Eidos: Thief's Going To Overcome Fan Resistance

[IrenIvy]

Thief will be a good game, maybe even a great game, a masterpiece even.

There are no evidences of this. All that developers are letting out is a carefully marketed, carefully controlled information which doesn't let us made fully informed choice about how good this game is going to be. Claiming that game is going to be 'great game, a masterpiece even' with only those bits and pieces available sounds overly optimistic.

Opposite may also be true, of course. But the position I saw in most of 'Thief' fans isn't 'we hate it because it is change and every change sucks', but because from what information we were already shown and told, we made conclusions that certain game elements (popup XP, change of voice actor, prompts for jump instead of free jumping, quick time events climbing, for example) are drastically breaking what made 'Thief' game a 'Thief' game, and not, say, an another shooter game with bad story and personality or even another kind of stealth game, like 'Deus Ex: HR' or 'Hitman Absolution'. There is appealing to wider audience and there is running game to the ground of mediocrity while doing so, and because devs right now are very careful with information and basically saying that without buying the game we won't get a full info, the simple life experience tells me it is going to be the latter. Looking for a number of recent reboots, I'm judging from my personal experience that the number of bad reboots vastly bigger than the number of good reboots. The game may surprise me for good, of course, but so far there are no, or very little, of evidence of game identity that made original 'Thief' game one of my favorites. I can only speculate of devs reasons why they are doing this (fear being the top reason why, from my perspective), but judging from what we have and what we don't (yet?) have, information-wise, you can't expect us to blindly love the game that offers so little of things we valued in previous game. There will probably be takedowns, and you can kill (a lot of?) guards instead of avoiding them... but this is "Dishonored", or "Deus Ex: HR", not "Thief". When you buy a carton of milk and instead of milk you find inside a bunch of rusty nails, you are free to ask why this carton is labeled "milk" and not "rusty nails" and why have you been charged $60 for bunch of rusty nails you didn't want to buy.

I don't want old school gamers to become the equivalent of bitter old men sitting on their front porch cursing the world for changing

If people chose to become like that, this is their free choice just as your choice is to be (overly?) optimistic about how good this reboot is going to be.

Captcha: know your rights
appropriate

 

[SecondPrize]

I want to see video of the new voice actor doing his lines while tumbling about in a gym or something. After all, they said they made the change because Russell wouldn't be able to do that so let's see it. Let's see the video of them not doing voice in a studio, like every single voice recording ever has been done.

 

[The Rogue Wolf]

I'm willing to go into this with an open mind. No one I know wants this game to be good more than me.

I do! I do!

"And hopefully 15 years from now people will be talking about what they remember about this Thief, in comparison to the first Thief!"

Yeah, like how creative you were with the title.

At least they dropped "Thi4f". Maybe not for the right reasons, but still.

Eidos, I'm not at all impressed so far. Everything I've seen tells me that you've turned Thief into a stealth-based Call of Duty- all style and no substance. The Thief games (the first two, at least) weren't about "experience points" or quicktime events or "rampages"- they were about player choice, being given the freedom to approach an objective in a variety of ways, and dealing with problems that cropped up organically. (Deadly Shadows tried, in parts, but had the anchor of "Xbox development first" tied to its ankle.)

I'm not against bringing new players into the Thief-verse. But let's do it with an actual Thief game, and let them discover what made the previous iterations great, rather than just slapping the "Thief" name on a game that has only superficial ties to the series.

(And while we're here, Eidos, why the hell are you already selling preorders to the game on Steam? It's not out for four months yet!)

 

[1337mokro]

Any game that disables my knees loses immediately.

It's just an insane thing that basically tells me my motion is limited because the path I am "supposed" to walk down could be circumvented in 6 seconds if I could jump. "OMG! A FENCE! Must find a key to open the lock instead of jumping onto that box over there and onto a piece of jutting scenery and over it."

Whilst I don't think the game would be shit it certainly will not live up to the Thief name. Maybe a better version of Dark Shadows but it has got nothing on Thief 2.

