You’d think in 4 years they’d be able to move beyond “we mostly understand how Deus Ex works” and into “and here’s something new”, but maybe Thi4f scared them enough to go back to polishing the budget.
Father forgive me for I have sinned.
I tried…I tried so hard to get into Morrowind, but I just couldn’t. While I appreciate that they were going for something unique, something different than the usual Generic Fantasy World, I found trekking through the neverending mist-shrouded grey/brown landscape to be tiresome and kind of soul-sucking. Like, I literally felt exhausted and vaguely depressed after playing it for a few hours.
So then in a moment of weakness I fired up Oblivion, loading a save that had only a few hours on it, and blasted through a chunk of the main quest, which is as infuriating and tedious as I remembered. But then I started dicking around with sidequests and got Benirus Manor and found my depressive feelings dissipating…
Idk I guess I have no taste.
oblivion is still a fairly competent game underneath quite a few atrocious design decisions - much moreso with the right selection of mods - but ultimately oblivion vanilla doesn’t have the right sense of adventure. it translates morrowind’s big, unknown world into, as others here might put it, more of a lawnmower sim.
moment-to-moment interest? i’d probably give that to oblivion. but oblivion just doesn’t hold up in the long term. the game reveals its seams and hollowness far too quickly for a game as big as it is
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but you can kill crabs by the beach
last time i played oblivion i headed for shivering isles asap and played there until i got bored thats my recommended oblivion experience
also specialize in hand-to-hand + stealth & murder everyone w/ rabbit punches
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what happened with that game?
it was an undistinguished entry in a franchise that only a very small number of people have any affection for at this point and I don’t think anyone cared about it when it was released (I forgot it existed).
Not to mention, we already had a perfectly decent Thief 4 in Dishonored.
In 2016 context, I’d mark the distinguishing features of Thief as the tone (Venetian guilds and family wars and a menacing classical past, let’s call it) and the level design (open and layered as opposed to Splinter Cell-style puzzleboxes). And my understanding is that Thief 4 botched both of those, so I’m certainly not interested.
As for what happened during development, I don’t have any special insight, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it was similar to how Murdered: Soul Suspect went down: a troubled development, then a Square Enix producer flies in from Japan, reworks the game incompetently and the team zombie-slogs until it’s out the door.
Huh
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I played Thi4f. It sucked. Not in the sense of like, you’re playing it and saying, this game is atrocious, it is physically painful, I hate it. It’s just an experience with no real edges, it’s all smoothed and rounded. It’s not exactly over-scripted in the way a lot of modern games are, they at least tried to do the immersive sim thing, but it just does nothing to rouse the mind. It’s quite similar to DX3, but it doesn’t have guns or talking so no one cares.
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huh
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I’m a little surprised that thief 4 even got greenlit, the entire fanbase is “people who owned a voodoo 2” and the murdersim genre is really crowded lately
I’m actually fairly enthusiastic for dishonored 2, one of my biggest problems with the first game was that the engine felt a little too clean and reigned in and that’s one thing that’s unquestionably been improved.
I think that’s a little harsh 3 years into our post-Kickstarter world. Thief certainly ranks among the most clout of '90s PC brands.
Of course the big problem is keeping the budget at a scale to that audience you’re bringing. Single-player first-personing with simlike tendencies has always been a niche and rising budgets effectively crush it. Somehow they pulled out a profitable game in the Deus Ex reboot but they figured out how to make it look like contemporary sci-fi whereas Thief 4 didn’t figure out how to broaden without getting, well, broad and stupid.
you think? If I was in charge of eidos’ money I’d tend to regard anything that never got a console release in its original incarnation yet requires near-AAA budgets as poison
new xcom, new deus ex, and new torment weren’t nearly as risky
not to say they couldn’t just, y’know, cook up some original designs
Yeah, we can assume they view new IP as more risky than old IP. I’d assume they based financial projections off of Splinter Cell sales. And given the studio location, they hired a bunch of old Splinter Cell hands and probably viewed it as a good studio fit.
right, that makes sense.
honestly, the only western PC game design portfolio which I think is relatively underexploited by modern publishers in terms of how well it holds up given its obscurity is paul reiche’s (archon, sc2, toejam and earl). might be the exception that proves the rule.
Wait, do we know what he did on Toejam & Earl?
Skylanders isn’t for us but it does make the universe feel fair that Toys for Bob was first to tie those strands together and do it so well. I have immense respect for that.
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he’s credited with “invaluable help” which sounds like a mark cerny type deal.
Following the the Paul Reiche wikipedia references teaches me that Gamespot’s 404 landing page has a roguelike built in?
http://www.gamespot.com/gamespot/features/all/greatestgames/starcon22.html/
it is a game I played, today
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What kind of bullshit roguelike doesn’t even let you die?!