks like it sprang from his hand.
I think I'm somewhere near halfway through the game. There are three or four different threads are unfolding around me as I make my way through the city, and I suspect that the game may change another couple of times along the way as I move toward its conclusion. I'm still looking forward to the next several hours of gaming. I'm certainly not going to stop playing just because it doesn't match up to my highest and most demanding of expectations. Although I still think it's a little too easy, it's still challenging, beautiful, and interesting, and that's what I ask from my games.
...and now, back to the city... I have some Keepers to outmaneuver and some offices to loot.