At least it won't be Shitman Abomination, the only hitman game where you do exactly ONE contract.

 

[Korten12]

Whatever happened to Splinter Cell Blacklist? there was a whole pile of hype about how they were ruining it up until the game released and then... nothing. I never heard about it since. Did it disappoint, deliver, or was it just so damn forgettable that everyone just instantly purged it from their minds?

I haven't beaten Blacklist yet but it's pretty awesome. The multiplayer (Spies vs Mercs) is a lot of fun, and the single-player while not insanely open, still allows for you to play in a multitude of ways from completely ghosting to all out fire fight and your rewarded for both plays. Personally I have been playing through it with zero killing and not being spotted once on the second to hardest difficulty. It's pretty intense at times. Also I would say the levels are designed pretty well.

 

[IrenIvy]

Personally I have been playing through it with zero killing and not being spotted once on the second to hardest difficulty. It's pretty intense at times. Also I would say the levels are designed pretty well.

I never played Splinter Cell games before. What about story/world/characters?

 

[Psychobabble]

"And hopefully 15 years from now people will be talking about what they remember about this Thief, in comparison to the first Thief!"

Well sadly I'm thinking the brunt of the reminisces will be along the lines of "Hey, remember that cool stealth game franchise Thief? No not THAT one, the ones before they created that horrifying atrocity of a buttfucked reboot, and crashed the franchise into obscurity."

 

[Imbechile]

"And hopefully 15 years from now people will be talking about what they remember about this Thief, in comparison to the first Thief!"

Yeah, It's going to be remembered for a long time.

This will go in the history books as one of the biggest rapes of an old, beloved series.

 

[IrenIvy]

Personally I have been playing through it with zero killing and not being spotted once on the second to hardest difficulty. It's pretty intense at times. Also I would say the levels are designed pretty well.

I never played Splinter Cell games before. What about story/world/characters?

Have you read a Tom Clancy anything, or are familiar with a right-wing shut-in's paranoid "the whole world is out to get us and by us I mean me!" outlook on the world, that involves the US being king of the planet and everybody else totally after us? That's basically the world. The games are really only notable for their stealth-action gameplay. Otherwise they're pretty forgettable.

No, I haven't read anything like that although I'm familiar with this point of view in general. Thank you.

 

[Agayek]

I have never played a Thief game in my life, and don't have any stake or even real interest in the franchise, and even I can tell that the reboot looks like shit. It's an action game with a nominal stealth coating and absolutely nothing about it that will stand out as anything other than utterly bland and mediocre.

 

[Aiddon_v1legacy]

I have no experience with the Thief, so it's difficult for me to build expectations. If they make it essentially like Dishonored then I'm all for it. Hopefully they don't piss too many fans of though; convincing fans is fine, just don't antagonize them or say their criticisms are wrong.

 

[1337mokro]

Any game that disables my knees loses immediately.

It's just an insane thing that basically tells me my motion is limited because the path I am "supposed" to walk down could be circumvented in 6 seconds if I could jump. "OMG! A FENCE! Must find a key to open the lock instead of jumping onto that box over there and onto a piece of jutting scenery and over it."

Whilst I don't think the game would be shit it certainly will not live up to the Thief name. Maybe a better version of Dark Shadows but it has got nothing on Thief 2.

At least it won't be Shitman Abomination, the only hitman game where you do exactly ONE contract.

Remember, they made the most recent hitman game-- you know, the one that wasn't nearly as fun because it was much more of a linear corridor than the fun free-roaming figure-it-out-as-you-go game than the previous one? You know, the thing fans (and yahtzee (I don't know any fans)) have been complaining about being done to this series so far...

It can't be the same people simply because of the development schedules, maybe the same studio, given that most of these mega studios comprise like 800 people in separate teams working on multiple projects. It is confirmed that someone else is helming this game and you need to try and I mean REAAAAAAAAALY try hard to fuck up a game as hard as Shitman Abomination. No, that can only happen if the guy that invented the killer nuns would join the thief team.



I am expecting a Dishonoured clone with more stealing. Which will at least be entertaining for the 30 odd bucks I'll be spending on it.

