Thi4f becomes plain old Thief, reboot coming in 2014

[sze5003]

Because no one cares about the sites that you listed.

I actually care about review sites like joystiq, game informer more than I would normally care about a site like Arabian gamers or some other site I've never heard of lol

 

[JumBie]

I actually care about review sites like joystiq, game informer more than I would normally care about a site like Arabian gamers or some other site I've never heard of lol

Sadly, due to youtube, and social media the only reviews that count in NA are IGN, GAMESPOT, REV3, POLYGON, EUROGAMER anything outside of that the amount of people are exponentially smaller than those 5. And I'd be in Europe its much of the same.

 

[sxr7171]

Does anyone know what time the preload will unlock?

 

[cmdrdredd]

Because no one cares about the sites that you listed.

No, it's just that half of the so called gamers that post on the internet hate anything that isn't a 9 or at the least an 8. If it's less than an 8 it's considered garbage by them. That's the state of things today and it's terrible. I've played some great games that were reviewed poorly.

 

[JumBie]

Wrong...you just hate anything that doesn't get a 9 like half the other so called gamers that post on the internet these days.

No I just hate crap games, I am a realest. It takes far more than to impress me than it does to impress the average consumer. What some might call a 9/10 I call a 6/10. I am not afraid to call a game out for its faults and hold it accountable for it. Many people let too many critical things slide, not to mention the fact that they hold the lowest set of expectations towards games.

 

[cmdrdredd]

No I just hate crap games, I am a realest. It takes far more than to impress me than it does to impress the average consumer. What some might call a 9/10 I call a 6/10. I am not afraid to call a game out for its faults and hold it accountable for it. Many people let too many critical things slide, not to mention the fact that they hold the lowest set of expectations towards games.

um...ok...


so again anything less than a 9 is considered garbage to you. Boy you must hate gaming at all...wonder why you even bother.

 

[PrincessFrosty]

In all fairness a lot of people seem to agree that review scores are often inflated, we've reached this AAA review system where by everything is almost automatically granted 80% or above for just being a AAA game and then it's just a case of how high into the 90% range you can get with titles fighting over 95-98% scores like CoD despite being just rehashed rubbish.

I certianly don't think that anything below 90% is rubbish but I would say that if a AAA game isn't making a solid 80% average these days it's probably not very good.

See this illustration commonly referred to by gamers as a good example - http://i23.photobucket.com/albums/b378/omarfw123/13151596601392.png

Thief fans suffer it worse in this case because of the dumbing down of games since the original Thief games, even if Thief did get a 95% average score it still probably wouldn't be even close to how good the earlier titles were simply because you can be a dumbed down game for the mass market (read casuals) and still score a 95%

Much of the review and user bashing is not just because Thief is objectively a mediocre game at best by today standards (just it's objecive technical issues drag it down to at least that), but it's also because it fundamentally detracts from the original Thief experience as almost modern remakes of classics do, dumbed down for the casuals.

In fact these things aren't just out of alignment, they're pretty much at odds, if you made a game like the original Thief today it could hypothetically look amazing, get amazing frame rates and be completely bug free, but idiots with controllers and no real ability to think for themselves in the game space would struggle immensly with the mechanics of a more complex world like Thief 1 and 2 throw you in to, so I suspect they'd suffer their review scores for that.

It's extremely common among older gamers like myself to really not rely on review scores too heavily, I mean games like CoD routinely score high 90's yet are complete garbage reskinned over and over for that mass market appeal and reviewers have become about matching game scores not against quality but against market appeal, so I tend to deduct a good 20% off most modern AAA games as good measure, that puts Thief a solid 4/10 for me which given what I've seen so far, looks accurate to my calibration.

 

[cmdrdredd]

I'll be honest...I think people who hail older games as being superior because games are dumbed down today are full of shit. Gaming is higher quality by far today than it was back in the day. There is far less random garbage on the shelf than there was in years past. There is no shortage of information, videos, and all that to keep a developer honest than there was before. You can't just put a cool box on the shelf with a turd of a game that barely works anymore. You have to actually have something there. The terrible game to good game ratio is lower now than it was back in the 90s for sure.

