Used correctly, it can give you more realistic (diffused) lighting, view distannce, and specific lighting effects. Used incorrectly, you get completely unrealistic lighting, you get some blur-o-vision, and it can greatly affect your performance in a negative way.

Not having much to play these days,
Ray


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http://www.thief3.org/
http://users.ign.com/collection/RayMarden
http://www.guzzlefish.com/collection.php?username=ray_marden
I love you, mom.

I have a dumb question... What exactly is this "bloom" thing? I keep seeing people refer to it, and all I've been able to glean is that it makes the graphics look worse and run slower. I've never read an explanation for what it is, why it's there, and what it's supposed to achieve...? Could someone possibly point me at an explanation? For some reason Google is more inclined to tell me about guys called Orlando...

I don't know how much it costs to develop a game these days, but I'm sure the budget for these two titles is well into the millions. I can't believe actually saying this, but appealing to a bigger fan base can be a good thing.

DX:IW didn't appeal to a bigger fanbase. It appealed to the fanbase of "I like to play crap". I am much more excited about this game after reading the preview at IGN. Now granted the textures don't look the sharpest, but this is due to bloom, or a mildly dated graphics style (Something the series is known for). Lets just cross our fingers (I hope the first mission and training session come as a demo. The first two games had great demos and this game should be no exception).

Actually, that is a common misconception that Thief and Thief II sold poorly, just because the series was never extremely popular. It was a rather niche game, especially back then.


In actuality though, the Thief series sold quite well, and did good business for Looking Glass. It was one of the few things that kept them afloat for as long as they were.

I don't know how many copies Thief or Thief 2 sold, but I'm sure it wasn't enough to break even. Of course they're going to make changes to make the game appeal to a broader base because there aren't enough "hardcore" fans to make it worth their while otherwise. Besides, 80 percent of the people who really enjoyed the first two will buy the game eventually, no matter how much they whine about it. It makes sense.
Besides, I don't see why everyone is complaining so much. The game will be good enough. Here's an idea to all the whiners: if you're not utterly astounded by the game, FIND SOMETHING ELSE TO DO!

Returning to the topic at hand: skepticism in the new Thief title is well warranted. All indications point to a style of gameplay departing significantly from its predecessors, which fanboys really have no right to complain about. Seriously, no developer has any obligation to make a game to satisfy followers of their previous efforts.

Huh? If you're making a sequel, why piss off your fanbase? From a business point of view that would be utterly stupid! Your fans are like money in the bank - you KNOW they're going to buy your next title... the problem is walking the fine line between adding features that please current fans, and adding features that will attract new ones. Coop would be a good example of this. By adding features your fans are asking for, THIS HELPS GUARANTEE THE SUCCESS OF YOUR GAME! It shows that you are listening to your fans, and happy fans are ones that will help market your product. Yes a game has to be designed with coop in mind, but with so many people asking for it, why not try to add it as a feature? Are people in business to sell games, or not?

---------------------------------------------
"There's so much comedy on television. Does that cause comedy in the streets?" -- Dick Cavett
mocking the TV-violence debate

Yay! I read the ign preview, and wow, take a look at this shot http://media.pc.ign.com/media/015/015244/img_2092274.html?fromint=1

This definately does not look like suck !

You dont differentiate between the different EA offices, San Francisco, Vancouver, Austrailia...no

Oh so the team that made Madden '04 also made Battlefield: Vietnam? The team that made Far Cry also made Splinter Cell? The team that made Half-Life also made SWAT 3 and Tribes?

Give me a fucking break, if somewhere out there on the internet there is another Dagok proclaiming that Ion Storm is the greatest developer the world has ever seen should I associate that with you?

If only it were so easy as tweaking an INI or two. We'd have a new game hitting shelves every other day.

Multiplayer takes a lot of work to pull off. Coop multiplayer is a real beast to work out. The entire game has to be designed around it. Serious Sam-type titles dont matter: they're just fragfests (not a bad thing, of course, but not the only thing either). Heavily scripted games (Half Life, Far Cry, etc.) need to be specifically designed around the multiplayer experience for that sort of thing to work. Or, you can just cheat a la Halo, and warp players together whenever they stray too far apart from one another.

