Thief, and a realization

Modern devs have no sense of game design, nothing is a risk anymore, everything is a generic but profitable copy of the last successful thing.
I want this industry to crash with no survivors and PC be PC and consolebe console.
The merging of PC and console truly was the hand that killed gaming.

came here to post this

playing the thief games is what got me into japanese games after a long run of PC gaming. I had essentially found that the traditions of mechanics and design first was maintained by them.

Oh yeah, no doubt.

I hate my life because i can't find a game so great as thief. I just want to find a fuckin godlike game like thief 1&2, but there's none. This makes me sad.

The golf game's mechanics were too difficult (other golf games would give you a little margin of error on your swing, while theirs gave you zero), and having nothing but realistic reproductions of two fuck-your-ass hard Scottish courses further limited its appeal.

The failure that really fucked them was Terra Nova. They tried to be like Wing Commander 3 and grafted FMV cutscenes into the game towards the end of development, which bloated the budget immensely, leading towards it being an even bigger failure than it otherwise would have been. And it was an inevitable failure. The shitty blocky graphics and clunky gameplay doomed it, especially when compared against Mechwarrior 2.

I think that WC3 was what doomed PC games. It singlehandedly shifted the focus of AAA games from progressing the state of the art in using gameplay to tell a story to taking the lazy shortcut of using expensive FMV cutscenes with D-list celebs and "cinematic storytelling." Origin/EA even labeled it as an "Interactive Movie" on the box. Too many developers had an obsession with legitimizing video games as an art form, and they felt that the way to do that would be to make them like movies instead of doing the difficult work of advancing gaming as its own medium. They never understood that they would never be accepted by pretentious cocksuckers like Ebert, that it would simply require refining their craft while waiting for the generation who grew up with games to have the dominant voice in culture. Instead, they tried to take shortcuts and caused long-lasting damage to the medium.

I know people who have been waiting 15 years for the next phase to begin. But it won't.

I remember back with LGS was killed there were some leaks about what the original T3 was like. Basically a sound system that put EAX effects to shame and very high quality lighting. That could have been the next thing, but instead we got the first "merged" generation and endless mediocrity. It's a shame because I don't think every game needs to be like Thief but too many can't even manage to be as good as the first Doom game, let alone this.

Hero worship. Koji did some decent stuff over the years, but quite a lot of his best work was done long before the average Holla Forums user was even born. And previous trends do not always assure future results.

Tightly-designed games that have top tier gameplay and no significant flaws that aren't Thief (in no particular order)
Those are all the ones I can think of. I wouldn't say any are necessarily better than Thief though and they're all certainly very different from it.

Why do they all start with D?

I like Terra Nova.

What did you think of Return to the Cathedral? I've been replaying Thief on Expert and I found that level was extremely difficult and quite frustrating, but the satisfaction of finishing it was well worth all the shit I had to go through. Same thing with Constantine's House and the Lost City. You start off almost totally lost, but eventually you learn the map inside out, and not because the game forces you to or because it holds your hand. Also the levels that change your objectives, and the one in Gold that completely switches from being a crawl through a dungeon to a theatre heist. Thief is a pretty much perfect game. Not to mention the levels where you're just robbing places like Ramirez's and the Downwind Thieves Guild are some of the comfiest I've played in any vidya

Actually Terra Nova's primary development problem was that they thought a true;y accurate milsim would be fun. When they completed the simulation to the best of their capabilities (and taking up the majority of the development time and resources outside stuff like FMV cutscenes) they realized it was not fun, and in fact quite the opposite. So they took what they had and tried to make it into as fun game a with the rest of the time they had.

Although it made a surprisingly good number of sales it didn't break even.

Oh hey welcome to the club.

Some other games that might get you even more disappointed: Myth the fallen lords had great narration and story that never evolved.

I tried it out not too long ago. Some of the missions were dirt poor. I quit at the Thieves Guild.

one of the reasons for that was that the uninstall program in the launch version of Myth 2 would delete your entire harddrive alongside the game, but by the time it was discovered 200,000 copies were already shipped
Bungie could've decided to just let it pass and release a patch on their site that would fix it, but instead they decided to recall all the copies and send back the fixed versions which cost them a fuckton of money, which also ended up being the main dealbreaker for their decision to get bought out by Microsoft, and the rest was history

System Shock and TES Arena ruined the whole fucking industry, actually. They blurred the lines between action games and RPGs while shitting up both and now we have an endless parade of horrors. Seriously, pick any random goddamn game off of the AAA slag heap and the odds are good that you'll be able to track its origin down to the style of game pioneered by SS1 and Arena. It doesn't have to be a lethal combination but muddying the waters to dazzle the uninitiated has been the get out of jail free card for so goddamn long that that's what games ARE now. Your action game isn't good but you don't know how to make a better action game because you graduated from a degree mill and the old guys are all gone? Eh, toss in some meaningless choices and make some stats visible. Your WRPG is shit because nobody in your company could write their way out of a paper sack after all of the decent writers fled the games industry like niggers at a crime scene? Eh, just play up the combat into an unbalanced, mediocre action game with mini-games on the side and couch your shitty writing in the voices of dykes and brown people so nobody will dare criticize it.

I remember that. They HAD to recall all copies. Otherwise they would get lawsuits.

Fucking this, and the consumers have fallen for it too. Nowadays if a game doesn't release with shit like meaningless RPG mechanic upgrades (XP bars, leveling up, etc) then it doesn't seem valuable and the same goes for an RPG released without an action combat system.

None of these games are the best of both worlds, they have nothing but the surface elements of each genre with none of the depth.

their sequels did actually

Those games set the precedent though. This is like the "WoW ruined MMOs vs Everquest ruined MMOs" argument. Yes it was WoW that actually influenced the entire genre but it was Everquest that influenced WoW since it came first.

It didn't help. You ARE right that by the mid 90s a lot of devs, the "legendary" guys were obsessed over turning gaming into Hollywood. Still are, you can see it with every QTE and cut scene. It explains completely why developer culture is the way it is for the most part right now, "they take lines of code and bring it to life for you unappreciative plebs". They want fame and recognition for their games, they think that if they make a great product (not a great GAME or piece of media, important distinction) they'll be James Cameron or something. And it's such fucking horseshit.

You know what, I would say back then when they were actually fucking taking risks with their games, they could actually say that they were doing their own thing - in their own field - that they could point to as a real work; something that they did that had some creative merit because of some system limitation or an evocative experience. Now? You see all these dipshits, talk about how their assembly-line products are better than anything Hollywood puts out in a year. It's all cookie cutter shit! The only thing it does it that it makes the guy from Atari who said game developers are basically towel makers, justified in retrospect. What the fuck do these people do that pushes any fucking boundaries at all? All make the same fucking product, and are conceited enough to say that they are doing something where they deserve recognition, a pat on the fucking back, and a credit at the end of the game over some development that's completely the same or largely similar to everything else on the market. It might as well be assembly line work, fuck a lot of games being made right now are basically "mock ups", reskins of other games with different branding slapped on. For fuck's sake, just call EA "GM" and Bioware "Pontiac", it's all fucking rebadged cars. Do you know who made your fucking car? Do you care?

I would say that accessibility ruins everything it touches then as the more people who are in a hobby or media, the more money is in it too

Name games and mechanics, please.

(checked)

The problem is working in the games industry today is like a combination of being a common whore and a battered wife. You have a money-hungry publisher breathing down your neck and if you can't keep up with the deadlines and the pressure you just get bumped out for the next idiot fresh out of university who thinks he'll do amazing things. All of the old devs either left the industry or got their soul sucked out by the people who saw the potential to make a lot of money off their backs. And that means less risk taking and more shoving in everything in the kitchen sink to appeal to as much of an audience as they can. And the audience is now 15 year olds who haven't played a game made before 2010.
No independent devs have the money to start up a quality team and make good games. Occasionally an indie dev will make something that's good, but nothing that could actually change the situation. And every dime a dozen retard who wants to work in the industry only knows Bethesda/Valve/EA/Gearbox etc. Because every other company gets bought up or shuts down after their first game.
The analogy to car makers is fucking spot on. A handful of big brands who make and own everything, and normalfags eat it up because they don't know any better.

Zelda: Majora's Mask though flawed has a near-perfect balance of it's parts as defined by pic related.

RttC is a quintessential Thief level. In a strange way it shares a lot in common with Life of the Party from the sequel. You go into both missions expecting a certain result and its turned on it's head after an exploratory period. And both have their share of freaky shit; RttC is filled with the undead (the worst being the Haunts) and Party has that steampunk babby that teleports behind you. And both settings are unsettling, to say the least. They are both huge, and sometimes confusing to navigate but have huge rewards if you muddle through them and end up being extremely satisfying.