Everyone brings up CoD but they fail to realize that a ton of people still don't play CoD year after year. So what if it sells a billion copies on xbox? That doesn't affect the quality of other games and I seriously want to know at what point it was decided that games that don't get high scores are bad games. They aren't all bad games. I don't believe reviews are inflated, I just think that certain reviewers bring their personal bias into it. That's why I look at more than just a couple, and I don't follow no name sites either.

Also, if a reviewer thinks that CoD is the best online shooter right now I expect them to review it as such and give it a good score. Averaging a 7/10 isn't bad...it's just perceived as being bad and for what reason I don't know.

 

[JumBie]

um...ok...


so again anything less than a 9 is considered garbage to you. Boy you must hate gaming at all...wonder why you even bother.

Again, by your logic. This would make you the type of gamer that says anything above a score of 6 is a great game that deserves your money. Right? Is that correct, or do we both sound like idiots.

I don't even want to base how I feel about games on scores. Thief for example, I base on what I see. And what I saw was mediocre, for a reboot of the franchise, especially considering this is 2014. Regardless, I don't care about what other reviewers have to say on those other sites. I go to the mainstream sites like IGN, Gamespot etc... I look at what they have to say, and I base my prejudgement with my new found judgement and mix it in with what I have seen and heard. Most of the time this works in my favor.

When a modern game comes out and boast all of its innovative and new features and how well it does them, it better friggen live up to that hype. The reason many new games get shitty scores from the media or from users, is because they can never fulfill what they say. Thief is mediocre at best, nothing new, nothing great, just a game someone can play and have some fun with. Nothing wrong with that, if you can have fun with a game then based on that factor alone its worth it. But is this game worth the money for what it claims to be? In my opinion, no.

 

[cmdrdredd]

Again, by your logic. This would make you the type of gamer that says anything above a score of 6 is a great game that deserves your money. Right? Is that correct, or do we both sound like idiots.

I don't even want to base how I feel about games on scores. Thief for example, I base on what I see. And what I saw was mediocre, for a reboot of the franchise, especially considering this is 2014. Regardless, I don't care about what other reviewers have to say on those other sites. I go to the mainstream sites like IGN, Gamespot etc... I look at what they have to say, and I base my prejudgement with my new found judgement and mix it in with what I have seen and heard. Most of the time this works in my favor.

When a modern game comes out and boast all of its innovative and new features and how well it does them, it better friggen live up to that hype. The reason many new games get shitty scores from the media or from users, is because they can never fulfill what they say. Thief is mediocre at best, nothing new, nothing great, just a game someone can play and have some fun with. Nothing wrong with that, if you can have fun with a game then based on that factor alone its worth it. But is this game worth the money for what it claims to be? In my opinion, no.

I never mentioned an arbitrary number...you did so all your other stuff talking about scores is meaningless to me. There's some positive reviews, and the major sites are giving it an average of 70/100 currently which isn't bad. Look at metacritic for example, IGN Italy scored it as 89 but the US site gives it 68. Other sites even gave it a 90. This seems like a game you either give a chance and like it or just don't. I've seen reviewers give a game a bad score because they kept whining throughout the whole review that "the game is too hard". So looking at no-name sites with no history of game reviews...I cannot trust.

I think gamers today are simply spoiled by the number of quality games compared to the cesspool of trash I had to wade through way back when. I wasted money on some real stinkers.

 

[sxr7171]

These days I think you have to make up your own mind. And with playable demos a thing of the past that's harder than it used to be.

So for me I just wait until it hits $30 or less. Most games have some redeeming feature or another. And yeah I do end up with games that I paid $30 for that I don't play more than one level.

With Thief it was $45 minus $5 at Amazon. So $40 isn't bad for a first day release in what currently is kind of a gaming drought period. All I care about is that it's fun. Just like watching a movie there is an element of suspension of disbelief. The AI will never be perfect and it will never please everybody.

Hitman Absolution had issues which fans of the series talked about, but it was fun. The Shangri-la level was really cool. There were some fun ways to take out targets.

I hope this game is fun and doesn't take itself too seriously.

 

[thedosbox]

Also, RPS - which doesn't use a scoring system - spoke quite positively of the game.

