Comments on: Thoughts: Thief.

By: pobbles

pobbles — Sat, 05 Apr 2014 19:57:23 +0000

Thief 2 has far, far less undead. If that was a problem.

By: Hentzau

Hentzau — Thu, 06 Mar 2014 18:53:27 +0000

The thing is, right, the customisable difficulty settings are nice, but they’ll be used by maybe 5% of the people who play Thief. The other 95% still have to put up with Garrett the rag and bone man, carting away any old junk from a crime scene because it’s the only way he can make any money. A master thief he is most definitely not.

(There was actually a trivial fix to the problem, too. Keep prices the same as they are, multiply all loot values by 10, and put in some form of money sink that has no point other than prestige. For example Tropico had an option to funnel 10% of all your income to your offshore bank account, which had absolutely no in-game benefit but which increased your score at the end of the game. Something like that.)

By: Hentzau

Hentzau — Thu, 06 Mar 2014 18:48:06 +0000

I’ve seen it. I can’t unsee it.

By: Gap Gen

Gap Gen — Tue, 04 Mar 2014 08:39:16 +0000

In that first shot, is Garret just an egg with heavy eye shadow attached to a torso?

By: Ninja Foodstuff

Ninja Foodstuff — Tue, 04 Mar 2014 08:16:04 +0000

Oh man I wish you’d get pre-release copies of games you review. Absolutely none of the reviews I read prior to buying the damn thing mentioned any of this, particularly that the simple act of theft is no fun in the game (instead they fixated on how great the customisable difficulty settings were).
Well, I can console myself that having not played any other thief games I won’t have such a bad time of it. Although like Darren I still need to complete Dishonored+DLC first (having just had exactly the same experience you mentioned in your review, where you could spot the plot twist coming a mile off, and wonder why Corvo couldn’t. It’s the exact same plot twist as used in Metro: Last Light too).

By: Harmen

Harmen — Mon, 03 Mar 2014 22:47:43 +0000

I tried the original Thief, but it was just too scary

You are reviewing a lot of games recently!

By: innokenti

innokenti — Mon, 03 Mar 2014 14:21:13 +0000

I think the most annoying thing I’ve found so far is the lack of reward for exploration and thievery. Big shiny loot items should be significantly more valuable than the common loot you find around, and medium ones should also at least make it worth the effort of going there.

I’d be fine if the game didn’t shower you with loot along the common track – but expending rope-arrows and doing a bit of acrobatics and exploration should be appropriately rewarding you with the big bucks.

The fact that it doesn’t takes a big chunk of the fun of thieving away.

As you say, the actual stealthing is generally sound, and I think I could get on with this game as a sort of nice little filler if it didn’t damn well randomly crash every 20 minutes.

(Shows no sign of any problems on High graphics settings, but whether I have them high or low, it just crashes about 20 minutes in, I’ve tried even updating the graphics drivers to the AMD Beta ones… but nothing. Boo. Hiss.)

By: Aleksei Volchok

Aleksei Volchok — Mon, 03 Mar 2014 13:56:44 +0000

>I *will* say that Thief’s plot was utter bollocks up to and including that point

Well, at least you didn’t get to the part where it felt like the game has skipped some cutscenes (we were just standing face to face in the end of the cutscene, why am I suddenly on another side of room?) and haven’t seen how various story lines met with the consistency of Old Spice ad and Gainax ending.

Making stealing boring and not profitable is what ruins exploring and side-quests. Linear mission design and story makes you suffer for just playing the game.

By: Hentzau

Hentzau — Mon, 03 Mar 2014 13:42:51 +0000

I don’t want to be one of those people who says “You should really play that game that I’m viewing through the rose-tinted glasses of nostalgia, it was awesome!” but please do try at least the first two Thiefs at some point. As for this Thief, I did try to go into it with an open mind but even so it disappointed me. It’s just not very good, and as you’ve said there’s better stealth experiences to spend your time on.

By: Hentzau

Hentzau — Mon, 03 Mar 2014 13:37:29 +0000

While it’s Eidos Montreal who are responsible for Thief, the studio is made up of about 350 people and it’s not the same internal team who made Human Revolution.

And I don’t mention the plot because I encountered my game-ending bug towards the end of Chapter Six, and I’m leery of damning a plot that I’ve only gotten two thirds of the way through ever since the Bureau, which was apparently precisely the point where it started to get interesting. I *will* say that Thief’s plot was utter bollocks up to and including that point, and it would not surprise me at all if it was utter bollocks all the way through to the end. For a game that seems like it’s been welded together out of spare parts left over from aborted development cycles it’s to be expected that the story would be nonsensical; the complete misunderstanding of what made stealing things so satisfying in the original games was in my eyes a far graver error.