A lot that makes those games great is that you get placed into disconcerting situations, and they are disturbing because you don't know what the fuck is going on - or worse sometimes you do - and you are weak as fuck. In both games you have an increasingly disconcerting feeling that something bad is brewing until the point where the problem fully reveals itself, then you have sort of mad dash to basically save the world and each time the final battle takes place in some kind of terrible place out of the creator's madness (although the nightmare of the Trickster's version of the Maw is quite different than what Karras sets up in Soulforge: both are wholly unnatural). In Thief 1 you get the feeling in some missions that somethings stalking you early on in those long corridors with deep shadows, and with Viktoria sort of keeping an eye on you, who knows ultimately? And in the last few missions of the second game, the moon turns a very disconcerting blood red when paired with the Keeper texts from an earlier mission briefing.

Arena? Eh…I don't know about that directly, but certainly DF and MW as its sires were more obvious. Arena itself though is barely remembered even by fucking Bethsoft. And they were sort of doing this thing before too: look at their late 80s Terminator game based explicitly on the first movie. Really you'd be better off saying that the Bethesda RPG style as whole since it's actually a wide range of titles. Although especially their 2000s releases since everything post MW abandons any pretense of classical RPG mechanics and are all awful.

System Shock though is a case of the industry learning the wrong fucking lessons. The first game is basically on the same tier as Thief but in a different way, and really in terms of what it did it was a one-off that not even LGS could fully recapture when they revisited it a few years later. There's very much a strong /cyber/ ethos over the whole thing, basically you are the neckbeard sitting in the closet crawlspace right by the vents who stopped working on your Gentoo-2000 distro for the first time in six months and noticed your experimental AI killed all your neighbors and now it's on the internet trying to kill everyone else, and a lot of the gameplay mechanics fit into it. And they sort of pretty much work with SS2 and Deus Ex even though they don't quite have the same background to fully pull it off.

But the main problem is people took the SS2 and Deus Ex implementations and even further bastardized them. Sometimes even the same people who worked on the first games, in the first place. Look at Invisible War, there's no fucking point for any of the RPG elements in there since barely any of them affect gameplay. And others copied them even worse.

I would rather say that it's the last several batches of devs who in general are ultimately to blame for all this; they don't have a clue on how to make a decent game even if you remove all these precedent setting titles from the equation. And when you do add them, you get a rather huge fucking mess. They don't have enough real life experience to make something compelling.

That pic isn't very accurate, a game can have 10/10 presentation/story/gameplay and still not have gesamtkuntzwerk. This would be if each of those individual elements are great but don't work towards a cohesive goal.

Imagine a game with a really great tragic story, beautiful colorful upbeat visuals, music that was intense fast hardcore shit, and gameplay that was all about being thoughtful and methodical in your decision making. All of those individual elements can be great but they aren't cohesive since they aren't working towards the same goal. When a character you like dies you want sad music and sad visuals to accompany it, the best eurobeat in the world still isn't going to work there.

Does that explanation make sense?

There's also plenty of build-up to the reveal in Thief 1. You get a different excerpt from various books in between levels which mention the Builder, the beliefs of the Hammerites etc. You see vague shapes and symbols, maybe you think it's the Devil or something. Then there's one excerpt that mentions something called the woodsie lord, the Trickster, and a specific symbol associated with him. And what do you find as you go through Constantine's House? That same exact symbol. Pair that with the way him and Viktoria speak, their weird smiles and the way they seem to have some kind of in joke and you slowly piece together what's actually going on just in time for the reveal. I actually felt like I was piecing the world and the lore together myself, and it made me excited to find books. Even the ones which are just little psalms or whatever from the Hammerites have actual significance and let you understand them more than just "they're generic fanatics in a fantasy world." Plus you also have mysteries like who the Smith-in-Exile is and those four statues in the Mages Tower who speak to you and how they fit into the Builder/Trickster dichotomy, etc.

It's not pointing towards a games quality necessarily. It seems to me that that pic is the goal that gaming should strive towards. You describe a very "schizophrenic" type of game.

Well that goal is pretty obvious, including the actual definition of gesamtkuntzwerk would make it informative.

And games should absolutely strive to have it. I described a very extreme example but the majority of games, even the ones that are super well received completely fail to match up all of their elements. Uncharted is supposedly all about being the action hero yet the gameplay encourages you to hide behind a wall and play whackamole. GTA IV was supposed to make Niko Bellic seem haunted by the war crimes he's committed and only begrudgingly do illegal things in LC yet the player will probably have more fun mercilessly running over pedestrians than they would following traffic laws (and even if you don't kill people outside of missions you'll slaughter hundreds of innocent security guards and police officers during them anyways).

It's like the people that write the story and the people that design the game are completely segregated from each other.

The idea entered Holla Forums's headspace via this video. Essentially gesamtkuntzwerk is derived from what Wagner thought made Opera's good. Warning: Holla Forums thinks this guy is a huge faggot and someone will probably bitch at me for posting this video.
That's the major flaw with AAA games and their large teams. For example: Skyrim has ab solutly terrible base mechanics but, this playlist: youtube.com/watch?v=HCsWwEXwMbw&list=PLa_iNJiztviy5LDpQyVxqV76nlpTmDVdh made me realize that there were people with actual passion for their jobs working on the game.

I'm aware, that's where I got the definition from too. If gesamtkuntzwerk meant any game where all of its individual elements are good then there would be a ton of those games, but he only listed five for a reason. I would add a decent amount of games to that list but not too many.

I'll give this Skyrim playlist a watch though. I do believe that there is genuine passion behind Skyrim, it just has no direction because Todd Howard is a yes man and the only concrete vision he has for his games is to let the player do whatever they want whenever they want and never lock them out of any content or make things too hard/confusing. He doesn't care about story, he doesn't care about gameplay, he doesn't care about art, and he doesn't care about music. Anything good that comes from Beth games is from the people that work for him and the fact that he will say yes to nearly any idea someone pitches to him.

Wasn't there some article or something written by a guy at bethsoft talking about how the environment is incredibly shit and to get anywhere you have to kiss ass? I'm glad there's people with passion trying to put that into games, but it's sad to think they'll probably get churned through the machine or ground into dust.

Oh I forgot to list some examples of games I'd say have achieved gesamtkuntzwerk:

So did Todd brown-nose so much the shit from the asses he was kissing go to his brain?

Why not Dark Souls?

These games are not so good as thief.

Gesamtkuntzwerk is about the balance of all of a games elements. Not quality. Though gesamtkuntzwerk games are better than the average game as gesamtkuntzwerk requires passion, teamwork, and proper direction.

Most here will blame developers. Quick, easy, comfortable.

I blame gamers. PC gaming in the 90s catered to basement dwelling nerds. I was one of them.

*and proper direction/management.
MFW gesamtkuntzwerk is Vidya's equivalent of Kino.

Ah. Okay then, i can agree with your list.

Turn on colored ID's m8.

Because it was in the video

You misspelled "Gesamtkunstwerk"

From "If anyone asks, I spelled "Gesamtkunstwerk" wrong ironically. That's my story and I'm sticking to it."
It's a altered screenshot from the video and I'm to lazy to fix it.

What a faggot. If you add german words to your explanation just to add an extra layer of pretentiousnes to it at least spell them correct

I'll give you 2, but Hotline is a high watermark in frentic stripped down combat that does it's job and gets out. Everything about that game gives you the experience of being a hopped up maniacal axe murderer

Games totally on Thief's level.

Are you implying the Soulsborne games are not good, and if so can you explain in detail why?

If film is a Audio+Visual medium, then is Vidya Audio+Visual+Interaction medium? And is interaction just touch?

Which are?

Get load of this retard.

So what would be the major criteria user?

Waifu quality.

He's a massive faggot, user. Earlier videos were good though.

Experience (pacing or anything about Presentation and Gameplay interact like flavor)
magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/making-magic/bursting-flavor-2003-02-24

Story should be merged with Presentation.

So…Experience, Story+Presentation, and Gameplay… or Experience, and Everything else combined… Also what the hell is experience? I'm sorry you just left me confused.

Presentation (art, sound, story, etc), Gameplay (mechanics, controls, balance, etc), and Experience (pacing, tutorial, flavor, etc.)

Yes OP, now you understand.
There is something else you need to understand though. When we played these games back then we had great hopes for the future. All these years I was waiting for a stealth game to utilize modern technology to give us more realstic NPC AI and more amazing mechanics.

I had this hope all the way until Dishonoured and Skyrim got released few years ago. I thought "Now is the time, technology is finally at a point where they can deliver us some amazing stuff"

Can you imagine how disappointed I was? Can you understand just how jaded and angry this experience has made me?

Can you give some examples of flavor outside of Magic? I can't think of what would be considered flavor in a video game.

This. What hurt even worse is when Thi4f was released, and it turned out to be just as bad if not worse than other modern games with "stealth" mechanics in it. It was a double kick to the balls since it was part of the series that fucking pioneered stealth gameplay. Never again should the Thief series be touched by a dev or publisher, for this modern industry knows not how to make a good stealth game.

In what ways?

Are you baiting? Either way, I'd answer this with this one incident - the devs (or was it community managers), official face of the company went to a panel to market their game, and took audience questions. The first question was,
The response was
This incident alone should be key in demonstrating how out of sync the devs were with what makes a good stealth game in the public eye. Dev hell is not an excuse for this - fuck, nothing is an excuse for this.

