How did devs manage to get gaming to go downhill so fast?

How did devs manage to get gaming to go downhill so fast?

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youtube.com/watch?v=JKVSyGvSQR8
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irrationalgames.com/insider/what-might-have-been/
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So this...

>That max gamma

Gotta do that when you aren't playing the game in pitch black.

Thief 4 is underrated

>mfw I see this Thief screenshot
>mfw I remember how great the 1990s-early 2000s were for PC gaming and gaming in general
Why are we still here?

normalfaggots

...

Because somewhere in our minds we somehow believe that it could be just half as good again someday... and we are retarded.

it's not the devs fault as can be seen with the recent Deux Ex.

Square Enix kept fucking with the production when the team wanted to optimize the game.

Blame the AAA publishers. It's a bunch of executives that have no idea how gaming works. Just adding bullshit to look important.

Wrong.

Isn't there anything we can do?

>tfw you will live to see the real Thief 4

Wait what's that? A fan made Thief 4? Tell me more

so how do you think otherside entertainment is going to end up. do you think they lost their touch?

The real Thief 3 was, of course, T2x.
youtube.com/watch?v=JKVSyGvSQR8

Consoles.

youtube.com/watch?v=HJHpb46-WCY

I have no hope

It's the design philosophy
it used to be about the player using the tools given to master the level now the levels revolve around the player

What is this abomination?
>they want to recreate thief combat system
Into the trash it goes

There are some good games being released occasionally that's why hope never leaves me, lol.

>assuming you survive

my fucking sides

So, how is the Dark Mod?

>thief combat system
which is basically the ultima underworld combat system

Aren't those the devs that are making system shock 3...

HAHAHAHA IT WILL BE FINE GUYS. IT WILL ALL BE FINE. IT IS GOING TO SAVE GAMING.

>That 80% of unity asset flip

Thief's multi-devs fan campaigns are notorious. T2X is the only one that actually went as planned. Seven Shades of Mercury and CoSaS only had one mission done each, Death's Cold Embrace is over 15 years in the making, even DrK is struggling with Rocksbourg. Crucible of Omens is also dead in the water.
What I'm saying is, even if this gets made, what are the odds any of us will live to see it released? 15 years? What do the actuary tables say? There's like a 5 to 10 percent chance you won't make it.

To be fair, the very little they've shown since this shows reasonable improvement. I get the impression that they're little demos were put out more out of a sense of obligation to prove to ks backers that they hadn't fallen off the earth, rather than a genuine impression of the game.

Still though
>kickstarter
>revival of an old series
Red flags.

even worse apparently its all old looking glass employees. they lost it we need to put them out of their mysery

No, guys, seriously. This looks like it's almost as good as the original games, why aren't we jerking off over The Dark Mod? Something must be wrong here?

I'm waiting with my mouse over the download button here.

Wasn't the combat the only thing everyone hated about Thief 1 & 2 and the reason that people used stealth?

how long has this been in development now? It doesn't look that great I mean the animations and some other assets look like they could be placeholders still...
they'll probably run another kickstarter for that when the time comes and yeah they sell themselves as being ex LGS but it's not entirely true

Look at Underworld Overlord. They're ripping off that art style which frankly looks like shit, and the game itself looks really subpar. It's also a paid mobile app with in-app purchases. It's trash.

MY FUCKING 18+ YEAR WAIT
SYSTEM SHOCK 3 WILL NEVER BE GOOD AAAAAAAA

Really? How can that even be possible? Did looking glass ever make a single mistake? Maybe we need to convince them to make system shock 3 on the dark engine.

>yfw its all over

Hmm maybe we don't need to loose hope just yet... Warren Spector joined them recently.

...

its over

I can see something good coming out of this project, anything takes time to polish and try out, especially nowadays.

Combat was never meant to be the focus, you're a thief, not an assassin.

youtube.com/watch?v=edMlwffFfXk

>female protagonist

Thief looked and played terrible until like 6 months before launch. Even LGS devs admitted this.
Iterating is important for every game, but it's absolutely crucial for LGS-type immersive sims. All the different moving parts only come together right at the end.

apparently it runs on unity 4.5

youtube.com/watch?v=jPqwDGXxLhU
Every dev should watch this video.

you could always play as a female in the original games
not voiced though obviously

T1 Final mission > T2 Final

>expecting a comfy thief thread
>get my hopes crushed instead

Maw is better than Soulforge, both are underrated.

I don't know about that game because I have no interest at all in games like that. They said it was made by a different group than their main team, so hopefully that means it doesn't have any bearing on how their other games are. If it does and they're shit, I'll just go back to playing Thief FM's like I have for the last decade. I think I've lost my ability to be disappointed, since nearly every game at this point is a disappointment.
Maybe I'd be more mad if I backed it. God knows why people still trust Kickstarters.

There there user, gaming is fucking dead, but there is still a very slim hope that it might be ok.

I am not gonna lose hope just yet.

I found T1 to be, in general, much more enjoyable than T2, against all expectations. Which is weird since The Metal Age is still an amazing fucking game, too.

It had little quirky things that annoyed me, though. Like, during Life of the Party, they couldn't be bothered to include Karras personally due to various reasons, so they gave you his recordings instead, half of which were muffled by background noises and the other half couldn't be understood because Karras is a fucking autistic nerd who has a lisp.

Meanwhile, fucking up Satan himself and styling on him by hanging from rope arrows and stealing the eye was the most metal shit ever.

Yes. Don't buy their games.

I really liked Thief 3. Then again, I am that guy who played Thief 3, couldn't run the installed Thief 2 when he tried, and completed only the first mission in Thief 1.

Still, I liked the story, characters and atmosphere in T3. Shalebridge Cradle was great. i also loved how some of the city hub levels could turn into a complete mess with several factions trying to kill each other while civilians helplessly run around.

But the game still had some terrible (but funny) oversights, like living statue and mermen enemies being unable to hit Garret while he crouches.

You're right but I need something to look forward to.

There are a lot of smaller 2-4 mission campaigns, right? Which of those are the best?

This video was great and it's a huge shame this guy doesn't make more videos; he's talented.

But user, if you accept that your hopes are truly crushed then the only thing left is to be pleasantly surprised.

I can't choose between 1 and 2 but they are both better than 3. They made some very strange choices with 3, but I those thief 3 was also pretty good.

The Shalebridge Cradle is one of the best levels in the entire series.

Gaming as an Industry went from
High Risk Low Reward
Faggots made games that other Faggots wanted to play (See Bungies Old Motto)

To

Low Risk High Reward
Those same faggots retired from the industry, handing it over to business men because they found a way to appeal to the largest crowd by shitting out a product that makes a lot of money with little effort.

That being said, good games are few and far between now a days but they still exist. Gaming as a Money Making Industry is phenomenal, we turned garage companies into multi billionaires.

Its just that its for the consumer now, not the hobbyist.

>It's a "massturd racer slaps shitty textures over someone's art and calls it better" level
>muh mods

You and autists like you are the ones that killed it. Have fun.

I agree with this guy

I also agree with this guy. T3 was great

What are you even trying to communicate?

I think at this point I'd take another Thief 3 over Thi4f any day. Which is probably lowered expectations, but hey, I'm not picky. