Thief 4. I shit you not.

[Lakov_Sanite]

Looks like an interesting art direction for the cg at least, sort of dreamworks/pixar type characters.

[Sky]

That's my concern with Dishonored when considered as a Thief-alternative, as well.

However.

They said the magic word. Ghost.

If the 'some think it's X, some thing it's Y' was about approaching levels like you could in Thief 2....yeah.

[Fabricated]

I don't know if you'll see a game like Thief where combat is de-emphasized ever again really, at least anything AAA. Garret will probably be able to kick the shit out of people.

[Sky]

Having that option is fine imo. But being able to ghost it and have that as fun as it was in Thief 2 is what will make or break this title for me.

[K9]

I don't know if you'll see a game like Thief where combat is de-emphasized ever again really, at least anything AAA. Garret will probably be able to kick the shit out of people.

I think Deus Ex struck that balance pretty well for a modern game, I'd argue that the stealth in DX was better than Dishonoured. It'd be nice to go the whole hog and have a proper glass character, at worst they might be able to add in a mode for that, where you die after one or two hits.

[HaemishM]

Deus Ex: HR's problem was the ending and the weapons (specifically some weapons just being utterly useless) but the stealth was decent.

[Ingmar]

Deus Ex: HR's problem was the ending and the weapons (specifically some weapons just being utterly useless) but the stealth was decent.

And the boss fights and the racial portrayals.

[HaemishM]

Shit, I had forgotten the assyass boss fights and inherent racism.

[Ironwood]

Racism ?  Refresh me ?

[Ingmar]

Racism ?  Refresh me ?

http://techland.time.com/2011/08/31/the-worst-thing-about-deus-ex-human-revolution/

I'd add the fact that pretty much every character you meet in Shanghai is in organized crime or a whore, myself, but the character that article is talking about is the one that literally made me squirm.

[HaemishM]

I was thinking of Shanghai mostly. I never even met the Letitia character but holy fuck... blackface is right.

[Sjofn]

Holy crap, when Ingmar idly mentioned the racism to me as a reason he didn't like it, I didn't realize it was that ... you know. That.

[tgr]

Huh. It didn't even register anywhere in my mind.

[Ingmar]

Huh. It didn't even register anywhere in my mind.

Yes, well, your ability to detect these sorts of offenses is perhaps slightly in question:

In fact, I'll go so far as to say that there's not much incentive to go to 0.0 at all at this point, except for all the drama. If I hadn't been in goonswarm already (or any reasonably newbie-friendly alliance, for that matter), chances are I'd just say "you know what? Fuck this nigger game", and moved on, because you can only really mine or do missions for so long before you start to /wrist.

[tgr]

Yes, because the use of one word, once, make me a racist.

[Sjofn]

It certainly doesn't make you a candidate for "can tell when something is horribly racist," at any rate.

[tgr]

Or perhaps the reason I'm not as hypersensitive to it is because, well, racism isn't that big of a problem up here. But sure, if using the word once makes me a racist, then using the word "gay" makes me a homophobe, and saying "that's interesting, but" makes me a climate sceptic. What else?

[Sjofn]

It certainly doesn't make you a candidate for "can tell when something is horribly racist," at any rate.

[Ingmar]

Nobody called you a racist, and gay isn't a slur.

Point being your failure to notice how awful the caricature in the game was is not very surprising, given you seemingly thought nothing of dropping the N bomb in a thread about internet spaceships.  I have no idea what passes for polite discourse on the topic in Norway, but you're certainly not very clued in on the subtext that character has for Americans.

[Paelos]

I get what they were trying to do with that particular character, but they fucked it up. The black street denizens in Atlanta don't sound like the crows from Dumbo.

[Sjofn]

When I was little, I loved those crows. They were the fucking heroes of the film! Then I grew up and went "... oh." 

[tgr]

Nobody called you a racist, and gay isn't a slur.

Point being your failure to notice how awful the caricature in the game was is not very surprising, given you seemingly thought nothing of dropping the N bomb in a thread about internet spaceships.  I have no idea what passes for polite discourse on the topic in Norway, but you're certainly not very clued in on the subtext that character has for Americans.

Considering you remembered that from 1.5 years ago, no, I don't put as much emphasis on that word as you do.

