This has to be the most honest and concise critique of this game. I have watched a number of playthroughs and some of them even gave up playing it in disgust because of the terrible mechanics and nonsensical storyline. It is such a shame that such a beautiful looking game went to waste because the devs simply couldn't be bothered to q.a. it properly. Imo the loss of the Hammerites and the Pagans were a big mistake, so much lore gone because twats wanted a triple a game done quickly and on the cheap. Blondie, I think you missed your calling, you should write the next Thief game, because you did an outstanding job on this analysis. It was entertaining, informative, fair and above all else, honest. Thank you for such a great video.
The early mismanagement and the late crunch at the end were the biggest killers. There was no time to polish or rectify any of Thief's mistakes. That couldn't save the writing, of course. I firmly believe that the slew of early departures took with it the heart of the Thief series and the technical experience needed to pull off this caper. Such a shame, it could have been something special. Thank you for the feedback! 👍
Very detailed review! I'm still upset years later. Great ideas, terrible execution. The long time fans gave "victoria" lots of ideas on their forums, I truly believe ALL of those ideas were ignored. This is truly an AAA game, not a thief game.
Thanks! I remember that call to action, how fans flocked to the forum to add their thoughts. I think I may have posted something too, but it was a while ago and I can’t remember. Ahh, the giddy early days held so much hope and promise. It’s clear to me that there were at least 2 different trains of thought within the dev team. Many senior staff left because of these differences, and I think they took the majority of fan ideas with them, unfortunately. But the *deepest* failure began when they were allowed to run free with little oversight. With proper management we may still have got a game that wasn’t Thief, but at least it might have been more cohesive, thought-through, and polished.
There are still glimmers of promise underneath the ‘new age’ dazzle. Staff left because of - in part - ‘creative differences’. I have to wonder whether these people were advocating for a game which stuck closer to the original formula.
100% I love GOG for this very reason. I know that the titles are supposed to remain in your library after purchase, even if they’re removed from the store, but I downloaded all the Unreal titles to be safe.
@@HeyBlondieGamer After watching your analysis of the Game, i think that the Repetitiveness was the reason i never finisched Thief. Watching the Gameplay video i suddenly was rememberted about the First Assasins Creed i never finisched that game either for the same reason: It might look good at the beginnig but. Animations repeat a lot and they repeat so frequent that it cant hide the fact that there are not realy a lot of Animations to beginn with. In Thief the Transitions have this Problem and in Assasinscreed one the Combos suffered from this Problem... but Thef III is Much worse... Assasinscreed one just got boring after a few hours but Thief actually made me feal nausea becaus of its ever looping Animations becaus they put them everywhere to hide the fact that the game had Loadingsceens who all where wihtin a 50 step range from eachother. Sad to see that so much went wrong, becaus underneath definatly lies a game that is fun!
It’s not so much the repetitiveness but how it executes that loop. Finding and disarming traps was a lot of fun; side missions offer a condensed Thieving experience which was pleasing; and the city hub *can* be a good idea if designed well. It’s the drawn out animations which make these actions feel bloated, in my mind. It creates an artificial feeling of repetitiveness because animations are long and can’t be skipped. I felt the same way about Assassin’s Creed toward the end. Not a huge variety of tasks to engage with.
I never played the old games so as this one as my first I thought it was ok. After learning it was a reboot and watching videos on old ones I get it and really hope to try them some day. Also them talking about ppl crying about the design change. If only they could have seen the future and how well sonic movie did by listening to fans.
As a stand-alone game it’s a solid 7. As the torch-bearer of the beloved Thief franchise, it fails to engage in almost every measure which made OG Thief a classic. No free-form movement is the biggest sin it committed, but takedowns replacing the blackjack, the strong emphasis on combat, and a complete overhaul of Garrett are among many of its failures to the Thief legacy.
There are some genuinely good ideas here, but most are poorly executed or undercooked, the plot is nonsensical rubbish, and old-school Thief fans who enjoyed the theme, plot, characters, world building, and even the gaming systems of old will find little commonality with the Thief franchise. They could have taken this in so many other directions, it’s heartbreaking really.
I played it and loved it so much, never completed it becase I probably played 40h of side quests. Never read or watched the reviews, so I am surprised to see that it was hated or flawed.
The side missions were way more fun than the vast majority of the main levels. If the game had strung these together with a cohesive narrative, my impression would have been miles more positive.