And it's one of the reasons why I read them and ignore any site that uses a scoring system. Trying to boil down a game to a number is ridiculous when taste is purely subjective.

This basically sounds like a poor "Thief" game, but a potentially fun "Stealth" game. Worth a punt on the GMG sale.

 

[motsm]

This basically sounds like a poor "Thief" game, but a potentially fun "Stealth" game.

If it was a few reviews here and there I'd say that could be the case, but it was given low scores by most of the mainstream press. Sites like IGN and Gamespot know their target demo, so they aren't basing their review scores on a game from 1998.

 

[thedosbox]

Sites like IGN and Gamespot know their target demo, so they aren't basing their review scores on a game from 1998.

I'm obviously not in that demographic as they cater to console gamers. More importantly, they assign scores to games, so are an automatic "no read" for me.

[edit]LOL - having said that, I checked out IGN and they had this buried in the middle:

Stealth is where Thief works best. It’s tough but fair, and gives you breathing room to avoid detection when you keep to the shadows. The impressive lighting makes it almost believable that sometimes you can get close enough to a guard to steal the boogers from his nose undetected.

Just goes to reinforce my belief that scores in reviews are meaningless.

 

[TheSlamma]

No I just hate crap games, I am a realest. It takes far more than to impress me than it does to impress the average consumer. What some might call a 9/10 I call a 6/10. I am not afraid to call a game out for its faults and hold it accountable for it. Many people let too many critical things slide, not to mention the fact that they hold the lowest set of expectations towards games.

That is not a realist, realists understand that life is not utopian and that games are for entertainment programmed by flawed humans.

 

[cmdrdredd]

I'm obviously not in that demographic as they cater to console gamers. More importantly, they assign scores to games, so are an automatic "no read" for me.

[edit]LOL - having said that, I checked out IGN and they had this buried in the middle:



Just goes to reinforce my belief that scores in reviews are meaningless.

I use them as a base reference. If everyone says a game is a 8.5 then it'll probably be a pretty good game provided it's in a genre I like. If it gets some mixed reviews I have to dig deeper to find out more about the game. In either case I don't find the score to always reflect on the quality of a game. So I have to read what people actually say about it like you said. I've seen some reviews where someone bashes the game pretty hard in many areas yet assigns it a very high score. It's like he wrote those words but didn't mean them. I've seen it the other way too where a game is praised highly in the review then stuck with a 7/10 and you would have thought based on the wording that it was a 9 for them. I don't know sometimes where the numbers come from.

 

[thedosbox]

So I have to read what people actually say about it like you said. I've seen some reviews where someone bashes the game pretty hard in many areas yet assigns it a very high score. It's like he wrote those words but didn't mean them. I've seen it the other way too where a game is praised highly in the review then stuck with a 7/10 and you would have thought based on the wording that it was a 9 for them. I don't know sometimes where the numbers come from.

Right, so why put a score on there in the first place? Other than being click bait for the "OMG, how did that score X" crowd (aka people who treat metacritic as if it's definitive).

 

[PrincessFrosty]

I'll be honest...I think people who hail older games as being superior because games are dumbed down today are full of shit. Gaming is higher quality by far today than it was back in the day.

Higher quality in terms of graphics and sound but way lower in terms of actual game play, comparing the original Thief games to the reboot is a classic example of this.

The new Thief is just a on rails rollercoaster which resembles the original Thief, it's like a fairground ride you're barely expected to participate in, if you knew anything about the depth and complexity of the original games and compared them to the new Thief you'd immediately "get" the difference and understand why people throw around terms like "dumbed down". This is the very definition of casaual.

Everyone brings up CoD but they fail to realize that a ton of people still don't play CoD year after year. So what if it sells a billion copies on xbox? That doesn't affect the quality of other games

Hahahaha, you what? Except every other AAA mainstream title tries to copy CoDs success by doing something like - ohhh wait for it - Adding XP floating out peoples heads for headshots, we'd never see anything like that in Thi- oh wait that was almost included but it was only through the sheer weight of fan outrage that it was removed at the last minute.

When people compare things to CoD they're basically saying that the game has becomed dumbed down in exchange for mass market appeal, it needs to be simple and straightfroward enough to both appeal to and satsfy casual gamers which kills and hope of complex gameplay, its exactly what happened to Thief.