Two reasons for that: 1) racism isn't generally a problem here, so you're right, that in and of itself makes me less hypersensitive to it, 2) I frequent other forums, where "the n bomb" (and other words which I'm sure will offend someone, somewhere) is readily dropped in any context other than a racial one, and 3) most of the time the racism card (or its brother, sexism) is being played, it tends to be because the guy (or girl) playing it is being an ass or did something wrong and is being punished for it. Obviously it still happens, and it's fairly obvious when it does happen, but it tends to be fairly infrequent.

And with that I think I'm going to just drop this subject, enough derailing on my part I think.

[Lakov_Sanite]

A backhoe might be faster for the task you are trying to accomplish.

[rk47]

I think the people you met in Hengsha are mostly lowlifes - that's why they talk like that.
And yes, punching out that prostitute who is asking for help and picking up her credit chit is pretty acceptable in my book.
Especially this asshole.

[Samprimary]

everything is racist forever and the world sucks. This place is rife with racial slurs, everywhere. You keep hearing people say "Fuck this Ingmar game" and "You fucking dirty Ingmars" and it .. er, wait. I think I have some words mixed up. but what cannot be excused is the pathetic trickle of ammunition DE3 petulantly doled out to you in meager, miserly wisps. You would kill people one powerbar at a time and carefully comb over each and every corpse, desperate and crying for even a dream of a ghost of a fraction of a bullet, remembering the good years before that time a dude threw you through a wall and broke your infinite ammo, forever. Now you're looking at guns which might have, in an alternate universe, been fun to use. But you drop it because you know you will only ever find six shots for it from now until the heat death of the universe. You never asked for this. And you simply can't waste that space. That space is for your creatine protein powder jugs you regularly inhale in a spectacular split second so that your robot punchorstab fist might punchorstab a dude then — in a glorious show of the majesty of your fusion of man and machine — be able to subsequently punchorstab a second dude without a union break first.

Thief will be better pretty much guaranteed because Garrett won't have to scrimp and scrounge and hunt through every nook, cranny, and corpse for additional swishes of his sword or baps of his blackjack, and I'm okay with that. I will try to like this game. I will like this game, until I reach the point where I'm stuck on a level and the game helpfully hints me towards the shop wherein I discover that rope arrows are day one DLC.

[rk47]

ok , dawg.

[eldaec]

For me dxhr came across as trying to do a sandboxy city but hitting the wall of console limitations. Everyone in shanghai was a prostitute or gangster because the plot had you face down a mafia and there was no space left for anyone else. Similarly everyone in Detroit was a corporate drone or a goddamn hippy. I blame fucking consoles.

Tgr OTOH has, I suspect, simply been posting in goonswarm lately and carried over certain vocab norms which are unhelpful outside of that very specific community.

[tgr]

For me dxhr came across as trying to do a sandboxy city but hitting the wall of console limitations. Everyone in shanghai was a prostitute or gangster because the plot had you face down a mafia and there was no space left for anyone else. Similarly everyone in Detroit was a corporate drone or a goddamn hippy. I blame fucking consoles.

To be honest, I've become so used to games set in the future to be dystopian and bleak, and as such have tons of people spewn everywhere as "social delinquents". In fact, the main reason I even remember the character Letitia was because when I stumbled across her, I thought "god damn, whomever did wrote and/or recorded the accent of her sure knew how to overplay". Apart from that, my impression of the game itself was that it was too small, and with too few people to actually feel like a proper city, and as such the suspension of disbelief necessary to accept the world was just a tad too much for me.

I wouldn't be surprised if you're exactly right in pointing the blame at consoles for this, in fact I'm almost convinced you're pretty much spot on. We can only hope that the next generation of consoles will have enough storage space and memory available to allow game developers to actually break past this barrier.

As to Thief 4, I'm kind of expecting that to be more of the same in this regard, but I still have some hope that they'll be able to do what Ubisoft did with assassin's creed or Rockstar did with the GTAs with their environment, and actually make it feel like a large and (semi-)believable city.

Tgr OTOH has, I suspect, simply been posting in goonswarm lately and carried over certain vocab norms which are unhelpful outside of that very specific community.

