So, with the tragic failure that is the latest Thief game, I'm not privy to any proper games just straight-up about thievery.
So I'd been playing thief 2 and 3 a lot recently, and figured, hey, why not take a week or two and give a shot at a prototype thief game of my own.
So what features from the real thief games were your favorites? Which did you hate?
For me, my favorite particular thing is being able to snuff candles and douse torches. Being able to turn the map into an area that's easier to operate in gives a good sense of power and shifting the gameplay balance in the player favor feels really good.
For my least favorite aspect, I never liked that moving backwards was slower. It makes sense, but it ends up making the movement feel kinda clunky. I'd prefer an overall slower base movespeed in all directions than one direction being slower than the rest.
My favorite part was just the basic movements. I used to try and beat the levels without using any items or weapons at all(besides instances where you had to use them, like keys and pushing buttons with arrows.)
Thomas King
One thing I can't love the game more for is having a separate inventory for each level, which encourages the player to use all of their one-time-use items. Is it best to play Thief on Normal first time around? Because I hear higher difficulties add more tasks. I'm on the Thieves' Guild mission and I'm disliking it alot more than the other levels
Ryder Richardson
Ah, yeah, it was cool how you could largely do 'ghost' runs if you were good. That'd be a neat thing to be able to get a bonus at the end if you managed it.
Yeah. It was interesting to have the continuous inventory in Deadly Shadows, but I think I prefer a "here's your stuff, go crazy" style. I get too paranoid about making sure I have the supplies later if it's a perpetual inventory.
I don't remember if the tasks change based on difficulty. That'd be interesting if it did though.
Mason Cruz
In fairness, if you're any good as a Thief, you should have ~$8K gold and a sufficiently full inventory at most times in T3 just from ~80% loot acquisition.
Also, you can farm passersby for loot if you're destitute, plus environmental items regenerate every in-game day (I'm pretty sure that means 10 free broadhead arrows, about the same number of moss arrows, six or so water arrows and maybe 5 fire arrows at least). I never realized how many fire arrows were sneakily deposited in torch sconces until I played it a second time.
Ethan Taylor
Hard and Expert will usually ask that you find more treasure, find specific items, or don't alert or kill.
Kevin Cruz
I don't totally agree, if you're going for an arcade styled game sure but in a thief / thief-like game a tiny bit of flavor text/dialog at the end of the mission or in later missions would fit so much better, or even changes to later levels for that matter. ** not that a bit of a bonus in some cases would hurt but it would need to fit, aka you got x more gold / x item because "your current employer" is satisfied with your skills or something to that effect
James Sanders
I agree, it'd work when it ties into the mission and lore. A little bit of flavor text would pretty much always work, but a mission where you were contracted by a third party to, say, steal some family heirlooms as part of their machinations to start a family feud, may pay a bonus for the family never realizing it was a thief's fault.
Definitely wouldn't be as an "every mission" sort of thing though, I agree.
Elijah Gomez
Thinking on it, if you ground that sorta thing firmly in mission/story lore, there'd be missions where you'd get a bonus for exactly the opposite. If you intentionally make a ruckus, or fight the guards because the employer wants people to know a heist occured, that could also get you a bonus.
That'd allow for a lot of interesting meta-objectives.
Anthony Jenkins
There are even free gas arrows in the city if you know where to look for them.
Luis Sullivan
I've been playing a bit of the first two Thief games (blind playthrough on Expert), and they're definitely great, but are somewhat overrated. I do like that levels are open-ended and you have to learn to navigate them on your own, instead of having a precise GPS and quest markers. That's essentially the strongest aspect in Thief (and a surprisingly basic feature at that). Small additions like head bobbing and audio cues greatly contribute to the atmosphere of the game, and extra objectives on higher difficulties are also a plus.
My issue is that these games don't work as well as people lead me to believe. The enemy's field of vision is too damn wide, and sometimes guards spot you at impossible angles and/or distances, especially when they're in "caution" mode. The pacing of the game slows to a crawl when you've missed a key item, and have to explore the whole level again in search of it (which will probably be completely empty in case you knocked out/killed all guards). Guards never wake up, the combat is absolute trash, you get stuck in bodies, you can't move at normal speed if you move sideways or backwards, which means looking around while moving can feel counter-intuitive, and what boggles my mind the most, is that some enemies will taunt you when you hit them with the blackjack, but they're basically being stunlocked, which actually puts them at a disadvantage. Hitting them enough times will eventually knock them out (or even kill them), which makes no fucking sense whatsoever for them to stand there and just laugh at you.
Robert Morris
It certainly has its shortcomings, but its overall a nice experience imo.
Guards at times even have an innate sixth sense on your precise location in the dark if you make noise even beyond their supposed hearing and sight range if they detected you from a distance away.
James Morales
If you could make a combo of thief with kicking like dark messiah that would be dope
Levi King
Is it going to be Dark Mod or your own engine?
Follow these 2 rules: 1. Don't make blackjacking too easy. 2. Have horror elements.
Robert Sanders
Exploration, exploration, exploration. Also the ways in which the game put obstacles in your way to make exploration more satisfying than "Oh look you turned down this street and found a pile of gold neat!". The multiple floors that made different amounts of noise. The lighting played a huge part as well, even though some places looked like you would be in shadow but your meter said you were detectable. Both of these combined made some scenarios very intense. You had to decide whether you would stay in spot and hope the guard that just turned the corner didn't see you, or you tried to move to a different spot which would require you to possibly move into even more light and make noise on the marble floor. The one thing I wish it had more of(which was expanded in some fan missions) was the vertical aspect of the maps. Another aspect of exploration was the use of items with the environment. The multitude of arrows you had made you feel like you could tackle any situation but your overall weakness when it came to defending yourself gave a nice balance. The items laid around in some levels were plentiful but they never gave too many of one item which made you think on your feet. All in all it was a game based more on skill and problem solving on the fly.