I will never forgive the devs for so recklessly leaving the franchise in rubble and ashes. They never apologized, even made smug comments on social media before ignorantly moving on. In fact, they should make a fan-requested fifth installment at their own expense to cleanse their black, sinful hearts.
Seriously though with these first person console games can we just stop pretending like your head is like one of those guys from the Star wars cantina and just kind of extends forward at the neck and then and then raises up a little bit.. and then your shoulders kind of Misses incredible their way into a way so that you can see your hands.. but if you thought about it it just makes your back hurt and your head hurt until you look down at your body and it gaslights you because of the perspective warp that they do to make that work now.. that they didn't have to do, cuz they could have just done it correctly, shout out to machine breeze, who with the exception of New order have done it correctly and very well and even managed to take the jank out of it with The New Colossus a fun return to form having temporarily abandoned a body at all prior.. they were always on the forefront of that with riddick, I mean so is looking glass with deadly shadows honestly.. and you know what.. so is Montreal, they did it very well in mankind divided.. and my opinion on human revolution has soften because it's so much better than the average.. but man did they really nail it with mankind divided.. they did not nail it here. I feel like in modern triple a I feel like I am quatto with man legs.. I only have wrists I don't have I don't have shoulders.. I mean they show up for some reason during contextual prompts but I guess they retract or something.. in this case they're coming like right out of my out of my the top of the shoulder so I've got the head and then I've got the wrists in the hands and the reason they're up like that is cuz I have no arms.. clearly this looks uncomfortable but for torso transplant quatto.. I mean he lives in a lot of pain, so I can't say it's not you know it's not suffrage but.. it's more comfortable than not for him not comparatively it's probably a sad existence his spine is screwed...
Storys awful but I actually enjoyed this for what it was, a mostly fine game with some cool levels/movements. Also your vocal tone is richer than dark chocolate so theres that.
It has its moments, for sure, but it makes of the pain of knowing what it *could* have been that much keener. I think they should have broken away and drafted a new IP. I was snuffly through much of that recording. I should get sick more often 😆
@@HeyBlondieGamer sure, it definitely felt underdeveloped at certain points. Oh snap, this video's long. I'm actually kneedeep in Nth's Thief retrospective and then I'll watch the rest of this one :)
100% agree. If you’re gonna redesign an established and iconic character, you better be damn sure you know them inside and out and can recreate them in a way that’s faithful to the original. Garrett *is* Thief, heart and soul. Not only did they fail to realize this, they failed to understand Garrett. From here, total failure was an inevitability. The initial concepts of Garrett with black nail polish conveyed everything I feared about this game. There’s footage of the devs playing through the original Thief games. How many of them were fans of the material? Quick answer: the ones who left.
Is this not a sign of the modern times.. the thief series went from industrial goth... to full-blown emo... I really hope that eidos Montreal, whatever they are now.. I wish and I really do hope that they actually.. actually gets to make this game that they've been trying to make through the corpse of looking Glass titles.. I'm I'm not upset about a lot of them, certainly not the dx games because they could have been so much worse my God.. and they did really do a lot of things that weren't the thing but weren't exactly not the thing either spiritually.. and it seems like especially with this really... but definitely with the deus ex reboots, that there's these ideas for a game that they've been running around with that they really wanted to make but since they were squares b they had sort of an opportunity to try and do that.. and they were never going to be able to do the dx thing because you kind of have to be that kind of writer to do that.. and they weren't going to be able to make that kind of game because well they don't make that kind of game anymore LOL.. but they definitely had this idea for a game rolling around in their brains and it's been trying to get out for a decade now... Think Ross Scott had a good, like insert card analogy of of this game.. and honestly I hadn't even thought about it until he mentioned it, and it really makes sense the more you think about it.. and I never really thought about it with this game in any context cuz I didn't play it but a lot of this is screaming a lot of that.. this one just happened to be completely effed from the management design factor.. in particular ways that thoroughly we're going to make it wreck given the kind of more complex gameplay that you have to factor in.. and more complex testing that you have to factor in for a gaming audience that's increasingly lost the ability to play games themselves but still think that they're helping.. I really like that studio though because they do still try, and they're one of a handful of studios that actually makes games that are mechanically somewhat interesting anymore.. and they've done it in iteration as well, like machine breeze going from riddick to Wolfenstein, there are there lines of quality and immersion that they won't cross just because the genre shifts a little bit.. and that is absolutely not something I could say about looking glass, irrational or a very large amount of the people that have gone off to prominent designing roles in the industry.. I mean, thief 3 would basically be the human revolution to thief 2, just with similar writers, but mechanically let's say.. invisible war is more like Bioshock to system shock 2, except.. even invisible or despite being mechanically neutered in every way and unplayable as far as I was concerned.. actually had core RPG mechanics so it's not a one-to-one.... Bioshock just happened to be an exceptionally bad game by comparison to previous work, especially SWAT 4 when you take a look at mechanics and immersion.. but all the others as well I did not see that one coming cuz I was young and stupid back then, but my point is.. pretty much every major developer that was doing something interesting of the very few that were still the left have basically converted to the most worst cliche versions of consolitis, the kind of kind of portrays the court concept of the previous iterations that they're using the cloud of.. in a lot of cases not even studio bound that they genuinely like went insane, and then thought this was like a good thing.. and most of them have been doing it so long now they don't even remember or care or think of it as a factor.. Eidos Montreal, or whatever they're called now that THQ Nordic owns them, is like not that.. you know.. I mean there are situations that you can't win in and it seems like square enix really likes those situations and not even on like a traditional oh we're just going to mess with you cuz we want to see you cry and then maybe we'll take you out back or maybe you get the puzzle basement for a decade kind of thing.. no they just genuinely have stupid business ideas for some reason now.. it's not a normal it's pretty common in business especially nowadays but.. it's uncommon to be so gung-ho about the stupid when even the other morons around you have been backing off LOL and you know what God bless their special special special hearts I guess.. I mean maybe not they're kind of mean, they're like really really mean but.. definitely really really special... apparently find out how well that works for them in a year or two LOL... But even under the special branch of of square enix LOL like they still managed to do the best they could and win, even if it was a technical victory in a lot of cases.. now that THQ Nordic... A grown adult company run by grown adults, despite taking the THQ name which you think would imply the opposite.. but now that this is a thing, like I can't say that they're going to get to make their game but.. I mean if they just keep doing what they're doing, like at least they'll be able to do what they're doing without making that increasingly more miserable and difficult.. I think they deserve it. And again it's such a small list especially in the first person action simulation whatever is left of it anyways I mean yeah let's face it we don't do some anymore but like the closest ghost of it left in the first person action genres.. that's even rarerer.
I don’t hate UbiMont, I’m sure they have talented and passionate people who do amazing work. But this was far from their best, and it’s riddled with hubris. Perhaps they have a story worth telling. Perhaps they could have told a great Thief story if the passionate ones hadn’t left the project in the early days. We’ll never know.
It was one of the first games I got on PS4 (when it launched) and I played it all the way through fairly quickly. In my opinion it was a decent little stealth-em-up even though by the end I was fairly annoyed by the “open” world design and how restrictive things were. It reminded me of Thief Deadly Shadows on the OG Xbox. Can it hold a candle to the old Thief games? No way, but it can still be fun if you’re not expecting much from it.
LOL that reference to like a child with the jump thing cracks me up.. with the release of stray, the cat simulator where you play the cat in the cyberpunk world without the humans and every single jump is contextual basically.. and you're just like you know.. yeah sure if you were a dog I'm sure you totally would just wait for the allowed permission and approval to do the jump.. but you're a cat.. you telling me your cat and you're actually going to.. oh it gets better there's no humans around.. I guess Garrett is the dog here? I mean it makes sense when you have this linear curated contextual gameplay of the modern AAA and the shoehorn stuff.. you're basically kind of like a a good puppers with a maybe questionable owner... Like all you want to do is just fucking go nuts.. you just want to go! It'll be fun it's going to be so fun we're going to go I just got to wait.. I got to be good I got to be good.. I got I got my I got my humans back you know I got I got to do my portion.. and do all these steps are going to do all these side quests I'm going to do the thing when the prompt comes up, I'm going to behave.. but yeah wouldn't it be cool we just go fucking nuts right now! Wouldn't it be so much fun.. And yeah if you let your puppers go nuts it's going to get a little messy... But it needs to go nuts every once in awhile.. you create an environment and provide the environment that it can go nuts in in a safe and responsible way.. you don't try to teach them to dressage in a china shop.