No, I just wanted to know how a dedicated stealth game could be worse in some ways than games with tacked on stealth.

What happened was a modernized vision of stealth. The game went through dev hell, and so came out late and tacked on with a shitload of mechanics that resonated with what was popular at the time, rather than giving a shit about the original game. That being said, the game had one passable level, the Asylum, which gave off Thief 2 vibes for a moment, but that was it. PC has a lot more voice acting, but now it's jarring, similar to how Horizon Zero Dawn does it. Vid related articulates it better than me.

tnx m8

Jet is increases your heart rate so using it on NPCs with heart conditions kills them.
Item descriptions in Dark Souls or any other game.
Elemental affinity (water beats fire, fire beat grass)

One neat little touch that he made in MGS3 was the Game Over screen turning into the words Time Paradox. At first, people would assume that it is just a pretentious way to telegraph that it is a prequel. However, it serves three important purposes.
1) It serves as the actual Game Over screen.
2) Its transition from Game Over to Time Paradox serves as a timer for the fake death pill.
3) It gives a lore friendly explanation for why killing Ocelot results in a failstate.

Also, thank you.

I feel honored to have played Thief Gold and Metal Age one old ass 4:3 CRT. True black shadow experience becometh

Edit
1) It serves as the actual Game Over screen.
2) Its transition from Game Over to Time Paradox serves as a timer for the fake death pill.
3) It gives a lore friendly explanation for why killing Ocelot results in a failstate.

People trying to cram a whole bunch of stuff that fits into titles that have strong /cyber/ or hacker ethos background, into games that don't. Basically sort of something that goes along with later TES games enabling ARPG abuse; devs haphazardly throwing in mechanics and concepts from other titles that don't really work with their base concept, but the other titles were popular so, "I gotta get me some of that and I can print a mint".

Oh yeah. You just get a sense as you go along that something is wrong; all the Trickster stuff in the mansion, then you are digging up an artifact that's fucked up so much stuff in The City over the past century that your old Keeper associates hid the keys to access it in multiple highly inaccessible locations. You actually get to it and you start reading all the notes the Cathedral Hammers were writing about it, all of it sounds like something out of a 70s demonic possession film. Next thing you know you're running through the good parts of town tripping over bodies while Garrett's alternately terrified and pissed off.

Speaking of, I really wonder what has to go through someone's head when they see a lot of strange stuff like that but doesn't put two and two together and takes a moment to think if it's a good idea to go through with this or not. The only thing I can think of is that he just had dollar signs in his head, or alternatively that he didn't want to fuck around with Constantine and was just hoping for the best.

Which are?
Can you give examples, please?

Edit
*Gesamtkuntzwerk is about the balance of all of a games elements towards a single, cohesive goal.

Why not just say Ultima Underworld? System Shock and Arena were both built on the groundwork it laid.

Probably a combination of both. I'm sure Garrett's encountered eccentric weirdos before, and he even says himself that the only people who thought the Trickster was real were the Hammerites. He also has a heavy disdain for the Keepers, so probably didn't think much of their warnings on the Cathedral, and by the time he'd actually got the Eye and it was talking to him he was too far invested not to take it back to Constantine, given his obvious power and influence and the fact that Garrett had already sunk his own money into getting the Seals.

What about that doom mod that was made into a thief game and it's free on steam right now?

Character upgrades for a start. System Shock treats them as unlocked abilities achieved through gameplay. Now SShock does it so that they actually add value to the experience: you can gain realtime 360 degree vision, force fields of varying levels of effectiveness and energy consumption (armor that uses electricity for durability), a targeting computer that adds progressively more information about a given enemy as it's improved. Actual hardware. Your character by themselves, with all devices offline, never gets more powerful but can briefly become superman and through judicious use of these improvements can sequence break or survive any barrier to success. Surviving an encounter requires forethought and pre-planning with the aid of these devices sometimes.

Where it goes wrong is that this inevitably devolves into a "skill point" system because the devs don't get the intention behind the upgrades and just think they are there to flat-out boost basic performance. SShock 2 makes this mistake by including both cyber points (skill points by any other name) and one time upgrades that on the surface more closely mimic the systems from the first game, but in actuality provides permanent increased ability in one area that is not covered by attributes or skills with no drawbacks. This infantalizes the game and it becomes more of an arcade experience. Deus Ex, for what it's worth, makes a similar mistake but handles augmentation upgrades a bit better overall since it follows the same basic idea from SShock 1…although its arguable that augmentations outside of combat enhancers have limited utility in that game, which means that it is mediocre copy of the original implementation (although done better than what LGS did in the sequel to the first game). The augmentation upgrades also have another feather in its cap where augmentations are largely installed as part of the proper gameplay flow: you find a base canister, you find a medbot to install it. Once you get it installed, you can upgrade it as part of a minor medical procedure that is little different than using a medkit.

One that immediately comes to mind is Saint's Row games. While the games are fun, which is what I suppose ultimately matters, I do feel that the use of a skill point system through completing missions to upgrade a character's abilities and then having to go unlock them on essentially a glorified menu breaks up game flow. What's worse is that if I recall correctly, the unlocks in the later games are really overpowered, to the point where towards the end of a game you are not presented any real challenges any more. And it doesn't flow well with the setting, which is basically a mobster sandbox set largely in the present day. Ideally with that kind of a game, you'd want to use in-game money and the various outlets in Stillwater and Steelport as the sole source of improvement for your gang and your character. You'd have a variety of weapons that had specific uses and eventually became obsolete in some cases later on, and various wearable items that you could use to boost specific abilities but not everything all at once. For example you could buy armor with ammo pouches to carry more ammunition, rather than having that as an unlockable upgrade, and that would sacrifice the ability to choose protection that came with steel plates to absorb damage better in a real firefight. Now some of this doesn't hold true starting with the fourth game, given changes in setting and gameplay, but then I've always seen that game as a bit of a disappointment since part of the fun of that game was customizing vehicles for use: as a superhero you no longer need a car. But I digress, I could complain about every game past the second for hours. But that's sort of a broad example that hopefully clarifies my point of view here.

Now, this is effort-posting!

Good thread.

bump

Pretty much everything has been said, and we can come to conclusion that we love videogames too much for our own good.

All that's left is waiting for a new crash

Crash ain't gonna happen. Play umihara kawase instead. Learn about games you've never played.

I'd agree with most of those points, but I think you're not looking at the full picture there.
SS2 has skillpoints sure. But they do work mostly in the same way as character upgrades though, just with a very different skin and for different purposes do to different reasons.

Take for instance the Standard Guns skill.
It essentially increases the damage you deal with 3 weapons and allows their use once you reach a certain level with it. The difference between SG1 and SG2 isn't that noticeable but the difference between SG2 and SG3 is actually, since it allows you to use a new weapon, the shotgun.
Were it done with the previous system, the game could just gauge at which time you're supposed to start using Shotguns and only have enemies dropping them or scatter in levels past that point. The result would still be the same, gating what you can do until some progress has been made.

The idea of Cyber Modules is to implement such a system but in a modular way that makes it far more flexible. You can easily find a shotgun long before you can use it, unless you specialize for it (and having Repair makes it happen much sooner too), however it will cost you in some other area.
It's fundamentally the same as unlocking upgrades, except the order by which you unlock things is half decided by the game and half by the players.
Instead of presenting you with 5 choices that you can pick, the game throws 20 at you, from which 10 will be available depending on what you're gearing up for.
It is a better system IMO since it gives more control and versality to the player, not to mention replayability.

Then there's the idea of skills, where I'll tangencially agree with you that they're often very badly implemented.
The Elder Scrolls series tends to make Skills into something that boosts a particular action and gives you a perk every 25 levels.
Those perks are often comparable to the upgrades you mention, while their passive effect is often very lame like a bonus to damage you deal with a specific weapon.

However, if the entire series was strictly the perks, you'd see very little improvement between any of them, and considering the time it takes to reach the next perk, it could feel like you're not progressing at all. Imagine if you will an RPG where you simply don't know how much XP you've earned so far.
The idea behind Skills progressing in a linear faction and giving some minor advantage as they increase comes strictly to give the player a sense of progression they might not have anyway.
This isn't needed for most games, especially short ones like SShock, that can give you upgrades with good frequency. But consider the average play time for an Elder Scrolls game and then consider spending most of it without any sort of new advantage?

Technically, the chalenge does rise as the game progresses, but it simply can't keep up and by the end, you'll be trashing supposely powerfull enemies very easily. Perhaps the idea is to make the player feel powerfull, easily destroying hard oponents, but it really doesn't work.

I find that the XP there actually detracts from the game. Since you gain it from finishing missions, I'm often rushing things to get the next upgrade, caring less about the story and what's going on. It would indeed be better if progression was tied to your interaction with the world, like spending tons of cash, since that'd mean you'd have to focus on activities and businesses that generate cash, not powergaming through the story.

...

just fuck my shit up

do you have any youtubers like that to recommend ? There's Mark Brown but he has seriously shit tastes in gaming.