Caleb Jackson
Yeah, I fully agree with you on the shortcomings list there. Guard AI is just bad in general. I mean, in stealth games, AI are supposed to be a LITTLE stupid, but they flit back and forth between offensively retarded and shocktrooper.
Between that and the movement clunkiness, how horribly slow the bow draw feels and the like is the kinda stuff I'd be keen to improve on for my little shindig.
The broad experience is excellent, but there's definitely a lot of small bits to the core mechanics that could use sprucing.
Haha, I'd actually been thinking about that. Kicking in Dark Messiah was kinda OP though. If I implemented kicking, I think it'd probably just make the guards stumble back a few steps or fall on their butt. Enough to give you a moment to bail(or stab them if you're going violent-like) but not a "fly off the cliff at mach 20" like DM had, as fun as that was.
I use a game engine, so it'd be a full standalone. For blackjacking, got any particular opinions on what'd make it too easy? I know if you stealth behind people in the thief games long enough you raise the jack and basically get a free, guarenteed knockout because it stops them from moving. I'd probably just make the player have the smack them themselves and try to not dick up the angle of attack.
On horror: yeah, at least one horror mission. 'S tradition, after all.
Levi Brooks
In some levels, it's easy to run through the whole thing just knocking people out. Even if they get alerted, they can't react fast enough. It makes the game too easy. Generally, you can leave your guard down in any area of the level where you have been before. There's no need to be alert and it makes the game boring. Have guards with helmets, monsters, undead, and automatons. Those kinds of enemies are more challenging.
Make it so that the player can never truly feel safe.
William Rogers
Put in a mod where when you kick them in the balls it plays that'smypurseIdon'tknowyou.wav
This was my strategy in Splinter Cell Chaos Theory plus piling all the bodies up in one mass
Daniel Diaz
The new Thief wasn't a bad game (by modern standards) per se. It's just not up to the standards of the original few.
I'd actually been planning on having knockouts and gas arrows be a temporary down like the MGS games, for example. Blackjack a dude, and he's out cold for a few minutes, but will eventually come to.
Gas arrows to make 'em sleep would last longer, but still never really be permanent. Kills would obviously be permanent, but then you have bodies and blood which can alert others.
Guards that find KO'd people could wake them up as well.
Liam Richardson
No, Thi4f was shit no matter what standard you hold. Kill yourself faggot
Brandon Mitchell
It was trying to be cinematic and edgy which hurt the rest of the game. Not being able to jump was infuriating. However, with the lack of good stealth games I found it surprisingly enjoyable as a throwaway title. Admittedly I'm not sure how the "normal" gameplay is since I had everything except iron man and slower movement enabled in the difficulty settings.
PS. Suck a cock
Nicholas Allen
That would encourage a real life burglar to take care of people he knocked out before by binding them with rope and gagging. If you intend to make knockouts temporary, give the player the means to do likewise.
Matthew Turner
You should really, really kill yourself fam. Have some standards so you don't have to cuck yourself into liking garbage product. The fact that it removed jumping disqualifies it from being good. Good games don't remove basic features.
Jason Peterson
I never said that it was good, retard. I'm just not viewing things black and white. That's what autists do.
Bentley Gomez
If you wouldn't, that counts as artificial difficulty.
Dominic Peterson
That reminds me of Commandos. You can knock someone out and they wake up after a while if you don't gag them. You also get a poison syringe. 1 dose stuns them for a few seconds, 2 doses knock them out, and 3 doses kill.
Jayden Reyes
Yeah, fair point. Presumably would be a consumable inventory item to bind and gag them though, right?
So you could take in like 5-10 of the things and hogtie up some guards, but if you're busting into a heavily fortified place, you may not have enough to saddle up all of them.
Seem like a reasonable setup?
Sebastian Perry
That reminds me. In Commandos, you could take someone's uniform and if you had the Spy, you could have him distract enemies and give them orders. That's nice to see in a stealth game.
Joseph Miller
Possibly. Details need playtesting. How long the task takes, what happens if it is interrupted and so on.
Connor Walker
Yeah, how long it takes is really variable.
If interrupted, I'd imagine you'd just drop them where they were and they just continue ticking down their sleep/ko counter as usual.
Another big balancing bit would be how many hogtie kits you carry on a mission. Too many and you can cakewalk the mission, too few and they almost may not even be there.
The other option would be places you could dump a body to remove it from the equation.
Nolan Morgan
Never make the thievery feel irrelevant. It may have just been me, but there were several missions, moreso in The Dark Project than the Metal Age, that simply weren't quite heavy enough on the thievery.
This is also just more of a personal preference, but I think it'd be interesting to see a stealth game that allows you to have a greater say in the plot outside of whether you were a loutish brigand or a silent safebreaker. Have missions that allow you to decide whether you want to turn in the item or keep it for later use, missions where several factions want the same item and you decide who ends up with it and that effects the game's progression (the Downwind Thieves' Guild would have been a good opportunity for this), missions with side objectives that require information from earlier missions or specific contacts, all of those immediately come to mind.
Colton Brooks
That'd be really interesting, especially if the choices made is based on a foundation of paying attention to details that come up in missions and lore bits.
Also, anyone have a suggestion on a name? Going too 'hurr hurr wink wink nudge nudge' feels kinda lame, but outside of a painfully obvious shoutout name like "Burglary", nothing's really striking.