Stray was contextual??! Oof, no thanks. I feel as though they had plans to make it open movement but ran out of time to test the possibilities. It hamstrings through movement and experience of being a master Thief and doesn’t fit the design or tone of the game. Then again, perhaps I’m wrong and this was is working as intended. That’s so much worse.
That's perfectly fine! The point of the critique isn't to shame anyone for enjoying video games. There was certainly something tangible about the atmosphere.
The idea of worrying that a professional voice actor would sound too old for a role is kind of about the dumbest thing to say to anybody that's a voice actor or you know does any of these sorts of things.. and might be possible to everybody else to pass off as shoehorned but potentially Fair. He's a voice actor.. like voices is kind of what he does.. do all sorts of voices Young voices, old voices, kind voices, gruff voices.. and document a steady progression of the traumatic brain injuries of Benny throughout the series.. Like if you ever look at a voice actors list of work.. especially the session kind like Garrett, it's basically here are 45 different personalities that I've messed with over the years.. I've got about 200 that I could probably do but I got 45 real good ones, so what do you say maybe a buck 50 characters here, we can get two other people and we should be good.. oh budget's not good enough okay I'll just do it myself no seriously I need the money.. also you guys didn't see my play.. like I thought I mailed the tickets you didn't you didn't get them oh.. what we're doing another performance.. do you want to.. I'm a real actor! Fk all you! It's a little bit better now I think, there's more gilding going on and whatnot but it's highly competitive and incredibly unspecialized specialized thing... You can make an argument about the body capture, I don't think it's a good argument.. considering it it took like massive cancer just to keep Michael Ironside out of the gimp suit.. I think he's pushing a little bit older than Steven Russell, I guess you could maybe make an argument that maybe he hadn't done it before I have no idea.. cuz he's old school enough that he came from the time when voice actor was voice actor where is Ironside was film actor and the transition makes sense.. but I don't know I always do this thing where I like defend myself when there's the thought process that stupid people might make when I'm trying to make a point when I should really just make a clickbait sentence and start a fight so that I could actually get a point across.. but I don't know... that's definitely one of those situations where if they hadn't said anything it would have been better off.. or if they had like said that the actual thing they wanted to do.. like if you're embarrassed about doing it, maybe you should rethink it you know.. if you can't convince yourself of a good excuse and if you can't even convince a marketing team of a good excuse cuz that's weird to not be able to do that.. then maybe it's a bad idea... Just don't lie to me like a marketing team would.. Because maybe a lot of that stems from this you know.. I mean marketing had taken over every other department in every corporation pretty much.. except for the talent department for the producing departments but that's an interesting ham-fisted way to try to solve that conundrum is make them marketing too from the inside LOL we couldn't fully saturated and breach their department.. because we have no skills.. but they have no marketing skills either which puts us on even footing.. let the devs say stupid shit out loud that we write down so they look really awkward and cry when they go home... Is such a brave New world dystopia, we don't deserve an apocalypse.. we're too vapid for that.
From memory I used the God of War actors as a reference. 3 guys for 1 character. The notion that Russell couldn’t come back as Garrett is a transparent argument. They were hoping to create a new IP free of the trappings of the original franchise which allowed them to do whatever they pleased. But they didn’t understand Garrett. They didn’t understand The City. They removed much of what was iconic about Thief and replaced it with ham-fisted ugly simulacrums. Cheap parlour tricks were never going to sell this game. It was missing soul and character. If it wasn’t intentional, it’d be incompetent. It *was* intentional, and that makes it arrogant. Thanks for dropping a comment, it was a great read. Are you a voice actor?
Such a quality content, you deserve a lot more subscribers man, keep it up
Cheers, that’s greatly appreciated! 👍
This has to be the most honest and concise critique of this game. I have watched a number of playthroughs and some of them even gave up playing it in disgust because of the terrible mechanics and nonsensical storyline. It is such a shame that such a beautiful looking game went to waste because the devs simply couldn't be bothered to q.a. it properly. Imo the loss of the Hammerites and the Pagans were a big mistake, so much lore gone because twats wanted a triple a game done quickly and on the cheap. Blondie, I think you missed your calling, you should write the next Thief game, because you did an outstanding job on this analysis. It was entertaining, informative, fair and above all else, honest. Thank you for such a great video.