What i would've liked they used in Human Revolution or Mankind Divided would've been that they went with this whole apartheid and the splitting of augmented-people and non-augmented people due to the fact the augment went crazy.

What i would've liked would've been the element of that with each aug you're getting, there comes a price. You choice to maybe make combat easier should affect the way people interract with you and also add a social stealth-element to the game. As in, the more human you would look, the more you would blend in, in those environment.

Demon's Souls and Dark Souls were original games, not just predictable, formulaic cash-ins like the vast majority of games today.

It's any interesting idea user, and it makes sense. If you get a bunch of obvious combat augmentations, regular people will be wary of you, and less likely to want to help. But what would the downside be if you got not so obvious stealth upgrades?
You wouldn't be less powerful in missions, but if there's a downside for the combat augs would there be one for stealth too?

This, /r/ing similar videos.
Anything critical really, twinperfect for example tore apart the hd silent hill remakes well but they aren't nearly as top notch as this thief vid.

bump

Not that user but any video by antisocialfatman is worth watching. He did a 5 part series on why Bioshock is an inferior copy of SS which is a solid start.

Also he's dead. Turns out being anti-social and fat is not good for the heart…
If you watch his Far Cry 2 video he pretty much predicted the changes Ubisoft would make with 3 which is fairly impressive.

I'm surprised more anons aren't interested in the subjects discussed ITT.

Mister Caption and Joseph Anderson do long-form, detailed reviews, I'm a huge sucker for those.

...

That's a fair amount of interest.

I lurked in the thread, but didn't add anything since most everything that can be said has been said. The only recourse any of us have is to become devs ourselves, because the industry sure as hell isn't interested in changing its course or making games like Thief. I don't expect most anons here to do anything about it.

Gesamtkunstwerk Games
Thief 1
Thief 2
Super Mario Brothers
Demon's Souls
Dark Souls
Bloodborne
The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask
Devil May Cry 3
Dustforce
Dead Rising
Hotline Miami 1
Devil Daggers
Drakengard 1
Any more?

This kind of shit is what I've been shouting about for years. All these fucking idiots on Holla Forums and elsewhere screaming about MUH GRAPHIX don't realize that games have gotten so fucking dumb you might as well just masturbate. I remember being a wide eyed kid at the turn of the millennium, fully expecting the advances in technology to bloom into even greater and more compelling games. I was wrong. Too wrong.

I should be glad that at least one more person understands just how far games have truly fallen in pursuit of profits and graphics but I know it'll never be enough to turn back time. At least we'll always be able to play the classics.

(trips!)

STEAL THOS TRIPS AMRITE HAH AH

ahoy

I'm not big into youtube faggotry. If you're into autistic game reviews I recommend Ross Scott.

Crowbat is good

he's amazing actually, one of the few youtubes that doesnt attention whore and goes straight to the point, without even talking

Yeah, it's time to quit our shitty wageslave/neetbux/hobo lives and make vidya great again.

I think the problem is balance and accessibility, not only in the games but within the industry itself. I'm perfectly fine with games utilizing quest markers and numerous cutscenes and the like Nier and Deadly Premonition have these, and a lot of us love those games, but if it is every game then it begins to become tiring. 10+ years ago there used to be such a huge variety of game styles and anybody who wasn't fond of one could go play something else, but we barely have that anymore.

The guy is probably the only gaming youtuber in general that I can stand, much less one who talks about gaming from an academic level. What's great is that the guys doesn't sound autistic, is actually capable of cracking jokes that don't seem out of place or forced at all, and is able to go in-depth about his subjects, without giving off any pretension at all. This guys literally shits on all other Youtubers who decided to jump on the "academic game design" bandwagon.

Thing is, is that I not only disagree with modern game design, but also with people on Holla Forums's game philosophy. It's gotten to the point where hardly anyone shares my views, and it's hard as fuck to explain when the other person has a completely different base of ideas. I just stopped going to these threads because I know I'll just end up disagreeing with everyone.

tfw I've only played the first Splinter Cell

I have a lot of catching up to do.

Say it anyway. Varied viewpoints would only make this thread more interesting, and who doesn't love a good argument?

Just explain your views, m8.

What's the matter with MatthewMatosis?

...

I don't have much of an aruguement right now, but if you want, I wrote a mini essay on this thread on /telvanni/ that'll give a slight glimpse into how I view structure in games. It's the last post, though it's a little outdated.
8ch.net/telvanni/res/48.html

I'm not saying everyone is dumb, I'm just saying that I have a viewpoint that generally isn't all that popular, and no one really to try and explain it with. If anything, I'm mostly likely the one who is wrong.

I don't mind Matthew, if anything I just forgot the guy, but TurboButtons has better analysis in my opinion.

Why?

Read it through, and it seems like you favor emergent/procedurally generated gameplay and narrative style over start-middle-end mentality you see most devs are stuck in. To a degree I agree that it makes a lot of games better e.g Mount and Blade, Minecraft. However, I'd say that creating context in your own head like that is strictly limited to certain scenarios like Second Life and its cousin in Skyrim. The best writers understand this - they give the imagination just enough room to get roped in while directing from behind the scenes at the same time.

To summarize, I disagree with your philosophy as being the overarching theme which games should follow. It has its place, sure, but NOT everywhere.

I just think that Matthew's analysis on level design, structure and pacing are a it more obvious than Turbo, who usually goes in-depth on how each variable acts per level.

It's not that I prefer emergent/procedurally generated gameplay, but rather an elevation of interactivity with enemy a.i. over a certain win state/goal. It's why I believe a.i. in games is the most important aspect of a game. I don't the lead designer to direct me, then it no longer becomes a game but moreso just you completing an interactable story. I'd rather have a set of rules and actions and a board in which the player and a.i. can enact those actions under those rules.

Shit, meant for:

Yeah, but as of now AI in games is a bunch of if-then statements, and will continue to be until there's a breakthrough in machine learning. What you're arguing for will either result in barebones crap or hugely complicated simulators (both of which defeat the 'fun' aspect) and very few will hit the sweet spot without their code being bloat. I'd point at FEAR AI utilizing this concept and doing it right, but the AI NEEDED the good level design to complement it.

Nigger how dumb can you possibly be?

That's what sucks, even now barley anyone gives a shit about a.i. For all the people who say graphics don't matter, no one is really pushing for a.i. complexity, as much as just trying to see how much shit can get loaded at once in a single screen.

Subtle story telling doesn't work with modern gamers. You have to understand that the target demographic are people who can read a forum post and completely misunderstand what's been said. Even direct story telling won't often work because they'll skip through dialogue or text and then complain when they don't know what's happening. This is why you so often see quest markers and protagonists who constantly talk to themselves in games now. It's so retarded players can have their hand held and be guided through what they have to do. And even then I'd give you even odds as to whether they'd know what the fuck to do.

In my opinion, games don't need a story at all.

I think I may partially understand what you were trying to convey.
You want games to put mechanics and level design first and foremost before the story. Reaching for a superior game, with said story serving the game part of the game and not the other way around.
Sadly, I have only played 2 of the games you mentioned. Therefore making your message be slightly "lost in translation".
Though, You lost me on the games being "movie like" point. I presume because of the inherent formatting problems of the wall of text in your post. I had to highlight each lines because otherwise my eyes got lost without it.
Or have I completely missed the point entirely?

Sorta, my argument when saying that games are too movie like comes from most games expecting you to go through the motions of completing objectives, rather than trying to trump an opposing player, because the dev wants to tell a story. The best way I can describe it is like this, most games are designed to where the player is more like an actor in a play, where they must go through the script in order to proceed. If they fail, then that means that have to retry that part until it goes smoothly. What I feel a game should be, is something like traditional board games like chess. In chess, there is no story, because if there was one, it would greatly inhibit the amount of variety, win states, and interactivity between player and the a.i. Instead, two players are put against each other, and given a set of variables, a set of rules, and a win condition. Of course, it doesn't have to be this dry, and can be more interesting with both creativity and subversion. If you want a game that sorta follows this type of design, play Joust or Sinistar. Both are extremely simple, but in my opinion, way more better designed than a majority of games both old and new.

This game broke me harder than Skyrim. If it was a generic FPS, I would have been fine. However, this game actually put effort to be shit.

This is something I posted elsewhere:
Everybody knows that there is something wrong with the video game industry but what is the actual problem with it?
I would categorize the problems to three parts:
1) Complacency / Stagnation
2) Lack of Standards
3) Post-Modernism

Image 2 about why AAA video game look so much alike. This was presented by someone who defended EA's business model in some stream (youtu.be/8RjNU-SuL5M?t=55m21s) talking about game journalism. I eventually found the website which this image originated from but now the website is gone. However, I found the YouTube video which elaborated on this image.
youtube.com/watch?v=h5tbDhiFBQg
The video is about the Business of Design and it talks about the ins and outs of designing art assets for a video game. However, I think that the same philosophy has been applied to other aspects of video game development. At this point (youtu.be/h5tbDhiFBQg?t=15m38s), the video touch upon Design Risks which really grinds my gears. Yes, the video was about the business of design and I'm not so idealistic to think that video games should only be a work of passion. However, this is killing off ideas before they even get on paper. Also, video games don't really look significantly better than before. Somehow, the video game medium prematurely ended its experimental phase in favor tried and true formulas. There is indie development but it doesn't have the marketing or human resources to directly compete. Video games unlike books require a lot of human resources making it harder to stay true to one person's vision.