 

[Sulaco]

I'll be honest...I think people who hail older games as being superior because games are dumbed down today are full of shit. Gaming is higher quality by far today than it was back in the day.

Gaming has certainly made great strides in certain areas, and many genres and IPs have come a long way and seen tremendous improvements.
Indisputably however, many have not. Many have either stagnated, or in an attempt to broaden their appeal, taken steps back. If those particular games or genres don't interest you or you don't play them, you might not notice or care. But please refrain from making nonsensical sweeping generalizations of people's opinions that can very easily be substantiated.

I'm not going to judge the new Thief title until I play it. But as a fan of the series from inception, bullshit cutscenes, QTE segments, and voice acting are not going to cut it. The original series was a masterwork of atmosphere and tension, and obviously a pioneer of the entire genre. I can forgive potentially clunky controls and technical shortcomings, but the design decisions and focus of the game is where the game for fans will ultimately sink or swim.

 

[BSim500]

Agree 100% with "Princess Frosty" & "Sulaco". Modern games look better, but half of the "more complex gameplay features" added - stuff like button mashing Quick Time Events, heavily scripted "railroad" hand-holding (for a "better cinematic experience"), unskippable cutscenes (both traditional and "micro-cutscenes"), reusing the same key for "contextual actions" (SPACE = climb / jump / swoop, etc), treating people like dribbling idiots with giant "quest markers" pointing out the obvious, unnatural looking over the top "head bob", random 1st <> 3rd person camera switching, etc, is precisely what people liked the lack of in older games...

I re-play a ton of old games still and whilst I agree the older engines are technically inferior, they had a certain "feel" to them that just "clicked" within the first few minutes of gameplay. Any frustrations after that were usually down to coding bugs that got patched out, not intentional sacrificial "design decisions" targeting a "broader appeal".

I think the problem with Thief 4 is that it'll never really have the same "feel" as the Looking Glass Studio's games (neither will a System Shock 3) no matter what it does. They did a pretty good "damage control" job with Deus Ex HR after the utter joke that was DX:IW, but the fact they were still seriously considering "XP Headshots" in "NuThief" at one point showed that at least some of the devs really didn't understand what the franchise was about, and simply went through every other modern game looking for popular gimmicks to "throw into the pot".

I'm on the fence over Thief 4. They did seem to go to great lengths to appease PC gamers with highly configurable options (best seen in Total Biscuit's good review), OTOH, that doesn't solve the linearity, claustrophobic excessive loading screens (remember the absurd "blue fog" in Thief 3 to try and hide the fact the game had been dumbed down and 80% shrunk to fit the XBox's 64MB RAM vs "Life of the Party" in Thief 2?) or "dumb AI" issues...

PS: Does anyone else find the "permanently outstretched arms" thing highly distracting in Thief4? It's like a damn zombie simulator...

 

[PrincessFrosty]

Agree 100% with "Princess Frosty" & "Sulaco". Modern games look better, but half of the "more complex gameplay features" added - stuff like button mashing Quick Time Events, heavily scripted "railroad" hand-holding (for a "better cinematic experience"), unskippable cutscenes (both traditional and "micro-cutscenes"), reusing the same key for "contextual actions" (SPACE = climb / jump / swoop, etc), treating people like dribbling idiots with giant "quest markers" pointing out the obvious, unnatural looking over the top "head bob", random 1st <> 3rd person camera switching, etc, is precisely what people liked the lack of in older games...

Bingo. Great points, things like jump being removed and replacing it with what is essentially a scripted jump sequence that you can't fail is a testament to just how much skill (and therefore reward) has been removed from modern games like NuThief.

Literally you cannot jump at all, if there's a gap between ledges either you can make it, in w hich case it alows you to use an action button to do a precanned jump that of course can't miss its target.

You can't fall off ledges so there's no sense of jumping too late, you just come to a stop at the edge of the ledge. If you can't make the jump (i.e there's no scripted jump at that point) then it simply wont let you leap between the ledges, or even fall off.

