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Eidos Montreal talks a bit about Thief 4

Carbonox

Member
Never played a Thief game before but after Deus Ex Human Revolution blowing me away, I will definitely keep tabs on Thief 4.
 

SparkTR

Member
I'm really interested in what they're doing with this. They've basically been handed one of the best game universes ever. I just hope they put it too good use, make something tense, methodical, atmospheric and more like the originals.

Never played a Thief game before but after Deus Ex Human Revolution blowing me away, I will definitely keep tabs on Thief 4.

Buy the triple pack on Steam and expose yourself to some of the greatest stealth games of all time, no excuses.
 

ArjanN

Member
A "certain level of"?

That's the entire fucking game. Thats how Thief works! Why is that being brought up in design after the success of Deus Ex? I hope I'm misinterpreting him and on the first day the design team scrawled in the center of their whiteboard "non-linear sprawling gameplay"

You always had less options in Thief though. Either you sneak or you murder people, while Deus Ex usually also had an option to talk/hack/bribe your way through.
 

Geoff9920

Member
I have a lot faith in these guys after Human Revolution and hopefully they'll be able to repeat their success with theif 4.
 

Sentenza

Member
I loved Human Revolution, despise some minor flaws, and I want to be optimistic about Thief 4, but I'd like to point that Thief gameplay is a much more easy game to mess up with.

There is a very delicate delicate balance between its parts that makes it an unique franchise.
The simple and intuitive stealth mechanics, the balance between sense of empowerment and fragility, a meticulous and clever level design, difficulty levels focused on different objectives and rules, etc.

They need to be very careful in how they handle this game, cause even a minor attempt of dumbing down could eventually break the "magic".
 

gabbo

Member
*Sigh*
Thief doesn't need anything but well executed stealth, thievery, excellent level desing, and some nifty gadgets in form of arrows. How can the dev team think it needs something more?

This is not going to end well.

This, but I'm hopeful this may be a case of something lost in translation and they don't mean Thief4 will have action shoved into it instead of focusing solely on stealth, but adding different approaches to being stealthy for Garrett to use.
 

Woorloog

Banned
This, but I'm hopeful this may be a case of something lost in translation and they don't mean Thief4 will have action shoved into it instead of focusing solely on stealth, but adding different approaches to being stealthy for Garrett to use.

Yeah, that would be OK. Allow the player to bribe and talk your way through some place (or to cause distractions), allow us to dig under a wall. Or something.
Just don't "actionze" the game.
 

ArjanN

Member
I loved Human Revolution, despise some minor flaws, and I want to be optimistic about Thief 4, but I'd like to point that Thief gameplay is a much more easy game to mess up with.

There is a very delicate delicate balance between its parts that makes it an unique franchise.
The simple and intuitive stealth mechanics, the balance between sense of empowerment and fragility, a meticulous and clever level design, difficulty levels focused on different objectives and rules, etc.

They need to be very careful in how they handle this game, cause even a minor attempt of dumbing down could eventually break the "magic".

I'm not sure I agree with this. Deus Ex seems harder to do to me, because besides the sneaking you also have to have decent combat, conversations, hacking etc. while Thief is pretty much pure stealth.
 

szaromir

Banned
I'm not sure I agree with this. Deus Ex seems harder to do to me, because besides the sneaking you also have to have decent combat, conversations, hacking etc. while Thief is pretty much pure stealth.

Making a great game is never easier or harder, it's always bloody difficult I can imagine... Deus Ex offered different gameplay options, but Thief had better level design. Both series are great although I'd give the nod to Thief if I had to choose.

I definitely wouldn't mind if Garret became more acrobatic, sort of like characters in Assassin's Creed (talking about traversing environments, not combat). I think it'd be also cool if they required the player to evaluate value of the objects they steal, rather than provide it like in the previous games. Graphics are good enough to make that possible. Just imagine if you robbed a house, tried to sell the loot in the black market and it turned out you picked up some objects that aren't worth a dime, haha.
 

Sentenza

Member
I'm not sure I agree with this. Deus Ex seems harder to do to me, because besides the sneaking you also have to have decent combat, conversations, hacking etc. while Thief is pretty much pure stealth.
Deus Ex is quite simple as a formula to nail down: it's exactly the sheer amount of things it tries to do that makes it unique.
In fact, the original Deus Ex (like Human Revolution years later) isn't even particularly good in anything except level design. It's more the proverbial jack of all trades, master of none.
There's dialogues, stealth, shooting, exploration, RPG leveling system... Unless you screw up in the execution, the formula is almost interesting by definition.
And in fact, while few games attempted something similar, many of them are remembered as classics (Ultima Underworld 1&2, System Shock 1&2, STALKER, Bloodlines).

Thief 1 and 2, on the other hand, were way more focused games, with tighter mechanics and less "flashy" stuff distracting the player by the core experience.
 
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