The PS2 port of Half Life offers a good glimpse of how a coop campaign can take full advantage of using two players working as a team (as opposed to Halo's cheesedick solution). Its coop campaign has some flaws, surely, but it's a blast, and much more involving than Halo's coop. If it hadn't popped up quietly in the console port of a five-year-old game, it'd probably have set a new standard within the industry.

Simple DM multi is a lot easier, but Far Cry is a good example of how a game designed specifically with the one-man experience in mind can easily fail in this area. Forget Far Cry's cumbersome multiplayer interface and worthless netcode; the gameplay was focused on a single player and doesn't lend itself well to DM or CTF.

Returning to the topic at hand: skepticism in the new Thief title is well warranted. All indications point to a style of gameplay departing significantly from its predecessors, which fanboys really have no right to complain about. Seriously, no developer has any obligation to make a game to satisfy followers of their previous efforts.

But more importantly, the game is utilizing an engine that is well known to be fucked to the point of unplayability. In order to make any game on IW's engine enjoyable, that engine would need to be overhauled to such a degree that you might as well just scrap it and start from ground zero. But they haven't. So unless this engine turns out to be an extreme example of a diamond in the very, very fucking rough, Thief 3 will be filth unworthy of even Microsoft's ugly black box.

The only major thing I would want in a Thief game would be multiplayer and well they say it's to hard and such. But somehow a team in Europe can take the UT engine and build a game like Thievery for free and have great MP - head to head, co-op the works. Thief 3 is already under performing in my book just looking over it's feature set.

I'll be skeptical to start with that's for sure and a year ago it was one of those games where you could feel safe buying immediately without any reviews. One game changed all of that! DE:2 has me on ultra watch-out alert from Ion storm, for all the “He’s a game play God” that was so below average he has lost all confidence with me. Worse release of a game ever imo, they couldn't spend 15 minutes with some ini files to make it work batter as a PC game. WTF?

It had the feel of them going out of their way to make sure the PC game sucked and blowed at the same time.

I'm also thought the Anachronox game was good.

This comment was edited on May 2, 12:14.

Anachronox is obviously debatable, since every game is subject to opinion on how good/bad it is. It obviously wasn't good enough for people to word to spread that it was worth the money to buy it, so people that liked it are in the minority. Concidering it could be compared to Final Fantasy, it paled in comparison.

The number of games not "good enough for people to word to spread" is legion, and btw the first Deus Ex is on that list. (so does the first Thief).

Anachronox kicked ass. It's comparisons to FF completely ignore the creativity and humor of that title. It's slogan should have been "come for the RPG, stay for machinima." I think you can play it for like, a quarter, on Yahoo's GamesOnDemand, and it's a fun little ride.

Yet they both share the same engine with its same limitations, and the same grotesque platform "parity" development paradigm. What's more troubling to me is that Randy Smith left the game well before it finished adding fuel to all the speculation about dissent within ISA.

Anyway at least with Thief there is less to stuff up given the relative simplicity of the gameplay...

This comment was edited on May 2, 10:07.

> And the whole thing about ThiefS is that it was developed
> concurrently with DX:IW [...]
> So, considering it was/is being done by the same people

Not really true. DXIW and T3 had separate dev teams (this is why they were able to develop the games concurrently). Some people at ISA would definitely have worked on both titles, especially given that they share a lot of technology, and I read that a number of DXIW team members migrated to the Thief team to help them get it completed after DXIW was released, but I believe that the design work for each title, along with the bulk of the development, would have been carried out by quite distinct sets of people.

This comment was edited on May 2, 09:43.

> You don't differentiate between Blizzard South and Blizzard North do you?

You do if you know that they're different and Blizzard makes it clear which of their development teams is behind a given game. Your point seems to be that we (the public) generally don't know who really made a game. This may well be true, but I strongly dispute the implication that we wouldn't care even if we did know.

> Looking Glass obviously wasnt all about Warren Spector

FWIW, Warren has many a time given the impression that he greatly disliked being hailed as some kind of one-man force behind the successful games he was involved in at the expense of all the other talented members of the usually-sizeable team that he worked with. I can't remember how many interviews I read where he had to point this sort of thing out to the drooling interviewer, and sing the praises of the other team members, but it happened a lot.

> Anachronox is obviously debatable [...] It obviously
> wasn't good enough for people to word to spread that
> it was worth the money to buy it

As best I can tell, marketing alone determines the success of a high-budget game. History suggests to me that word of mouth will do next to nothing to recoup these kinds of development costs, irrespective of whether or not the game is worth the money.