I can make a long rant about review scores but I'll sum it up to this.
Fuck. Review. Scores.
Review scores are moving targets. A 9/10 today isn't the same as it is 10 years ago. There are also those using review scores as an objective metrics of quality. This can not be stopped. People want review scores. If there is no Metacritic, another would take its place. Game criticism is too entwined with marketing. There needs to be a conversation, a back and forth, not ass kissing. What other mediums have that prevents them from endlessly strung around by the latest trends are timeless classics. People need to look at the ups and downs of these classics and learn from them instead of just copying them.

youtube.com/watch?v=bHw4MMEnmpc
What has dwelling on what is art and forfeiting to subjectivity given any medium? The pursuit of beauty has lead to study of human anatomy, perspective, color theory, etc. What has going around saying that beauty is subjective has done? We keep asking things like "What is a video game?", "Is video game art?", or "Does video game need to be fun?" but we tend to ignore less meta questions like "What makes this game enjoyable.", "What is this game design trying to achieve?", or "What works and what doesn't work?". Also, too many people are less concern about making a good game and more concern about proving video games as artistic medium.

wtf I love theif now

Still haven't played it, but now I want to

What's the problem with being obvious?
To me, being "obvious" means that one conveys a thought as simply and clearly as possible removing the problems of the conveyance of ideas being lost in unnecessarily complex phrasing.
?

Where is the source of this idea? A book on writers you read? I'm looking for elaboration.

I don't understand what you mean. The AI, win state/goal, story, set of rules and actions, and the board (which includes the level design) are all ways for the designer to direct the player.

Can you please list the "founding RPG's"?

So you want less things to do? I'm not sure what you're saying. Can you give examples of what you mean by "objectives".
So you want multiple choices to interact to a stimulus because you are tired of having only one choice given to you like most games you've played?
Can you give examples of these?
?
What?

Still waiting for someone to post a non-gold torrent.

What's wrong with gold, user?

nothing, as long as you get the goldskip.

this looks like bait to me, user

No bait, goldskip is necessary. As the name implies, it's a patch that lets you skip the extra levels that Thief Gold adds to the base game.
Well, it's just that some of these levels can be much more tedious than the base game.

I get the feeling from your phrasing that you think this question is trickier than it really is. For graphical RPGs, the list is
and arguably
Although the latter is more of a crossover point between text RPGs and graphical, what with the ASCII and all.
Some people include Might and Magic, although at that point you're already into derivatives of the first two.

Oh, okay. I thought it was supposed to be like a "director's edition" but maybe it was just a ploy to throw the incomplete levels in and bump the price tag vs a reprinting?

Either way, good thread op

Trips of truth

It adds three new levels. The first one is pure drudgery with no relevance to the plot. The second and third extend an important quest which was probably designed to be in 4 levels originally. That's fine. However one of them is also a bad level.

Does it at least put it back to the original? Because otherwise you're skipping important parts of the story.

yeah, it just skips over the gold edition's extra levels.

Thank you for the more detailed info, user!

I think I will take one bad level in exchange for two semi-good/relevant ones. I'd hate to love the game and want to go back and play them later out of sequence…

Sometimes you have to be glad some games don't have any kind of sequels or continuations, they would only spoil the legacy and create disappointment.

They cancelled this game, a cool looking, dark detective game, but thankfully they didn't slash it into a million pieces, jimmy-rig a load of bullshit like a change of tone or PSA bullshit, while also creating some inconsistencies with gameplay and plot, all in order to appeal to a mainstream audience. R-right?

I head it adds too the game and therefore changes it. When most people talk about it they talk of he original I want to play the original then gold then 2.

f'reals.
FUCK STARFOX I WANT A NEW SOLARIS

Did you try archive.org/web/, archive.is/, or any of the various search engine caches?
How? Can you give examples?
[Checked!]
What's the difference between a test and graphical RPG?

?

Alright, let me explain. You know how people act like Invisible War does not exist? Distrust and Danganronpa is like the same thing, Danganronpa was the final version of Distrust but it cut so much out for various reasons.

When I refer to PSA bullshit I refer to the batshit ending. Basically when the villain is revealed and the world is revealed to be destroyed before the events of the game, everybody bands together against the villain…. for hope. They literally say hope. And this whole thing is used so much throughout the series that it starts to feel like a gag. Just thinking about it pisses me off. I mean, after seeing a bunch of their friends die in various gruesome ways, like getting hit in the head with a dumbbell and then getting hung in crucifix position, you would think they would think of something more grounded, right? Or it is supposed to be cheesy or terrible. Who knows.

>Did you try archive.org/web/, archive.is/, or any of the various search engine caches?
It was a while but I think so.

AoD tried to be a classic CRPG but ended making VN. Every LucasArts Point and Click adventure was an attempt to improve DotT's shitty no fail formula. FFXIII tried to win people over another ATB game after FF12's play itself gameplay. nuPrey and nuSystem Shock are looking to be shit. TES has been ruined by Morrowind.

Maybe not copy but misinterpret what makes them good.

No, ypou retard what the fuck does PSA stand for?

Darude - Sandstorm

These fucking acroyms holy shit.

...

When I said more obvious, I meant that what Matthew says is more trite. His analysis is weaker therefore more obvious than that of Turbo. If anything, Turbo is also a better explainer. Also, "is a it" was a typo, I meant to say "is a bit."

I agree with what the other user said, you're over complicating what I said.
In most games, an objective is given, even if not directly conveyed through text. You go through these objectives because the dev wants to tell you a story, so you feel more like an actor in a play, rather than playing a game.
I don't know what you mean by "stimulus" but if you mean anything interactable, see my post about a.i. being limited.
Take a game like Joust. As simple as it is, it has a win state, which is to be the last man standing, the set of rules are what defines a joust and how one can trump the other over in a battle, and variety. Because the game isn't hampered by a set of objectives that the devs wanted you to go through in a specific sequence, the battles between the ai are more organic, and feel less forced. The difficulty also ramps up based because the ai gets smarter following the same set of rules.
Dry, as in plain, as in trite, as in boring.
The game philosophy I presented would be pretty boring if you made it as simplified as Joust, if you don't add in creativity and an ability to to recognize each little tid bit, and adjust it to defy player expectations.

matthew covers a broad range of topics while Jon is more focused on single subjects. I've helped him do some analysis on level design back when we were both at gather your party and provided some footage for him in the past. Jon's a very cool guy and I'm happy to say I was the push to get him to make two donkey kong country tropical freeze videos.

What would be a alternative to this?
Something that happens that you can or should react to.

Refer to:

What I get from that post was games have rules and newer games have the computer bend those rules for narrative reasons like DM.
When I said that Experience (anything in between Presentation and Gameplay) should be the third major criteria, it isn't anything new. People are crafting experiences in order to make art (because art is about expression and expression is about creator not the player). This lead to people fucking with player agency just to tell their story, luddonarrative dissonance aka Ken Levine is a fucking faggot. Look at Bioshock, it is basically praised for giving you false sense of freedom.

Sometimes people do this for balance reasons. If Super Mario was made by today's devs, the final boss room to Bowser would have a invincible enemy and a pathway too small for Big Mario to pass, requiring you to damage yourself, and give you one mushroom on the other side just to make sure you don't cheese the battle using a Fire Flower. PoE forbid you from casting enchantments before a battle. AoD arbitrarily takes away all of your freedom when combat starts. "You can't open that door. Why is it locked? No, because then you would have ran away from the battle and that would have made the game easy."

Is Gesamtkunstwerk the solution for "game feel" and "ludo-narrative dissonance"?

AoD?

Age of Decadence

I don't know what you mean by that.

Gesamtkunstwerk is the solution for everything, how is this even a debate.

Resident Evil REmake
System Shock 1
RayForce
G-Darius
Gun Frontier
Metal Black
Pathologic

Different times OP. Back when the old good games came out, there where so much less competition on digital entertainment than today. They had the possibility to take risks on inventive gameplay and cut corners in graphics, or leave some mechanics unpolished or simply very underdeveloped. This was mainly because they knew that the consumers would anyway put in the effort to learn the game devs had designed.

The simplest way to see this is: Back then players where putting in the effort to get the reward. Smaller market made them more invested in the game, and the developers knew that. So they had a change to put in very hard, and rewarding when mastered, game mechanics.
Now players want praise instantly. Game development answered that desire and started to exploit it. This is why you get throfies from tutorials, and constant praise with flashy glitter confetti up the ass.

Last stage of this cancer is fake difficulty in the way of: danger without actual danger of gameover, constant praiseconfetti without actually doing anything to warrant it, hidden difficulty lowering, and the best of all, completely overstating the role of the player in a successful part in the game.

