rpanonmod ([personal profile] rpanonmod) wrote in [community profile] rpanons2014-03-29 09:56 pm

Okay

Rundown: [community profile] rpanons is an anonymous community for role-play related topics. This place serves as a forum for game discussions, canon discussions, RP solicitations (ATP, game ads, open memes), and advice. The occasional off topic comment is inevitable, but please keep heated social and political topics to their respective communities. Posting them here will only get them frozen. Subsequent threads made to bypass a freeze will then be deleted.

Rules:

Do not post pornographic or shocking images.
Do not share private entries, plurks, chat logs, etc.
Do not use this community as your social/political/hatespeech soapbox.
Do not be redundant. One page does not need three or more threads on one topic/theme.
Do not treat this comm like your personal Plurk or Twitter. Off-topic happens, but it should be open for discussion and not just a play-by-play of your life. No one cares.


CONCERNS | RESOURCES


Navigate:

LATEST PAGE | GAME DISCUSSIONS | CANON DISCUSSIONS | HTML/GRAPHIC HELP

ATP/ENABLE ME | GAME ADVERTISEMENTS | PB SUGGESTIONS | USERNAME SUGGESTIONS

GAME IDEAS | CHARACTER ADVICE | RP WITH ME

Re: THIEF

(Anonymous) 2014-03-30 08:18 pm (UTC)(link)
this is exactly what i was afraid of when i saw Thief was getting a reboot... i'm a crazy huge fan of the first two games, the third one was kinda crap to me but it was okay, and with this one i was really hoping it would go back to its roots... only... with better graphics, i guess. too much to ask for apparently :(

i'll probably play it, or at least watch a playthrough, eventually, but it's such a shame that they couldn't keep the old sparkle going.

da

(Anonymous) 2014-03-30 09:32 pm (UTC)(link)
i think the issue is the developers were too afraid to try to keep it like the original two, aka the ones that gathered the biggest fanbase. because those games were, and still are, incredibly unique experiences. they're slow-burn, true stealth. and in the current game market, the most popular games tend to be very loud, very showy, very actiony.

it was a mistake to try to blend those two genres. while i don't exactly blame them for trying to "update" thief and make it "cool and current" i really wish they... hadn't. it suffers as an incredibly mediocre, forgettable game and i honestly think the series deserved more than that.

so while i'm not bitter at anyone who did like it, i'm quite sad that the game itself is fairly crappy.

(Anonymous) 2014-03-30 11:01 pm (UTC)(link)
I think you've gotten it partly right, but a big thing is that they simply couldn't make a game "like the old ones".

Changing your game to appeal to the mass market is one part of it, but the fact is that the development environment of 2014 is very different from that of 1998. Modern games have to be streamlined and accessible or they'll be rejected by the market. Gone are the days where key information was in the instruction manual: now in-game tutorials and hand-holding is the standard. Games in 1998 were more concerned about creating worlds (and all of the annoying realism that goes with them); 2014 games are more about being forms of entertainment.

It is entirely possible to update a game to modern standards while also keeping the original appeal. Dishonored arguably made for a better Thief reboot than the actual Thief reboot. Deus Ex: Human Revolution was also an amazing example of creating a modern instalment of a stealth game that is true to the original while blowing out all of the cobwebs.

tl;dr don't say "they shouldn't have tried to update it", say "they should have tried to update it well".

It's also a high-profile reboot of a classic title, so executive meddling and development hell was almost certainly involved at points. That, more than anything else, is probably what's responsible for Garrett's muddled personality. Far be it for me to start listing all of the things that they could have or should have done without knowing the details and circumstances of the development process. Personally I would have made it more like an open-world game ala Assassin's Creed and allowed you to break into as many NPC homes as possible, but who knows how much that would have cost in money and manpower.