The early mismanagement and the late crunch at the end were the biggest killers. There was no time to polish or rectify any of Thief's mistakes. That couldn't save the writing, of course. I firmly believe that the slew of early departures took with it the heart of the Thief series and the technical experience needed to pull off this caper. Such a shame, it could have been something special.
Thank you for the feedback! 👍
Very detailed review! I'm still upset years later. Great ideas, terrible execution. The long time fans gave "victoria" lots of ideas on their forums, I truly believe ALL of those ideas were ignored. This is truly an AAA game, not a thief game.
Thanks!
I remember that call to action, how fans flocked to the forum to add their thoughts. I think I may have posted something too, but it was a while ago and I can’t remember. Ahh, the giddy early days held so much hope and promise.
It’s clear to me that there were at least 2 different trains of thought within the dev team. Many senior staff left because of these differences, and I think they took the majority of fan ideas with them, unfortunately. But the *deepest* failure began when they were allowed to run free with little oversight. With proper management we may still have got a game that wasn’t Thief, but at least it might have been more cohesive, thought-through, and polished.
The old thief series has always been close to my heart so I was amazed that how this reboot could have slipped aside
There are still glimmers of promise underneath the ‘new age’ dazzle. Staff left because of - in part - ‘creative differences’. I have to wonder whether these people were advocating for a game which stuck closer to the original formula.
This review made me buy the old thiefs on GOG before they get isekai'd away like Unreal...
100%
I love GOG for this very reason. I know that the titles are supposed to remain in your library after purchase, even if they’re removed from the store, but I downloaded all the Unreal titles to be safe.
I had my EYE on this back in the day... Then it came out
I feel the pain of that statement.
This game is one of the cases, that i somehow enjoyed playing but never enough to finish it... pretty thorn on it
I remember thinking it was solid enough back at release, a 7 out of 10 if we're using a rating system (which we're not :P).
@@HeyBlondieGamer After watching your analysis of the Game, i think that the Repetitiveness was the reason i never finisched Thief. Watching the Gameplay video i suddenly was rememberted about the First Assasins Creed i never finisched that game either for the same reason: It might look good at the beginnig but. Animations repeat a lot and they repeat so frequent that it cant hide the fact that there are not realy a lot of Animations to beginn with. In Thief the Transitions have this Problem and in Assasinscreed one the Combos suffered from this Problem... but Thef III is Much worse... Assasinscreed one just got boring after a few hours but Thief actually made me feal nausea becaus of its ever looping Animations becaus they put them everywhere to hide the fact that the game had Loadingsceens who all where wihtin a 50 step range from eachother.
Sad to see that so much went wrong, becaus underneath definatly lies a game that is fun!
It’s not so much the repetitiveness but how it executes that loop. Finding and disarming traps was a lot of fun; side missions offer a condensed Thieving experience which was pleasing; and the city hub *can* be a good idea if designed well. It’s the drawn out animations which make these actions feel bloated, in my mind. It creates an artificial feeling of repetitiveness because animations are long and can’t be skipped.
I felt the same way about Assassin’s Creed toward the end. Not a huge variety of tasks to engage with.
I never played the old games so as this one as my first I thought it was ok. After learning it was a reboot and watching videos on old ones I get it and really hope to try them some day. Also them talking about ppl crying about the design change. If only they could have seen the future and how well sonic movie did by listening to fans.
As a stand-alone game it’s a solid 7. As the torch-bearer of the beloved Thief franchise, it fails to engage in almost every measure which made OG Thief a classic. No free-form movement is the biggest sin it committed, but takedowns replacing the blackjack, the strong emphasis on combat, and a complete overhaul of Garrett are among many of its failures to the Thief legacy.
I've never heard a single good thing about this game, so I'm interested to hear your thoughts on this.
There are some genuinely good ideas here, but most are poorly executed or undercooked, the plot is nonsensical rubbish, and old-school Thief fans who enjoyed the theme, plot, characters, world building, and even the gaming systems of old will find little commonality with the Thief franchise.
They could have taken this in so many other directions, it’s heartbreaking really.
I played it and loved it so much, never completed it becase I probably played 40h of side quests. Never read or watched the reviews, so I am surprised to see that it was hated or flawed.
Thief 2014 was so much fun, that I never completed the main quest, only played all the little missions.
The side missions were way more fun than the vast majority of the main levels. If the game had strung these together with a cohesive narrative, my impression would have been miles more positive.
