Re: bad video game levels in good games and particularly re: the Thieves Guild from Thief Gold (say that ten times fast) that ellaguro mentioned: i think about the inexplicable, comical pile up of shittiness of that level quite a bit. the sole credited designer, Sara Verilli, also co-designed several other levels including the very next one, The Sword (which is a fucking great level and the thought of a newcomer to the game giving up in Thieves Guild makes my heart hurt). the only other solo credit she has, Strange Bedfellows is a little bit of a narrative filler level, but still far more coherent and intriguing than the complex of sewer mazes the Downwinder thieves use as a base
(wait a minute… Downwinder… is that a fucking FART JOKE?? gonna be thinking about that too now lol)
The level is one of 3 added for Thief Gold. The other 2 are decent but overlong (Mage Towers) and pretty damn fun (Song of the Caverns) respectively. Both are justified as narrative additions because they flesh out the macguffin quest in the middle third of the game by giving each of the elemental talismans their own mission. Thieves Guild is a nothing mission that’s about Garrett taking a really stupid risk for petty reasons and its an overlong, ugly maze that feels like a bad DOOM pwad. Everything about it screams “rough draft filler to pad out the game length” yet it was added to a rerelease of the game! What on earth was Looking Glass even going for!
there are whole swathes of the level where the lighting (aka the Key Mechanic to Thief stealth) is just lying to you, you can be in obviously dark spaces and still have a bright light gem. There’s like 200 guards in the level for no reason, all crunched into these tiny box like spaces overlapping patrols. You have to travel to one side of the map to get a key for the complete other side and even if you pick up the eavesdrop clue telling you this, the T1 style shitty nonindicative map combined with the confusing design makes it very possible to do things out of order and have to backtrack all the way across this huge stupid maze TWICE. Hard & Expert difficulty add a subgoal thats somewhere around the middle of the map, in one of many anonymous rooms, tucked into a tiny safe that’s pixel-hunt tier missable.
Just a bizarre fucking mess. I hate playing it but i kinda love thinking about it, obviously. Would genuinely suggest to anyone playing TG that they treat tTG (…) as effectively non-canon and use the level skip cheat to cut right from Assassins (another terrific level and the only example of “stay close but not too close” stealth ive ever enjoyed) to The Sword
Related: the Undercover mission, my other least favorite, where you’re meant to be disguised as a Hammer and trying to do things discreetly but afaict it is impossible to avoid detection as soon as you do anything “off-limits”. Like you think you’ve been real smooth and then suddenly a guard turns around and conks you over the head with his sledgehammer. I try to take a low-KO approach to these games but i cant beat either level without knocking out every single guard and creating a Boy Pile™ in a dark corner somewhere
I think of how a mainline FF game just came out and even on here I feel like no one has said a word about it. I know there’s a thread for it but, usually mention of a game leaks out of those if it’s worth talking about at all.
just saw this - yeah! the level is quite inexplicable. it doesn’t really make sense that Garrett would care about robbing the Thieves Guild as a character - he seems like a freelancer who doesn’t have anything to prove to them. the design feels like about 3 different levels in one, and all of them are fairly generic. it is weirdly difficult and overpopulated in places - the beginning few areas are especially bad for some reason (and it’s not like it’s later on in the game where that might be more justified). even the guard dialogue in it is different, and stupider. it does feel like a fan mod - down to the mind-numbing thing of requiring you to backtrack a ton to prolong the mission, whereas the other two additional levels feel like a part of the game.
i do kind of like the underground section with the different vaults, though. it has a sort of clunky Deus Ex 1 feeling to it. it feels like it could be from a different game. i feel like that section alone and the final section might have made for an okay (tho kinda bland) level also. otherwise the overall experience of the level is so annoying
yeah there are bits of that level that could have been chopped & screwed into something better, or at least less frustrating. I like the idea of sneaking through a front establishment into a casino (and the loud drum’n’bass playing in there as though over a sound system (??) is silly in a good way). of course it’s the Dark Engine with recycled assets from T1, so it doesnt really look like a casino at all, and the patrons are just forever standing there whistling and clearing their throats (Song of the Caverns also has this issue, both levels have some proto Thief 2 vibes though to vastly different degrees of success)
iirc the conceit of the level is that Garrett is pissed that the Downwinders swiped his next heist before he could, and is trying to capitalize on the guild leaders feuding eachother in order to make off with it. but he even says something in the briefing like “if they catch sight of me, they’ll know i swiped it” and it’s like ok cool man, so if even 1 guy spots you youve painted a big fucking target on yourself with no plausible deniability. kind of puts a hole in his cool-headed professional thief vibe
it is sorta funny that the moment you make a thief guild guard suspicious they start yelling like GARRETT YOU ASSHOLE I KNOW THAT WAS YOU
The guy who drew the Wandering Emanon Quadrilogy, Wandering Island and Spirit Of Wonder did the art for an unreleased Gainax game called Shinbatsu that still has it’s release page archived.
thinking about that right now — how past 201x++ proper review input acquisition process is turning out to be waiting for a month until the overly biased/positive (or negative — ‘there are only 5h of playtime, 0.0001 stars worst game EVER!!!’) data points have been canceled out by sheer mass of impressions
the prima (RIP) eGuide for SimCity (2013) starts with a bizarre pre-apology, responding to backlash against the game’s always-online requirements
especially funny is that it includes lies about the core game requiring (and benefitting from!) some kind of magical cloud processing, further justifying the DRM (turns out, you could play it fully offline by commenting out a line in a config file to disable a timeout)
I’ve never gotten big into a multiplayer focused game but i love reading about them, and Chromehounds rings to me like Armored Core x Tribes and/or Battlefield there’s an inherent “you had to be there for it” part of it that makes it fun to experience as a voyeur though i’ll never have been there for it
responding to something that came up in the games you played today thread (i just tried abbreviating this as gypt and, uh, that didn’t look right)
a friend got the ‘bad end’ of persona 3, where you make the choice to kill ryoji and erase your memories of everything going on instead of facing the end of the world head-on. the game all but urges you not to do this, and the tone of the ending is very downbeat, leaves a bunch of threads dangling, and the music over the credits is melancholy. dude didn’t even consider there could be a ‘good ending’ and was just like ‘what a depressing, dumb abrupt ending. can’t believe that’s all there is.’ when he was told about there being another ending he was like ‘doesn’t matter.’ think about this a lot.
another videogame thing i think about a lot is how much it sucks that the intellectual property rights to lemmings ended up in the hands of sony, probably the worst videogame company to have the rights to lemmings
I do think about people who are unwilling to accept lesser outcomes over the best outcome (I myself was this person for many years) despite both of these being authored content written for the game. By that metric bad endings should be more coveted because of how few people will experience them.
Yeah, phrased that way, I get that. But I don’t think it’s not interesting—rather, it’s intentionally unsatisfying. I think the choice’s presence in the game works interestingly for the game’s themes, and it not just being a blank screen with some text makes for it more compelling.
