Thief 4

JDR13 said:

Uh… you can't even jump in this game?

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Yes, you can jump - but it's not free-form jumping. You can, however, free-form jump from ledge to ledge, for instance.

Personally, I have no problem with the system - as it feels pretty natural overall.

But if you want the ability to jump at will - this isn't the game for you.

As of right now, I consider it the best stealth game since Thief 2 - but it might change later on.

I've played ~7-8 hours in all - and the atmosphere (especially with SweetFX) is fantastic, frankly.

With expensive resources turned on, the economy is much tighter than the one in Dishonored. You're VERY motivated to find loot - and there are plenty of upgrades for the long-term - or so it seems. Dishonored suffered heavily from giving you too many upgrades too soon, in my opinion.

I literally don't understand why it's getting so much grief - but I can only assume it gets really bad at some point - or people want something very, very different from their stealth games than I do.

That said, I was never a major Thief fan - and I didn't finish any of them. But as I recall, the first Thief was extremely primitive compared to this one. Guard AI in the old game was a joke in comparison and not at the level of sophistication in this game, bugs or no.

I also think it's much more challenging than Dishonored was at highest difficulty - and I've had no AI issues so far, apart from a single instance of a buggy guard that was spinning around in circles.

What I REALLY don't understand are the scores from Gamespot and IGN - and I would have guessed it getting at least 8.

Old-school nostalgia-driven whiners bitching about it not being the real deal (and the ignorant wannabe hardcore masses joining the stupid-choir) - I was expecting, but not the mainstream media bashing it.

Maybe I'll do a 180 at some point - but if the game stays at this level, I'm ready to give it 8 or even 9 out of 10. But I have to expect a significant change for the worse - given the rather heavy bashing all over the net.

I have two major criticisms - and those would be the obscure city layout and how it's fragmented into so many separate areas - as well as some annoying stuttering due to how the engine loads assets with each new area.

Beyond that, it's pretty great - and much more elaborate as a stealth game than I expected. Lots of freedom and a TON of little details that reveal how wrong I was at first - because there was definitely some love and care involved in creating this world.

DArtagnan said:

Yup.

On Master - you're not allowed to harm NPCs at all.

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Thank you, it is good to know and to have this option means that the developers worked hard to give control to the player - which is always a good thing.

Perhaps I should go write into currently playing thread.

Just finished main quest chapter 2. During it I swear I looked everywhere and looted everything possible to loot, yet ending stats say I didn't find 4 collectibles. Of them 5. Okay let's say I'm unskilled, but I'm not replaying the whole thing just to try to find where those are. If I missed one, okay, it would be understandable if it was hidden so well, but four of possible five?! I'm playing this on normal difficulty, I'm exploring every possible corner and seems I've missed four spots. Does this mean on hard you can't find even the fifth collectible?

Did I say no bugs? Sorry, I was wrong. There are bugs with scripted guards. Or it's a deliberate feature? At least during this mission guards sometimes don't do what they just did before you reloaded. They stand at one spot, move nowhere and stare usually on each other. Or simply say the same thing over and over again. While sometimes their irrational behavior could be characterized as devs tried to make them behave randomly, it affects your finding of certain items. Sorry, but I don't want to stay hidden for an hour at the same spot waiting for some guard important chitchat to happen.

Remember the game Legends of Dawn and unoptimized code problem? No?
That game didn't communicate with gfx card well, and under the pressure the card fans would go frenzy to stop the heat. Not on my card as it's super silent. However, the card still tried to suck out a huge amount of power from PSU, like you're printing something on a big laser printer, not playing a game.
And now, it happened to me in Thief too. My poor UPS started to scream like crazy at a certain area of the main story mission #2. Luckily it didn't explode, but if I couldn't forgive LoD (okay, they did patch the problem), I won't forgive Thief.

I'm not saying the fun stopped. It did not, I'm returning to the game right away. Just wanted to say that it definetly needs more polish ASAP!
If you didn't buy Thief yet, don't rush. Definetly wait for the performance patch. Or buy yourself a new machine with 32 Gb of RAM, i7 CPU, two Titan or better cards and at least 800W PSU.

Ok, I'm around 10 hours in now, and I have to admit that the city layout is getting to me - as are the loading screens. Once you have to go from one end to the other, it gets really tiresome - especially because guards respawn whenever you re-enter a subsection of the city.

That takes it down a notch - and I'd say the game is around 7.5 at this point.

But I'm enjoying the atmosphere and exploration immensely - and some of the levels are VERY big - and, for instance, the Brothel level is MUCH larger than the corresponding level in Dishonored.

Which is strange - when the city hub is so damned fragmented.

Still haven't encountered any serious AI issues - though it does seem quite exploitable on occasion.