If you're speaking about the unwashed masses, you're probably right, Dagok. But I'd hope that the people who visit and post on Blue's do actually differentiate between different studio's and are smart enough to know the layout of the gaming industry. It's kinda handy to know which part/team in a company is making a game, and what it's track record is.
That's why we always look at who's developing the game, as opposed to who is publishing it. And that's also why we cower (well, you know what I mean :)) when top people leave a good dev studio (like BIS etc), because we know the talent is leaving a company which was (maybe) working on a game we were looking forward to.

And the whole thing about Thief:DS is that it was developed concurrently with DX:IW...and we know that the people who did the latter have lost their way in gamingspace, if you will. So, considering it was/is being done by the same people, and seeing that they've screwed the pooch with something developped at the same time, and considering that we see bad things in the video's and interviews (awfull textures, strange gameplay) already, well, I guess we have reason to be not-so-chuffed.

18. Debate continues as to whether or not Spector's team is responsible for Daikatana.

That wasnt the debate at all. Doesnt matter that it was two different teams. They share a name and they share history. You don't differentiate between Blizzard South and Blizzard North do you? You dont differentiate between the different EA offices, San Francisco, Vancouver, Austrailia...no, Blizzard is Blizzard and EA is EA. Ion Storm is still Ion Storm, whether it is 100% different people and in a different location.

I used to work for EA Vancouver, since I left, they have moved offices, changed about 99% of the staff. It is still the same company making games, regardless of the staff changes.

Bottomline is Ion Storm, old and new, has failed to make more than 1 (debatably 2) good games according to mass appeal.

The bad rap still sticks with the name and they still use the old ionstorm.com website. Looking Glass obviously wasnt all about Warren Spector, since he has failed to even come close to the success Looking Glass was able to obtain...again debatable since they werent making enough money to stay open.

Anachronox is obviously debatable, since every game is subject to opinion on how good/bad it is. It obviously wasn't good enough for people to word to spread that it was worth the money to buy it, so people that liked it are in the minority. Concidering it could be compared to Final Fantasy, it paled in comparison.

Wazootyman,

It is not that ISA made only one bad game juxtaposed to an almost universally loved GoTY. It is that they unrepentantly believe IW is excellent and that the only reason it is reviled is because of fear of change, PC-centric elitism and a misunderstanding about "real emergent gaming". Funnily enough there are many quotes supporting the fact that Deus Ex's development was something of an accident with its depth and complexity more due to personality clashes, mismanagement and slavish doting on the legacy of SS1&2.

People are fond of letting Harvey take the fall for IW - but Warren approved the decisions and let him cut his teeth. Certainly Warren was and still is adamant that DX gaming should be simplified to the lowest common denominator across all platforms.

It still mystifies me that there are that many game reviewers with such terrible taste to give it an average over 80. How on earth? Unified ammo, cul de sac matchbox levels, severely truncated RPG customisation, non-existant reward mechanics (yay I've got a 5,000 credits and 20 biomods I have absolutely no use for), eliminated complex world interactions (computer interfaces, keypads etc), no tactical combat (reticle etc), nerfed stealth, pathetic character development and pacing, weak side quests, NO conseqeunces for actions (particularly "polar faction bouncing"), crap replayability, even more cliched plot than the original, low res textures. Even the little details - like spelling mistakes and missing digits on keypads. etc etc... The whole game screams mass-market rushed fud.
This comment was edited on May 2, 07:23.

Other than the obvious, whats the difference between Thief and the other sneak game, Splinter Cell 2??

I'm just keeping my fingers crossed about this one !

...the only possible way Thief 3 could turn out is caked in shit.

With candles? Oh oh, how 'bout some sprinkles? Yeah, sprinkles with on a shitcake. mmmmm..mmmmm... now we're talking. I bet half these assminers would bitch that their shitcake taste like chocolate anyhow.

BTW - this is fuckin hilarious if you're drunk... but just a little drunk. Like shit in the neighbor's kiddie pool and call yerself Brown Beard drunk... cap'n of the seven seas and this here poop schooner drunk. ARRRRGGGGGHHHHHH!! RAMMIN' SPEED MISTAR PEANUT!!!

*I need another beer.*