This thread. Holy shit. So many amazing posts, my shit was put to shame. (Yes, I posted before reading the whole thread.)

This is why I love Holla Forums. In good bad way.

Dumb memes talked about by hipsters.Ludo-narrative dissonance is when a games mechanics and story are antithetical to each others goals, like said about Uncharted and GTA IV. I forgot what game feel was though.

tnx

Thank you, I haven't played any of those.

Can you give examples of games that fit in the types you listed?

Would any of the other mario games be Gesamtkunstwerk games?

If you want to blame the death of gaming on RPG elements and cinematic cutscenes you then could trace back to at least Zelda II and Ninja Gaiden. The truth is that there's nothing wrong with RPG elements or cutscenes, the real problem is that developers figured out how little effort they could get away with. Sure you could make complex levels, but It's much quicker and cheaper to make dirt simple levels with quest markers and it won't stop your game from selling, so why on Earth waste time and resources on level complexity?

You don't see games like Thief anymore because developers realized they don't have to make them. They can knock together some piece of shit, add shiny cutscenes to keep the plebs engaged, and sell millions. All the devs with actual passion are gone so it's all about minimizing effort while maximizing shekels.

tl;dr the industry got jew'd

So is it more-so market forces or Jewing?

The market itself has been reshaped by jewing. Gaming attracted dumber people as the games got dumber. Now the audience for vidya are mostly braindead plebs. In other words the industry served shit for so long that the market was taken over by shit eaters, and now the market demands and expects shit.

Should i point out that most of the major gaming-companies are owned by jews or by jewish corporations in one way or another?

Which corporations are and are not a " major gaming-company" anyway? There's EA, Activision, Zenimax, Ubisoft, Nintendo, Warner Brothers(but they do other stuff as well) and I heard Sony paid From Software to make Bloodborne, I know there is independent AA and indie devs but some of those are owned by a larger corporation. I truly don't know which are independent and which are not.

The first System Shock is a good game. I don't know why these retards around here think it has RPG elements or something, I guess they never played it and assume SS1 is the same as the shitfest that is 2.

In the old days games were more niche. Making them was cheaper and done by a small team. Ever looked at the credits for a SquareEnix or Ubisoft game?

It was the fucking 90s. Tech was cool. Lose fifteen million dollars on a failed game? Who cares. It was fun. Games were made by folks who put their soul into it.

Nowadays games are huge projects. Hollywood. Loosing 50 million in this economy? Heads roll.

This was never true. Deus Ex was made for a half million dollars. $15 million was a mind-boggling amount of money.

Why was 2 bad? I heard it was one of the greatest games ever made.

Well in comparison to any Bioshock release, which are glorified arcade games, System Shock 2 is a revelation. The main problem with it is that the same can be said about SShock 2, in comparison to SShock 1. The sequel is very much abstracts things to cater to a simpler audience; even by the late 90s games, games like Falcon 3.0 and SShock with a lot of things going on at once simply weren't feasible with the gaming market anymore.

Even worse is that it was unfinished, in particular the final few maps needed more work; pretty much the whole of the Von Braun is fine but Rickenbacker and onward there was a certain degree of culling that occurred due to gameplay, funding and time issues. Also the game had a different ending at one point but, I believe it was lost or deleted just before it went gold so you have this whole experience ultimately wrapped up with the infamous "Nah" scene as a result.

And even today that's…what? 1-2 million to make the same kind of thing? Maybe a little more?

How? It's been several years since I played it but, I found the mechanics enjoyable, the levels up to the last two atmospheric and decently designed, and the story good until after the "big reveal".

Get out, Todd.

What's wrong with fallout 4 user?

...

I listened to the part where he played 200 hours of Fallout 4 and said he liked it.

Nothing sorry

Might as well post it. Them? youtube.com/watch?v=jVyjRhSX92E

...

...

Is that Joseph 'I never played original Fallouts and probably never will' Anderson?

.

..

archive.is/oy3cP

I still think about what could've been and hope that one day someone will take the burden upon himself and try to make the greatest game that never was.

Cuil.

What type of game was it?

Please tell me that the board ripped this faggot to shreds.

About 30R% of the right on every post was cut off by archive.is.

...

Spy game using the Dark Engine. Was supposed to be the last game on that, OG Thief 3 was going to be on a new platform come hell or high water. That new engine was actually about half done by the time LGS was killed, and Deep Cover looks like it was about nine months out.

You're always going to be able to find people on Holla Forums who don't like games, even (or maybe especially) when they're critically acclaimed. System Shock 2 wasn't a terrible game, the problem was that it wasn't a good sequel to the first game in terms of gameplay and mechanics. Whether you think that's a good or a bad thing depends on when you started playing games, and what you've played. Most people will agree that System Shock was a great game, but a lot of people, especially now, would struggle to actually play it. For the people who played the first game and enjoyed it, the second seemed dumbed down, although not to the same degree modern AAA games are, and didn't have the same atmosphere or feel as the first one.

...

Can confirm. I've played vidya for almost 20 years and when I first played SS2 I thought it was really good. Even returning to it years later it holds up as a solid game in my opinion. I tried playing SS1 last year and the controls killed it for me. I do want to revisit it at some point, hoping that if I try it enough it's going to click for me. Aside from the controls what I did get to play was very intriguing.

...

What are you trying to convey, user?

I heard there was a mod that added a modern key layout and mouse look.

oy vey

it was only prototyped in the dark engine. It was intended to be a debut title on the siege engine (e2k) which never got past the alpha stages. The siege engine was going to be very interesting at the time, with the primary point to be more advanced physics (probably havok quality, pre-havok's mainstream success in things like max payne 2 and psi-ops) and to eliminate brush based design with a new geometry system involving raw point data that allowed for extreme flexibility in detail.

The second game on the siege engine was going to be system shock 3.

So a 1st person stealth game like Thief?

...

I don't recall Expert ever cutting off paths, I know it adds a few in some missions though. Another change not mentioned is exfiltration.

On easy the mission flow is
while on expert the mission flow is

I wonder if some autist online has a very detailed list of all the difference between the modes.

more like a james bond game with 60's era gadgetry and social stealth with thief's stealth. You'd do things like attend fancy dinners, slip people shit in their drinks, follow them back to their room while dressed up as a waiter or sneak on the outside of the hotel and listen to them spill the beans from the truth serum you just gave 'em. all with cool 60's spy gadgets like micro film cameras and grappling hooks and a high tech wrist watch.

Off the top of my head, having played through on Expert recently, for the mission where you break into Cragscleft, on top of getting more loot, on Hard you have to try and get Cutty out and retrieve an item from another prisoner, and on Expert you have to get Cutty out and a guy called Basso (because you want to get in with his sister).
For Down in the Bonehoard you had to retrieve two other treasures as well as the Horn of Quintus.
The next one with interesting extra objectives is the Sword, where you have to try and find more information about Constantine on Expert.
For the Mages Tower I remember you had to steal an artefact from a guard and get some valuable reading glasses and in the Lost City you have to get the Keeper amulets from the dead expedition members. For Undercover you have to steal a bunch of Hammerite valuables.
And for Escape and the Maw of Chaos there's just less items for you to use and more enemies.

So the Hitman games?

would have come out around the same time or a few months after the first hitman game. This is the year 1999-2001 we're talking about. LGS closed in May 2000.

So yes or no?

no

But why not? The concept sounds precisely the same with the exception of some aesthetic differences.

similar concepts, different execution. You can't say that Hitman feels the same to play as a thief game. The very basics like movement are vastly different. Looking Glass was exploring a similar thing that another studio was at pretty much the same time with some of the framework from their existing games. Social stealth was fairly unexplored territory in game design.

How?

The Thief wiki lists the changes on the page for each mission e.g. thief.wikia.com/wiki/OM_T1_Down_In_The_Bonehoard#Difficulty_Alterations (also it lists the number/type of enemies which also changes with difficulty).

The lift in the prison doesn't goes as high up on Expert.

What kind of master thief would Garrett be if he didn't steal a jew's shekels?

This one of the best threads I've seen on Holla Forums

Graphic whores have always been the plebs of PC gaming, that made me remember when 3d graphics first appeared like every dev went for 3d even though it was uglier than 2d/sprite graphics. Back then it seemed like the only way to success was to improve and move forward, be it new technologies or new concepts. Now, I don't know, it's like simplifying and retro pandering/remakes is the only thing most devs ever do…

Can you give examples of new technologies and concepts?

Thanks.

This page: thief.wikia.com/wiki/Thief says that there are 4 "demos" and a "mobile game". Has anyone here played any of them? What were they like?

Not tried any of them but if the mobile game is anything like STALKER's mobile game I wouldn't hold out hope.

This is the only gameplay video I could find. It looks interesting though I would have to play it myself to get a opinion on it.

Fuck that music is grating.

Shit, forgot to post links.
thief.wikia.com/wiki/Thief:_The_Dark_Project_Demo
thief.wikia.com/wiki/Thief_Gold_Demo
thief.wikia.com/wiki/Thief_II:_The_Metal_Age_Demo
thief.wikia.com/wiki/Thief:_Deadly_Shadows_Demo
thief.wikia.com/wiki/Thief:_Deadly_Shadows_Mobile

Turn the sound off then, m8.