It's the very epitome of hand holding, even when you pickpocket guards you don't have to worry about positioning, you simply hold a key and your character is dragged behind them automatically to keep focus in the right place. Pickpocket them at the wrong time like when they're about to 180 and spot you, well it doens't matter NuThief will literally stay behind them as they rotate, all automatically.

Press X to win, basically.

 

[cmdrdredd]

Gaming has certainly made great strides in certain areas, and many genres and IPs have come a long way and seen tremendous improvements.
Indisputably however, many have not. Many have either stagnated, or in an attempt to broaden their appeal, taken steps back. If those particular games or genres don't interest you or you don't play them, you might not notice or care. But please refrain from making nonsensical sweeping generalizations of people's opinions that can very easily be substantiated.

I'm not going to judge the new Thief title until I play it. But as a fan of the series from inception, bullshit cutscenes, QTE segments, and voice acting are not going to cut it. The original series was a masterwork of atmosphere and tension, and obviously a pioneer of the entire genre. I can forgive potentially clunky controls and technical shortcomings, but the design decisions and focus of the game is where the game for fans will ultimately sink or swim.

So what your saying is that when they make a game that is a sequel to or uses the same name as an older game they aren't allowed to add anything that is considered standard in the industry today? Seriously...voice acting?? You complain they gave the characters voices?

You guys sound just like the butthurt console guys who can't get over the fact that jrpgs dont sell like they used to so you aren't going to get a thousand of them. Gaming has changed and you need to change with it or you may as well just quit now. Blame whatever you want but I blame people who always bash today's games as terrible and bring up the inevitable comparisons with old games for not adjusting with the industry. You dont have to like everything but always saying "but back when I played game X nothing like this existed and nobody talked, they didn't have such things as movies" really is stupid to me.

Gamers often complain for the sake of complaining. Just dont forget that the developers dont work for you and aren't there to be your best buddy. They want to make money for the publisher to get the funding for the next project.

I also agree with most of this article on the top things gamers complain about. Many of them fit right here in this thread. http://poweranks.com/blog/five-trends-that-gamers-complain-about-too-much

 

[EDUSAN]

yesterday i saw the totalbiscuit video of it. I was shocked at the part in which he said that the new thief doesnt have the rope arrow that the old thief had to produce new paths.

I mean... it is kinda unaceptable that a 10years old game was more open in its small spaces than a brand new game with huge open places

im probably gonna pick it up eventually cause the game doesnt look bad, but its a pity

 

[sze5003]

I don't get so many people's expectations. If you don't like a game you don't play it. Its your right to be disappointed. I've never played the older games but even if I had, it doesn't sound like I would really know how to play it the way you guys talk about it. I've played pretty much most of the splinter cell games, some dishonored, and from streams this game reminds me of dishonored minus the special powers.

I'll make my own opinion of it when I get it today. If I don't like it best buy will give me $40 bucks for it. Im paying 50 for it anyway.

Shenmue 2 wasnt as great as the first, I still enjoyed it quite a bit. They are games solely to entertain and I don't expect more than that. If the story sucks or the game play is annoying then I won't like it.

I mean its a stealth stealing game. All you do is go around sneaking and pilfering. If they took the qte out and maybe enhance the AI with a patch, it still doesn't change the gameplay. You still are going to have to sneak around unnoticed. So what if you can easily take out a guard, more than one and you won't last very long.

 

[TheSlamma]

I'll be honest...I think people who hail older games as being superior because games are dumbed down today are full of shit. Gaming is higher quality by far today than it was back in the day.

Back in the day games were fully completed before they were released as there was no internet to get patches from. Now what we have is games like BF4 which kill it's own user base because it's released in such a bugged state.

There is far less random garbage on the shelf than there was in years past. There is no shortage of information, videos, and all that to keep a developer honest than there was before. You can't just put a cool box on the shelf with a turd of a game that barely works anymore. You have to actually have something there. The terrible game to good game ratio is lower now than it was back in the 90s for sure.

Another unfounded argument, Steam greenlight and indy section is PACKED with games with hardly any recommendations. Back in the 90's games took up shelf space in small software stores, there wasn't even the physical room to be more junk as you are stating, just cause now it's in digital space you can't SEE doesn't mean there isn't more.. and my gawd there is some JUNK!