I will never forgive the devs for so recklessly leaving the franchise in rubble and ashes. They never apologized, even made smug comments on social media before ignorantly moving on. In fact, they should make a fan-requested fifth installment at their own expense to cleanse their black, sinful hearts.
They don’t deserve the opportunity. Give it to a worthy indie team or perhaps New Blood. They’ll do a much better job.
Seriously though with these first person console games can we just stop pretending like your head is like one of those guys from the Star wars cantina and just kind of extends forward at the neck and then and then raises up a little bit.. and then your shoulders kind of Misses incredible their way into a way so that you can see your hands.. but if you thought about it it just makes your back hurt and your head hurt until you look down at your body and it gaslights you because of the perspective warp that they do to make that work now.. that they didn't have to do, cuz they could have just done it correctly, shout out to machine breeze, who with the exception of New order have done it correctly and very well and even managed to take the jank out of it with The New Colossus a fun return to form having temporarily abandoned a body at all prior.. they were always on the forefront of that with riddick, I mean so is looking glass with deadly shadows honestly.. and you know what.. so is Montreal, they did it very well in mankind divided.. and my opinion on human revolution has soften because it's so much better than the average.. but man did they really nail it with mankind divided.. they did not nail it here.
I feel like in modern triple a I feel like I am quatto with man legs.. I only have wrists I don't have I don't have shoulders.. I mean they show up for some reason during contextual prompts but I guess they retract or something.. in this case they're coming like right out of my out of my the top of the shoulder so I've got the head and then I've got the wrists in the hands and the reason they're up like that is cuz I have no arms.. clearly this looks uncomfortable but for torso transplant quatto.. I mean he lives in a lot of pain, so I can't say it's not you know it's not suffrage but.. it's more comfortable than not for him not comparatively it's probably a sad existence his spine is screwed...
Storys awful but I actually enjoyed this for what it was, a mostly fine game with some cool levels/movements. Also your vocal tone is richer than dark chocolate so theres that.
It has its moments, for sure, but it makes of the pain of knowing what it *could* have been that much keener. I think they should have broken away and drafted a new IP.
I was snuffly through much of that recording. I should get sick more often 😆
@@HeyBlondieGamer sure, it definitely felt underdeveloped at certain points. Oh snap, this video's long. I'm actually kneedeep in Nth's Thief retrospective and then I'll watch the rest of this one :)
Shouldn't redesign an established character. Should accentuate them.
100% agree.
If you’re gonna redesign an established and iconic character, you better be damn sure you know them inside and out and can recreate them in a way that’s faithful to the original.
Garrett *is* Thief, heart and soul. Not only did they fail to realize this, they failed to understand Garrett. From here, total failure was an inevitability. The initial concepts of Garrett with black nail polish conveyed everything I feared about this game.
There’s footage of the devs playing through the original Thief games. How many of them were fans of the material? Quick answer: the ones who left.
@@HeyBlondieGamer Absolutely right👍
Is this not a sign of the modern times.. the thief series went from industrial goth... to full-blown emo... I really hope that eidos Montreal, whatever they are now.. I wish and I really do hope that they actually.. actually gets to make this game that they've been trying to make through the corpse of looking Glass titles.. I'm I'm not upset about a lot of them, certainly not the dx games because they could have been so much worse my God.. and they did really do a lot of things that weren't the thing but weren't exactly not the thing either spiritually.. and it seems like especially with this really... but definitely with the deus ex reboots, that there's these ideas for a game that they've been running around with that they really wanted to make but since they were squares b they had sort of an opportunity to try and do that.. and they were never going to be able to do the dx thing because you kind of have to be that kind of writer to do that.. and they weren't going to be able to make that kind of game because well they don't make that kind of game anymore LOL.. but they definitely had this idea for a game rolling around in their brains and it's been trying to get out for a decade now...
Think Ross Scott had a good, like insert card analogy of of this game.. and honestly I hadn't even thought about it until he mentioned it, and it really makes sense the more you think about it.. and I never really thought about it with this game in any context cuz I didn't play it but a lot of this is screaming a lot of that.. this one just happened to be completely effed from the management design factor.. in particular ways that thoroughly we're going to make it wreck given the kind of more complex gameplay that you have to factor in.. and more complex testing that you have to factor in for a gaming audience that's increasingly lost the ability to play games themselves but still think that they're helping..