I turned the video off instead

What do you guys think of the planned Theif 4?

Thief 4: Dagger of Ways
Thief…"Modern?"

thief.wikia.com/wiki/Unfinished_Thief_sequels
ttlg.com/forums/showthread.php?t=103525&page=2&p=1399221#post1399221
please use archive.is/articles/2015-08-31-the-modern-day-thief-reboot-that-never-was
archive.is/SFjIC

Switch "please use" with eurogamer.net

Yep. Any other genres you're curious about?

There's a Thief fan remake (do not play the Eidos Thief remake, it is cancer) if you need more Thief:
thedarkmod.com/main/

I thought Thief 4 was gonna have a female protagonist. Thief 3 ended on a baton pass where Garret takes on a female disciple the same way he was first trained by the Keepers.

I disagree with his repudiations of choice. Choice can be done very well, as long as it is thought out. And complaining that today's games have too much choice is bullshit. A lot of games have very little choice and those choices are primarily nominal. Proper reactive choices are great for games. The problem is simply that like everything else in today's games, the choices are poorly thought out.

Dr. Pavel?

I…only remember hearing about T3 being on Siege. Damn, that REALLY sucks if that is the case. Now it's going to be done by post-Epic Mickey Warren and some lightweights…and no Doug Church in sight.

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eurogamer.net/articles/2015-08-31-the-modern-day-thief-reboot-that-never-was

The modern day Thief reboot that never was
By Joe Martin Published 31/08/2015
What's theirs, isn't ours.

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I was kidnapped at gunpoint and shoved into the boot of my car Unexpected stories of game development. I was kidnapped at gunpoint and shoved into the boot of my car

You better played it with EAX

EAX?

Nigger. That's for audio, stealth games and EAX are a fucking need man.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_games_with_EAX_support

Can you post this uncroped please?

Or OpenAL, which is software based instead of hardware based.

Yep, don't know the source though. What's the bumplimit for this board.

Cool

I remember someone posted a video with a incredible applied over HL2, but I can't find it. Does anyone know what I'm talking about? I think I remember it was abandoned by and worked on by a EA subsidiary.

I know which video you mean, that worked on materials rather than just space. Was pretty dope

*a incredible sound system

Uh you don't get to bring friends

The bump limit is 300.

The tools listed in >>>/r/ 's intro sticky are very useful. Suppsoly this is the source: pixiv.net/member_illust.php?mode=medium&illust_id=41795967 ,accroding to the source link on the Gelbooru link on the 95% similarity on iqdb.org, which is one of the tools listed in >>>/r/ 's intro sticky. Polite sage for off topic.

>Garrett is a criminal in the modern world, relying on night vision and semi-automatic weapons

I remember not finding this very promising back in the day, if I had know it was this bad I would have gone nuclear.

From

>"Basically Thief 4 was going to be a retelling of the original games, except set in modern times. It would have modern versions of the same characters from the old games, who's roles would have been translated to modern day parallels. Some of the old maps were going to make a reappearance as well. To be clear, it was not going to be anything like Splinter Cell or similar games. Garrett wasn't going to be turned into a James Bond type of guy with a bunch of gadgets or anything like that. He would still be the dark, sarcastic loner who uses his own skills and ingenuity to do his thieving, not gadgets. I don't think we were even going to let the player use a gun, just simple tools and weapons. The art direction would have been similar to the steampunk from the previous games, just translated to modern times, with the same crowded and dilapidated city streets and such. I guess the Silent Hill series is the closest reference I can think of for what we had in mind for looks, but it would have been pretty different from that too. We were going to somewhat modify the "rules" of the modern world to make them more conducive to the Thief-type stealth game also, and not necessarily realistic. There wouldn't be light switches that anyone can just turn on to reveal you, the enemies wouldn't all have machineguns, there wouldn't be lasers, etc. Basically we were going for a very similar type of gameplay to the original series, just in a twisted steampunkish modern setting."
ttlg.com/forums/showthread.php?t=103525&page=2&p=1399221#post1399221

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I am now afraid to read this thread.

Nice picture included with your post haha you know what I mean My ManA

wut

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Utter Cancer, all of his posts just screams "I've discovered Holla Forums for the first time" and is going through the over excited and compulsively needs to reply to everything phase.

The first two games haven't aged very well. Just play Chaos Theory.

Calm down m8s. I've just been strategically bumping to encourage the effort-posting this board so desperately needs. No need to spurg out.

People generally use the catalog here, fam.

How?
What makes this superior to the other games?

Whatever m8.

The original Splinter Cell and Pandora Tomorrow rely on checkpoints, and you can't save anywhere. To be fair, this isn't too bad, since the levels are also much more linear than Chaos Theory–although that in itself is also a problem. They also rely on trial-and-error much more, especially since some missions will instantly fail you if the alarm is raised, or even if someone sees you at all.
Chaos Theory has bigger levels that are all one map, and lets you save anywhere. It includes a sound meter, which the first two games didn't. It doesn't pause the game when you're reviewing your mission data and objectives. It gives you more tools, like a knife, offensive weapons like the shotgun attachment for when shit hits the fan, and the EMP attachment to your pistol that lets you temporarily disable lights. It also includes a decent hacking mini-game. The animations are more fluid and graphical fidelity is drastically improved. Even the story is more engaging (though it's still in the same mold of globe-trotting super-spy Clancy stuff).
Chaos Theory also includes a separate co-op campaign, and it features the return of competitive multiplayer.

Just finished Thief 2
Though I prefer T2's emphasis on taffing regular buildings over spelunking as opposed T1, I can appreciate T1's overt focus on the supernatural as it allows T2 to have its own identity as a result, so it doesn't feel like an extra mission pack disguised as a sequel.

The last mission did get fucking crafty as it felt more like puzzle-stealth like with Splinter Cell, where you can't simply blackjack all guards and then run around the level collecting all loot. Though it's a nice change of pace, and a fitting final level.

Wouldn't a disadvantage of that system be save-spamming? Wouldn't a superior save system for a save system be something like Ori and the Blind Forrest's mechanic of giving something up(example:gold) to save?
What would you say would be the flaw in stealth games were you can't defend yourself?

Yes. But when you have large and nonlinear levels (though nowhere near as much as Thief's), save-anywhere is basically a necessity.
For Splinter Cell, no, because resources aren't maintained between levels. If you're dead set on limiting saves, best to just use Hitman's model, where you have a limited number of saves, with easier difficulties giving you more.
Stealth games are about the improvisational, partial-failure state–i.e., the state that you enter when you're caught. The point of this state is to give players a brief opportunity to fight or flee, so they can recoup, plan, and try again. If you couldn't defend yourself, but only flee–well, it does work, but it would be frustrating to the player if you had to do that every single time. Taking the player's weapons away for one or two levels is fine, but if the entire game is like that, you'll start to find it tedious. For example, if you successfully sneak through a very difficult section, only to be found by a single lone guard, you might prefer simply killing him (or knocking him out) to fleeing back the way you came and fucking up your success, or trying all over again. The option to defend yourself shouldn't be overpowered, though; you should only be able to take on one or maybe two guards and win.

You misunderstand, the system I propose would allow for unlimited saves, but with added mechanic of making you give something up in exchange for said save. This would add a layer of strategy, to when and where the player saves. In my proposed system the player must weigh the advantages and disadvantages of saving at the place and time they are at.

Do you guys know of any stealth games where sound is visible in some way?

In XIII you can see footstep sounds and their position as onomatopeia

There are stealth sections in XIII where you see the sounds enemies make.

Let me guess. Doing things perfectly doesn't make you catch the nigger any faster.

What about a color system? I'm thinking a change in color, saturation, or even using black&white.

Yes, and my point is that your idea wouldn't work, because player resources aren't persistent between levels. So the only way to stop save scumming would be the Hitman model.
Really, though, I think you should allow save scumming. Even if it makes for a shittier game, players who are autistic or retarded will do it, and everyone else will have a good time by not abusing it.

What if the player kept the treasure from previous levels (that they didn't sell) in their home or in a bank and could choose how much to bring with them for the purpose of saving?
Also, I'm not 100% certain what you mean by "resources" is it always valuables that you acquire throughout levels?

That would change the game drastically. You'd have to rework levels in order to allow the player to gather what he needs, and you'd have to project an average for what most players will have at any given time. I'm not saying that's hard or impossible, just that you'd have to turn Chaos Theory into a very different game in order to do that.

Splinter Cell isn't about stealing. Your equipment resets between levels, and there's no money or any other kind of upgrade. In Chaos Theory, the most you got was the ability to choose between three different loadouts before each mission.