The post Ingmar drug up was the only post on here where I slipped up wrt that particular word. I ignored the "hurr you're a racist" responses then, because I knew it would just turn into absolute shit if I said "no, I'm not". I should've done exactly the same thing this time as well. But yes, you're right as to the origin of the vocab norms, which is what I referred to as "other forums", amongst others.

[Fabricated]

everything is racist forever and the world sucks. This place is rife with racial slurs, everywhere. You keep hearing people say "Fuck this Ingmar game" and "You fucking dirty Ingmars" and it .. er, wait. I think I have some words mixed up. but what cannot be excused is the pathetic trickle of ammunition DE3 petulantly doled out to you in meager, miserly wisps. You would kill people one powerbar at a time and carefully comb over each and every corpse, desperate and crying for even a dream of a ghost of a fraction of a bullet, remembering the good years before that time a dude threw you through a wall and broke your infinite ammo, forever. Now you're looking at guns which might have, in an alternate universe, been fun to use. But you drop it because you know you will only ever find six shots for it from now until the heat death of the universe. You never asked for this. And you simply can't waste that space. That space is for your creatine protein powder jugs you regularly inhale in a spectacular split second so that your robot punchorstab fist might punchorstab a dude then — in a glorious show of the majesty of your fusion of man and machine — be able to subsequently punchorstab a second dude without a union break first.

Thief will be better pretty much guaranteed because Garrett won't have to scrimp and scrounge and hunt through every nook, cranny, and corpse for additional swishes of his sword or baps of his blackjack, and I'm okay with that. I will try to like this game. I will like this game, until I reach the point where I'm stuck on a level and the game helpfully hints me towards the shop wherein I discover that rope arrows are day one DLC.

I dunno, Deus Ex:HR really encourages searching anyone you killed or knocked out because most of them tended to have a PDA entry with door/computer codes or other stuff on them. I also never had a problem with ammo since I stuck with the pistol, magnum, and stungun- magnum ammo is rareish but buyable at points and after you trick it out, it's pretty much a 1-shot kill on anything but bosses, heavies, and boxbots. The game shits pistol and stungun ammo all over you.

Of course the game heavily encourages just sneaking up on people or running straight up to them and mashing the "Punch Mans/Arm Sword Mans in the face" button while slamming powerbars.

I'm still wondering how Jensen uses the gigantic container of energy drink powder stuff. I like to imagine him just dumping the container on his face because it makes me laugh.

[Lakov_Sanite]

DX:HR Had it's faults but inventory management? That's a new one. I never had any trouble finding bullets or felt like it was tedious to do so.

Also thief is chock full of inventory when you consider arrows,smoke bombs,potions, etc.

[Sky]

This is why announcing games with no info is bad.

[Yegolev]

I'm cynical enough now to assume exactly zero of the great things that could be in T4 will actually be in the game; one of these would be sneaking.  Hell, rope arrows didn't exist in T3.

I do remember that T1 scared the shit out of me a couple times, only beaten out by Amnesia (fuck that game).  No way in fuckland is that going to be replicated in a modern title.

[Samprimary]

DX:HR Had it's faults but inventory management? That's a new one. I never had any trouble finding bullets or felt like it was tedious to do so.

I'm just overcriticizing the game because it burned me out on playthrough 1 because I liked weapons that were completely unfeasible to use due to ammo constraints/size

Learned my lesson, used pistol instead on my second try.

[K9]

For the record, I didn't pick up on any racist subtext in DXHR.

I'd add the fact that pretty much every character you meet in Shanghai is in organized crime or a whore, myself, but the character that article is talking about is the one that literally made me squirm.

Except for all the people living above the plate, who were all engineers, scientists, businessmen, or construction workers. Also, all the people in and around the Hengsha Court Gardens were just regular civilians and shopkeepers, the whores and criminals are all around The Hive. Hell, even the people in the Alice Gardens Pods were mostly just normal folk. Furthermore, the streets of Detroit were pretty light on anyone who wasn't a gangster, whore, or junkie.

Boss fights, and the ending were really the only problems with the game. On the flip side, the magnum that shot exploding bullets was  

[eldaec]

Most of those civilians were either secretly part of, in debt to, working for, escaping from, or defined by being a victim of, the aforementioned mafia.

I think to call it racist overstates the case, but in the grim dark future, all american cities are dominated by corporations, all Asian cities are dominated by crime lords, while Europe and Africa cease to exist.

It is known.