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New Comic Thread for 12/19/07
Posts
Nothing makes sense.
at the eye thing
the rest is bleh
I didn't really appreciate it at all, but if you are proud of it then that is what counts.
I erase the text and then type things as they come to me
if there's something in that to laugh at, hooray
if not, there's always the next one
I'm not sure if that makes them better or worse.
even you, tube
The hands are very very tiny.
around the woorld
I would fuck her tenderly.
fuck
Good
You don't always have to fuck her hard. In fact, sometimes that's not right to do.
but her voice is annoying as hell, so
Ugly girls, hot voice: Crime against nature?
Thief 3 was good except they watered down the gameplay and all the suspense and tension, thus killing the mood of the whole thing. Plus, of course, watered down gameplay is lame.
What was watered down?
I will concede the level design wasn't quite as good.
Yeah, countless painstaking hours.
c'mon, man, you're better than this
maybe I don't know what to believe any more
I'm just a man on a forum with no answers
OK I mean I just said this, but I'm totally in love with the sound of my own voice, so...
In Thief 1 and 2, the game was designed to be played on Expert. You could tell because the storyline progressed in ways that included Garrett doing things that were only objectives in Expert mode, and not doing things that most players would do, except that they weren't allowed in Expert mode. For example, in Thief 2, we can tell that Garrett doesn't kill Ramirez in "Assassins" in Thief 1, even though most players probably would on non-Expert skill levels, but he does recover the masks from the Lost City, which is only an objective on Expert.
Point is, Garrett, in Thief 1 and 2, never kills another human. This was a big fucking deal for the gameplay, because you couldn't just kill guards if you fucked up and got caught; you could KO them with rare and expensive items (gas arrows, gas mines, or flashbomb + blackjack), or you could run and hide or explore somewhere else until they calmed down, which was frequently not quick. In some levels, they'd even sound alarms and alert the whole fucking place and it was really hard on you after that kind of mistake. That gameplay is what made Thief a pure stealth game (minus "action" levels like the goddamn Bonehoard)...it wasn't stealth-action because, unlike Rikimaru from Tenchu or Snake from MGS, you couldn't just slash or shoot your way out of trouble every time. You HAD to run and hide. Guards were scary. Getting caught was terrifying. Players would actually whisper while playing the game because the gameplay (obviously it wasn't the graphics) was so intense and immersive that the fear of being caught really got to the player. In addition, Garrett was constantly starving; roughly 50% of the missions he undertook in the first two games were just to pay the bills and keep his landlord and the church-police and the real police and the crime bosses off his ass. He spent a lot of time just scraping by, just barely able to survive, and that was a deep part of both the gameplay and the story/character.
Thief 3 throws that out the window; you can kill people on all difficulty levels. That right there takes away a lot of Garrett's mortality. Granted, they downgraded you from sword to dagger, so now you can't parry, but you can still feel free to shoot people with arrows. You're not constantly poor, either, and the black market is much more accessible, so Garrett can easily stock up on all his equipment; stuff is always available for purchase, and he always has tons of extra cash. All of the things that made the first two games work, notably the requirement to be stealthy and the atmosphere of suspense, tension, and desperation, are completely gone. Oh, right, and also the AI is dumber. A lot dumber. And much less persistent about hunting you down.
I played Thief 3 and didn't kill anyone. It had plenty of tension. I didn't notice any difference in the AI.
You just HAD to run and hide in 1 and 2, huh? Can you please explain why you CAN'T blackjack people after they're flashbombed in Thief 3, while you can in the previous two games?
You'd better believe it!
(Didn't know if it was too big to put it inline)
nice
Yeah, I'll explain exactly why you can't do that. Because if you flashbomb and then blackjack someone in Thief 3, it takes them out of the flashbomb instead of knocking them out, and then they start beating the shit out of you, instead of sleeping on the floor.
The AI forgets about you much faster in Thief 3. That's a big deal.
I played Thief 3 without killing anybody, too. Still didn't change the following facts:
1) I knew that I could kill if I had to.
2) I could easily keep myself fully loaded up on water arrows, so it wasn't a big deal to douse half the torches on the level (I didn't have to ration my water arrows carefully).
3) I could easily keep myself loaded up on moss arrows.
4) I could easily keep myself fully loaded up on flash bombs and gas arrows. You know, "get out of jail free" cards.
5) I could easily keep myself fully loaded up on potions.
What I'm saying is that I had no reason to be afraid of the guards. They were forgetful and easy to handle. Also, I noticed that if you press your back against a wall in a dark corner, guards cannot see you well enough to go from "suspicious" to "alert" status, so if you just press against a wall and wait, even guards who physically bump into you will not actually detect you.
Oh, right, and the third-person camera takes away immersion directly by removing the camera from the character, and lets you look around corners with zero exposure, an ability which removes some of the fear of the unknown.
because that's 5 kb dude
avatars kb limit is 8 times that