I really like that studio though because they do still try, and they're one of a handful of studios that actually makes games that are mechanically somewhat interesting anymore.. and they've done it in iteration as well, like machine breeze going from riddick to Wolfenstein, there are there lines of quality and immersion that they won't cross just because the genre shifts a little bit.. and that is absolutely not something I could say about looking glass, irrational or a very large amount of the people that have gone off to prominent designing roles in the industry.. I mean, thief 3 would basically be the human revolution to thief 2, just with similar writers, but mechanically let's say.. invisible war is more like Bioshock to system shock 2, except.. even invisible or despite being mechanically neutered in every way and unplayable as far as I was concerned.. actually had core RPG mechanics so it's not a one-to-one....
Bioshock just happened to be an exceptionally bad game by comparison to previous work, especially SWAT 4 when you take a look at mechanics and immersion.. but all the others as well I did not see that one coming cuz I was young and stupid back then, but my point is.. pretty much every major developer that was doing something interesting of the very few that were still the left have basically converted to the most worst cliche versions of consolitis, the kind of kind of portrays the court concept of the previous iterations that they're using the cloud of.. in a lot of cases not even studio bound that they genuinely like went insane, and then thought this was like a good thing.. and most of them have been doing it so long now they don't even remember or care or think of it as a factor..
Eidos Montreal, or whatever they're called now that THQ Nordic owns them, is like not that.. you know.. I mean there are situations that you can't win in and it seems like square enix really likes those situations and not even on like a traditional oh we're just going to mess with you cuz we want to see you cry and then maybe we'll take you out back or maybe you get the puzzle basement for a decade kind of thing.. no they just genuinely have stupid business ideas for some reason now.. it's not a normal it's pretty common in business especially nowadays but.. it's uncommon to be so gung-ho about the stupid when even the other morons around you have been backing off LOL and you know what God bless their special special special hearts I guess.. I mean maybe not they're kind of mean, they're like really really mean but.. definitely really really special... apparently find out how well that works for them in a year or two LOL...
But even under the special branch of of square enix LOL like they still managed to do the best they could and win, even if it was a technical victory in a lot of cases.. now that THQ Nordic... A grown adult company run by grown adults, despite taking the THQ name which you think would imply the opposite.. but now that this is a thing, like I can't say that they're going to get to make their game but.. I mean if they just keep doing what they're doing, like at least they'll be able to do what they're doing without making that increasingly more miserable and difficult.. I think they deserve it. And again it's such a small list especially in the first person action simulation whatever is left of it anyways I mean yeah let's face it we don't do some anymore but like the closest ghost of it left in the first person action genres.. that's even rarerer.
I don’t hate UbiMont, I’m sure they have talented and passionate people who do amazing work. But this was far from their best, and it’s riddled with hubris. Perhaps they have a story worth telling. Perhaps they could have told a great Thief story if the passionate ones hadn’t left the project in the early days. We’ll never know.
For all it’s flaws I still enjoyed this game quite a bit.
Can I ask what you enjoyed about it? Not trying to be funny, just curious and trying to understand your experience.
I enjoyed it as well! The story? Eh, but the gameplay and the open-city area is pretty great (I'm only a few minutes into the review, lol).
It was one of the first games I got on PS4 (when it launched) and I played it all the way through fairly quickly. In my opinion it was a decent little stealth-em-up even though by the end I was fairly annoyed by the “open” world design and how restrictive things were. It reminded me of Thief Deadly Shadows on the OG Xbox. Can it hold a candle to the old Thief games? No way, but it can still be fun if you’re not expecting much from it.
The open city had a lot of promise, definitely an approach I normally enjoy. I have to say that many of the side missions were enjoyable.
That was kind of my approach the first time I played it too. If I let myself forget that it was Thief game it was a decent experience.
LOL that reference to like a child with the jump thing cracks me up.. with the release of stray, the cat simulator where you play the cat in the cyberpunk world without the humans and every single jump is contextual basically.. and you're just like you know.. yeah sure if you were a dog I'm sure you totally would just wait for the allowed permission and approval to do the jump.. but you're a cat.. you telling me your cat and you're actually going to.. oh it gets better there's no humans around..