Addendum: Blacklist did have money, but Blacklist was mediocre and not really a proper Splinter Cell game. I don't know about Conviction, because fuck Conviction.
Now that I think about it, Double Agent could have been made to do something similar to what you're talking about. In the 6th-gen version of that game, you had two separate "loyalty" meters: one for your government agency, and one for the terrorist group you were working for. They basically measured how confident each group was that you were on their side. In Double Agent, there were occasional, unexpected moments where a representative from either group would contact you over the radio and demand that you go to a spot on the map within a certain timeframe to "check in." If you didn't, you'd lose loyalty with them. You could do something similar to your idea, by inverting this mechanic. You'd save your game by "checking in" with one group, but doing so would cause the other group to become more suspicious of you. (If either meter reaches zero, you fail the game.)

I was thinking of a hypothetical Thief-like stealth game that was mechanically superior by every measurement to the Thief games including the suggested improvements in this video

Oh, I see. I'm a Splinter Cell fan, so I guess that's why I assumed you were still talking about that.

Holy fuck, I thought you were joking. He actually died of a heart attack. At only 27 years old, Poor guy.

I'm somewhat late to this discussion but over the year I've compiled a list of youtubers that have made good video game analysis videos and good gaming videos in general. Also not included in this picture is hbombguy because he's sort of SJW but his fallout 3 video is good

What? Also, I'm pretty certain that he frequents Holla Forums and Holla Forums here.

Mrbtongue and Superbunnyhop are SJWs, too. But they still have some good stuff, especially from before GamerGate.

I still wonder what the real reason he stopped making videos was.

Well, ignore E;R, everything else is gaming related

How is Super Bunnyhop sjw? I've watched all of his videos since MGS2 Critical Close-up and listened to at leas 100 episodes of his podcast on tovg and only thing I can remember of him being sjw is that one brexit comment couple of months ago

Just little things like that Brexit comment, or how, in his Mankind Divided video, he pointedly turns off the TV when a character in the game says the phrase "social justice warriors." He's smart enough to keep his spaghetti in his pockets, but at this point it's only a matter of time before he publicly declares his allegiance.

So should we disregard his content because his political shit is contained?

At no point did I imply that. I'm just saying you shouldn't be surprised when the other shoe drops.

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I stopped following bunnyhop after he began one of his videos with a political line which was blatantly false about the recent US election. Fuck that socju piece of shit. I'll follow a political channel if I want to hear that.

How? The only anti-Holla Forums comment he made I can remember was "he was wrong about the Jews" in but that just lead me to assume he was a normalfag.

Whatever m8.

I'm not from Holla Forums, so I'm fine with people not being racist or hating Jews. That's not what I mean. He sperged out about GamerGate pretty hard, and all the poor, victimized women who were chased out of the industry by those mean old misogynerds :'(

Did Oliver Queen change his super hero name again?

my favorite bit of analysis from super bunny hop is "in some ways dark souls is a lot like doom."

they were never good, either of them

Doom is great, kys.

you are a retard much like george

>>>/out/

Thats so blatantly pandering it hurts. checked

It sounds like that the Invisible War team started fucking with the Thief script. Thief 3 really was already pass the point of no return. Apparently for the entire industry.

What was his argument that Dark Souls was like DOOM?

Gamergate was before my time. How legit was the abuse?

How?

It wasn't. Unaffiliated trolls would send threats to special snowflake devs for lulz, because they would inevitably turn into lolcows and shed crocodile tears about how "persecuted" and "harassed" they were, just because some fag on Twitter said "lol fug u die cis scum ::DDD". GG was pretty good about not trolling, doxxing, or harassing, especially after it got organized. But the indie devs (and to a lesser extent the corrupt journos) wanted to craft a narrative in which they were selfless victims of mindless hatred.

What proof was there that they were unaffiliated?

That entire era I mean, with Thief 3 being the starting point, when they wanted to merge console games with PC games. Thief 3 and Invisable War seemed to be the point they started dumbing all PC games for the console market. There us probably a better example, like some have said
Morrowind. Hell, Thief 3 wasn't even as bad as "Thi4f", but thats when it started.

It might be more accurate to say that there was no proof that they were affiliated. Part of the issue is that GG was a nebulous movement that anyone could "participate" in. That was one of its strengths, but it also allowed the media to arbitrarily declare that the actions of any random fuckwit or false-flagger was a GG action, even though nearly all of the "death threats" and other "harassment" came from new accounts, or from people who had no posting history in support of GG.

And another thing, I'm sure Thief 4: assassin's creed would have ended up better then most, but something tells me it would have ended up having the "grey brown shooter" cancer that was going around at the time.

Sometimes I still have to remind myself that it's (basically) over. It felt like it would never end.

Would rather brown shooters over cinematic non-shooters.
The music industry is the future of the vidya industry.
I'd rather listen to early linkin park over whatever trash is out nowadays.
I'd rather play through another shit/piss/vomit color palette shooter instead of whatever trash is out nowadays.

It wasn't going to be a shooter according to a dev.
See: and

How did those games dumb down because of console design? How mechanically did they change to accommodate the console market? Can you detect any mechanical trends that were the result of this "dumbing down"?

Checked.

Oh, ok.

Don't know about Thief 3, but DX:IW had tiny levels, universal ammunition, swappable augs and horrendous interface.

What constraints do you think lead to those design choices? Do you think there is something inherently part of console controllers that lead to the bad design choices? I have heard some ascribe it to the devs simply not knowing what made the original so good.

Level size was decreased due to RAM limitations of consoles - the PS2 port of the original DX has this too, along with simplified health and inventory. Interface was explicitly made with controllers in mind, so it's only horrendous on PC, on console it's just ugly.

Thief 3 also has tiny levels punctuated by loading screens so it could run on PS2's limited RAM. Theres a mod for the PC version called Thief 3 Gold that combines groups of levels to reduce the number of loading screens, unfortunately it doesn't fix Thief 3's hardcoded problems like camera and character movement not being synced even in first person.

Would any of the Touhou games be gesamtkunstwerk games? It seems obvious that small games made by small amounts of people may be easier to make into gesamtkunstwerk games.

Can I just say the worst thing about Thief 2014 for me personally was yet another game where the protagonist won't shut the hell up while his hands operate on screen constantly?
Like, Doom makes good use of it by making the protag mute, but shit isn't immersive or for slow paced in the least.

I think I'm the only person on Earth who didn't hate THI4F. As a Thief game, it was shit. But as a stealth game, it was fine–sort of like Blacklist was compared to its series.

OOSH

If you are still here.
I can completely believe the original devs may have had no idea what even made the original game good. That they stumped upon gold and could never replicate it again. Still though, both Invisible War and Thief 3 had hardware limitations that, despite the original xbox being a pretty beefy machine, all the levels where tiny with Thief 3 having maybe one or two "medium size" levels. I can't recall too well of thief 3 now, I know there have been a few videos, but one thing they took out was sword play. Which despite "if you had to sword fight you where doing it wrong" in thief, the sword play was very enjoyable and even in a plot wise gave garret some character. Especially since the black sword was a reward for him in one mission.

Thief 3 storyline for garret had an endless amount of circle jerking for the character. Everyone would say how famous or infamous he was, but considering it was the 3rd game in the series I guess that would be expected, but it defiantly changed the atmosphere, your not some taffer trying to taff some goods, you are the taff master.

As far a gamepad controller vs mouse and keyboard, Invisable war simplified inventory and universal ammo pretty much is all that needs to be said. They could have attempted an RE4 item layout, but they didn't. Even so, with RE4 as a example, it takes a lot longer to get your inventory set up when a mouse could have done in in a fraction of the time. Also, sure you had less spaces which was annoying, but since all ammo used the same ammo type, weapons where more of a preference then any "resource decision". Rocket launcher was the same as the silence pistol? I guess I feel like explosions today.

Thief 4 didn't have an inventory problem since Garret had big pockets, being a thief I guess that make sense. Thief 3 was really kicked by the smaller level sizes then anything else. The gamepad vs mouse and keyboard wasn't as big factor for thief 3 then IW, but the "target audience" sure was. The fact that now had a target audience. When Thief 1 and 2 was made, I'm sure they wanted to make a "fun game" first and didn't really think "who would think this game was fun". Ross did a better analysis of what invisible war slimmed out, and even goes on to what human revolution took a step further of removing.

it didn't look that big when I was typing it.

There's Splinter Cell and Metal Gear Solid for more stealth games though. Deus Ex can also be played as a stealther.

New Thief is just bad.

MGS and Deux Ex aren't really stealth games. Thief, if nothing else, was a stealth game–at least on Master difficulty with focus and the other handhold shit turned off; I didn't bother with any other play style.

How was it not a stealth game on lower difficulty's?

I don't know if it was or not, I literally just said that I only played it on the highest difficulty.

They're still much better than newthief.

I agree.

It was a good thread, lads. Wish I'd seen it sooner. Later.

web.archive.org/web/20170305214045/https://8ch.net/v/res/11986704.html
archive.is/6ZWls

Oh hey someone posted my video.
Yeah, agreed, though I haven't played Doom.

No, Blacklist at least had Conviction to make up for and in general brought new things to the table on some level.

There's so many small problems with Thief 3, along with the level design, that it really is only worth playing for the Cradle in my eyes.
That is the only truly noteworthy part of the game in my eyes.