Thief 4 - Preview @ PC Gamer

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PC Gamer has a preview for Thief 4 fom it's PC Gamer UK Magazine.

We won’t be able to make everybody happy,” says Daniel Windfeld Schmidt. He’s the lead level designer on Eidos Montreal’s Thief relaunch, and he’s right. I recently played the first-person stealth game, and some people aren’t going to be happy.

This Thief game has third- person climbing sections. It makes minor use of quick time events. It has ‘Focus mode’, which gifts master thief Garrett with limited time-slowing combat abilities. It has context-sensitive controls that mean you can only jump when the game says you can jump.

Unhappy yet? I’m not. After playing the game for over an hour at this year’s E3, and putting all my concerns about the above to Schmidt, I’ve settled on being cautiously optimistic. Thief has changed, but not in the ways that matter.
More information.
 
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Only being able to jump at points designated by the designers doesn't matter? I would have to disagree. That matters a lot, at least to me.
 
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So... Garret and Altair are trying to sire a bastard child?
 
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To me, the best part of any stealth game is the sensation of being a truly sneaky bastard.

The game has got to challenge me and make it hard to stay out of sight, and any physical conflict needs to be a desperate act.

You need to feel that each takedown is an accomplishment and that you're being very clever by eliminating a guard without sound.

The worst thing you can feel is that such a thing is trivial and that you don't have to be careful.

Beyond that, it should reward careful exploration with lots of loot and story exposition.

This game sounds like it wants to be more of a traditional console action game with a lot of physical conflict and a lot of QTE events - as well as the standard overdose of "experience-driven" content like big explosions going off as you jump vast distances.

As in, it doesn't sound like Thief to me.

My best guess is that they put someone in charge that doesn't understand the genre or games in general. Most likely some company lackey speaking only corporate and trying to "market-guess" what gamers want - like not feeling frustrated by actual challenge.

It's exactly what you'd expect these days - except that the very same company released Deus Ex: HR - which WAS very faithful if you look beyond the boss fights that suits forced upon the development team.

Sure, the actual development team is different - but I seem to recall the DE:HR developers talking about this team taking over their development office and how they seemed ready to take on the mantle of Thief in a similarly faithful way. Probably, that was just my wishful interpretation.

I don't know what went wrong here, but I assume it's because DE:HR only sold a couple of million copies. I guess they're trying to aim wider this time.
 
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Don't forget this article I posted. It explains why the game turned out the way it is.
According to one source, each new lead and senior designer would come with a new vision for the game. Old ideas — including stages and mechanics — would be rebuilt or scrapped. In March of this year, the same month as the game's publicity push on the cover of Game Informer magazine, Lead Game Designer Dominic Fleury left the studio. The studio has seen a number of high-level departures

Sources emphasized the high level of talent and enthusiasm of team members, many of whom came to work on Thief because of their love of the franchise. Those same sources cited team politics and conflicting visions as cause for many departures and setbacks.

Due to a need to hit promotional deadlines, the latter part of 2012 and early 2013 was focused on creating press demos, the first of which was shown for the Game Informer cover and also at last month's Game Developers Conference. According to a source, the demo took nearly 10 months of development time, roughly six of which required the participation of nearly every content creator on the team. The level, which takes place in part inside a brothel, apparently featured "Cinemax-level" sex sequences at one point that some animators were uncomfortable creating.

Over the past few years, Square Enix has become increasingly concerned with the status of the game, now half a decade into development. A source says Eidos Montreal turned to a German investment firm for additional funds, something superiors within the studio claimed to be a common strategy in the industry and not cause for concern.

The current version of Thief barely resembles the initial concept, says a source. The vertical slice doesn't load inside Thief's current heavily modified version of Unreal Engine 3. Many programming tricks were necessary to run the current demonstration, like turning off non-playable character AI — the engine has trouble when too many characters are on screen.
 
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Only being able to jump at points designated by the designers doesn't matter? I would have to disagree. That matters a lot, at least to me.

A typical mainstream move to make it a lot faster to develop, they wont have to think about if the player can exploit certain spots or if graphics is gonna look bad from certain views (e.g player jumps to a spot where he can see 2D props etc).

I certainly wont be buying this.
 
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It gives them an extended control over gameplay. Very important for this game as the AI of NPCs plays a part.
 
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