I guess Garrett is the dog here? I mean it makes sense when you have this linear curated contextual gameplay of the modern AAA and the shoehorn stuff.. you're basically kind of like a a good puppers with a maybe questionable owner... Like all you want to do is just fucking go nuts.. you just want to go! It'll be fun it's going to be so fun we're going to go I just got to wait.. I got to be good I got to be good.. I got I got my I got my humans back you know I got I got to do my portion.. and do all these steps are going to do all these side quests I'm going to do the thing when the prompt comes up, I'm going to behave.. but yeah wouldn't it be cool we just go fucking nuts right now! Wouldn't it be so much fun..
And yeah if you let your puppers go nuts it's going to get a little messy... But it needs to go nuts every once in awhile.. you create an environment and provide the environment that it can go nuts in in a safe and responsible way.. you don't try to teach them to dressage in a china shop.
Stray was contextual??! Oof, no thanks.
I feel as though they had plans to make it open movement but ran out of time to test the possibilities. It hamstrings through movement and experience of being a master Thief and doesn’t fit the design or tone of the game. Then again, perhaps I’m wrong and this was is working as intended. That’s so much worse.
For me this is one of best game ever. I do not care what other said, the atmospehere of the City was phenomenal.
That's perfectly fine! The point of the critique isn't to shame anyone for enjoying video games. There was certainly something tangible about the atmosphere.
The idea of worrying that a professional voice actor would sound too old for a role is kind of about the dumbest thing to say to anybody that's a voice actor or you know does any of these sorts of things.. and might be possible to everybody else to pass off as shoehorned but potentially Fair. He's a voice actor.. like voices is kind of what he does.. do all sorts of voices Young voices, old voices, kind voices, gruff voices.. and document a steady progression of the traumatic brain injuries of Benny throughout the series..
Like if you ever look at a voice actors list of work.. especially the session kind like Garrett, it's basically here are 45 different personalities that I've messed with over the years.. I've got about 200 that I could probably do but I got 45 real good ones, so what do you say maybe a buck 50 characters here, we can get two other people and we should be good.. oh budget's not good enough okay I'll just do it myself no seriously I need the money.. also you guys didn't see my play.. like I thought I mailed the tickets you didn't you didn't get them oh.. what we're doing another performance.. do you want to.. I'm a real actor! Fk all you!
It's a little bit better now I think, there's more gilding going on and whatnot but it's highly competitive and incredibly unspecialized specialized thing...
You can make an argument about the body capture, I don't think it's a good argument.. considering it it took like massive cancer just to keep Michael Ironside out of the gimp suit.. I think he's pushing a little bit older than Steven Russell, I guess you could maybe make an argument that maybe he hadn't done it before I have no idea.. cuz he's old school enough that he came from the time when voice actor was voice actor where is Ironside was film actor and the transition makes sense.. but I don't know I always do this thing where I like defend myself when there's the thought process that stupid people might make when I'm trying to make a point when I should really just make a clickbait sentence and start a fight so that I could actually get a point across.. but I don't know... that's definitely one of those situations where if they hadn't said anything it would have been better off.. or if they had like said that the actual thing they wanted to do.. like if you're embarrassed about doing it, maybe you should rethink it you know.. if you can't convince yourself of a good excuse and if you can't even convince a marketing team of a good excuse cuz that's weird to not be able to do that.. then maybe it's a bad idea... Just don't lie to me like a marketing team would..
Because maybe a lot of that stems from this you know.. I mean marketing had taken over every other department in every corporation pretty much.. except for the talent department for the producing departments but that's an interesting ham-fisted way to try to solve that conundrum is make them marketing too from the inside LOL we couldn't fully saturated and breach their department.. because we have no skills.. but they have no marketing skills either which puts us on even footing.. let the devs say stupid shit out loud that we write down so they look really awkward and cry when they go home...
Is such a brave New world dystopia, we don't deserve an apocalypse.. we're too vapid for that.
From memory I used the God of War actors as a reference. 3 guys for 1 character. The notion that Russell couldn’t come back as Garrett is a transparent argument. They were hoping to create a new IP free of the trappings of the original franchise which allowed them to do whatever they pleased.
But they didn’t understand Garrett. They didn’t understand The City. They removed much of what was iconic about Thief and replaced it with ham-fisted ugly simulacrums. Cheap parlour tricks were never going to sell this game. It was missing soul and character. If it wasn’t intentional, it’d be incompetent. It *was* intentional, and that makes it arrogant.
Thanks for dropping a comment, it was a great read. Are you a voice actor?