AWKWARD ZOMBIE

I think the biggest disappointment for me is the chopped-up levels. I could forgive the hard-to-see interactable objects if you could navigate a mansion without having to pause for a loading screen. How could a game released in 2014 be unable to handle a larger level? Hell, Skyrim could handle large dungeons with only one or two loading screens.

Edit: Also, I heard through the grapevine that this game was having a lot of developmental troubles, which might explain the half-baked feel some of the reviews talk about. Having Square Enix in charge of the game probably didn't help either but at least this game doesn't seem QUITE as linear as some of Squeenix's stuff.

I watched some gameplay and I liked it. Not a release purchase for me, though nothing is these days because of budget, but I'll watch for a Steam sale.

Yeah, the gameplay looked fine to me too. I can handle the repeated animations when Garrett steals stuff and I don't mind not being able to immediately see what I can interact with--it's just the choppy linear levels I'm wary of, along with the forced cutscenes. The dopey AI concerns me too, but I'm still...optimistic...that the AI at least gets smarter on higher difficulties.

Chopped up levels are a good thing. It enables more detail and more content in each individual cell without slowdown or bugs.

I would disagree with you on that, to some extent. Yes, it reduces lag, but choppy levels were a point of contention in Deadly Shadows. Previous Thief games were able to have very large and non-linear levels, such as the bank in Metal Age or the opera house in Gold. That could have been because the primitive graphics didn't put as much of a strain on the system, but the technology is improved now.

You just answered your own question. The graphics, the engine, the texturing, everything needs more power now. It might be possible to have a seamless world with everything cranked up to max, but it would only be for the very best computers.

That's what adjustable graphic options are for, though. Skyrim was able to have large, good-looking dungeons with only one or two loading screens, max. While it's not exactly FAIR to compare Thief to Skyrim, or Squeenix to Bethesda, Skyrim at least shows that it can be done.

But with all the problems Thief supposedly had in development, I guess chopping up the levels was their 'best' solution. There's still no excuse for linearity.

(Also one of the Yogscast is doing a playthrough of Thief and I'm not pop flyin' about that because 1: Thief isn't TECHNICALLY RELEASED YET and 2: Yogscast isn't very good at gaems)

Which Yogscast member is it? I've been meaning to get back into them and this might be a nice gateway.

It's Sjin. He's not as bad at games as, say, Simon, but I'm still not really a big fan of anything other than his Let's Build videos. At any rate I'm not going to watch them because I was planning on playing Thief blind and I still intend to do that.

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xJS1yCSKlhs[/youtube]

Botched game, indeed

You do realize TotalBiscuit likes the game, yes? He has only played six hours of it though, and apparently people are saying that it's the later parts that begin to implode in a cataclysmic display of suck.

I'll wait for when it gets a nice, deep discount on Steam before I try it.

Whoops I meant botched as in sarcasm, the game looks great according to his video.

About the chopped up levels, if you read the first review I linked, they clearly stated that not only are the constant loading screens annoying, they lead to you feeling like you're moving from one tiny area to another and prevent you from feeling like you're ever infiltrating any kind of large location.


Thief 1 and 2 managed to pull off entire buildings and large open areas without loading screens 15 years ago and they were by no means less graphically intensive for their time when compared to the reboot. I recently listened to a podcast where a guy described the graphics of the original two games as 'rudimentary' - that is, everything was designed to convey important visual information to you. What doors you could enter or items you could take was always clear, while preserving visual fidelity and large, loading screen-free areas. All this and the games still managed to be Looking Glass's most profitable releases ever at a time when PCs cost 2-3x what they cost today. The reboot fails at all of these endeavors - the levels are small and the graphics fail to convey important visual information, 15 years of progress later.

Heck, DS was designed with the Xbox in mind and people criticized it for introducing too many loading screens, even though the hub world only had them when you entered a building (90% of the time, this meant either Garrett's house or the fence) and between districts. I clearly remember still being able to traverse entire multi-floored mansions without a single loading screen in between. Even with the console limitations that influenced the design, it was still far more open than the reboot and I didn't need a god damn Focus vision to be able to tell what I could take, despite the improved visuals over the first two games.

See, that's basically what I said. The opera house was huge, and the game put both that and an underground cave system and part of the main city into one level. I worry that in their effort to make the game more 'friendly' for consoles, they cut things up TOO small. If the game has more loading screens than Deadly Shadows did, that's too many. Deadly Shadows at least used a little bit of sense with loading screens with the way it divided buildings from the hub and 'inner' parts of levels (like in the Shalebridge Cradle).

Is it just a bad Thief game, or is it bad in its own right?