 

[keserak]

I have no experience with the Thief, so it's difficult for me to build expectations. If they make it essentially like Dishonored then I'm all for it. Hopefully they don't piss too many fans of though; convincing fans is fine, just don't antagonize them or say their criticisms are wrong.

Thief will be a good game, maybe even a great game, a masterpiece even. I just want us to stop being so cynical about the future and instead look at it with cautious optimism, instead of letting some guy's comment of wanting fans to like the new game convince us that the new game is already dead on arrival.

No, Aiddon, that is the one thing that they, and their fanboys, will not do. You can see that here. Ironically enough, defenders of this sort of thing will project all of their negativity onto people they're claiming are being negative.

Again, the key problem here is that the company is lying. If the company is going to make a triple-A fps clusterfuck that handles like a fat, diseased buffalo and offers nothing but photorealistic gore with no plot, challenge, or engrossing theme, then they can totally do that.

But if they did that, and advertised it honestly, it would not sell.

That's the dirty secret. That's the Big Lie behind raping franchises, attacking used games, encouraging contempt for old-school fans, and on and on.

The industry is geared to create triple-A games. If a triple-A company can make better money by NOT doing this, it will, instead, do it anyway, and lie about it.

Why? Consider the cost of not doing so. You'd have to make deeper, richer games that meet consumer expectation. This would require a change in the nature of management.

Management doesn't make sacrifices for you. You make sacrifices for management.

Why should managers embrace the Real World? Why not live in a fantasy where they can pretend they can capture the CoD audience and the WoW audience and the GTA audience and every other acronym floating through their dreams? If they're wrong, they'll just blame the devs, fire them, and hire more. Why should they ever evaluate their strategies?

Most people here watch the Jimquisition. Why do you think management doesn't? Because they don't have to. Corporate America has its head up its own ass.

But that dog won't hunt. They make insipid triple-A garbage and they lose their core audience -- and fail to get much of a new audience as well. So what do you do?

Simple. You lie. You lie your ass off. You tell the customers that they'll get what they want. When the grassroots groundswell says "no, we won't get what we want, you're not giving it," you respond by telling them what they want and that it's really just a variation of what they always wanted.

Problem is, this sort of thing breeds contempt. And passive-aggressiveness. And we're all sick of it. Worse, trolls come out and criticize the customer for Not Liking What I Like, dishonestly claiming that a customer who has been mislead by a publisher is to blame for that publisher's bad products.

So it's not the bad games. If Thief -- seriously, if you can't come up with a title, you should not be making games -- if Thief is terrible, that's a pointless tragedy. . . but the market will deal with that fairly by making its sales low. The problem is the hype around it will be noxious misinformation, as usual, and when customers complain about that and reject the game, there will be a social backlash against them.

Devs can feel free to make whatever game they like -- e.g., whatever game the publisher demands they make. But be honest about it. If you're making a Dishonored clone that has so little to do with Thief that it doesn't even count as being in the same genre, that's fine -- so long as you don't obfuscate. Don't piss on my leg and call it rain.

 

[piinyouri]

I'm still of an open enough mind to give this a shot a couple of years down the road when it's cheaper.

 

[Nazulu]

This is just cop-out crap. I hear this all the time when they make changes to appeal to a 'wider audience'. I'm not even a fan of Thief and I still say their a bunch of dicks. In fact, anyone who names a new release with the same title as the original deserves to go bankrupt. "Wait till launch", pffft. Yeah, when all is said and done. When a pile of shit is carved into stone.

 

[DarkhoIlow]

Let me start with this on this particular topic: I haven't played the first two Thief games because I was only in my baby days when it got released, but I did play Thief 3 after a few years and enjoyed it quite a lot. I played primarily in the third person, but I found the first person view as well was very immersive.


I am very skeptic about this new game/remake/whatever you may call it. From the footage that I have seen the game looks very mainstreamed in my eyes.

On the flip side, I will play it regardless then judge because "Hey, it's a Thief game finally!" then we can bash them all we want if it's going to be needed.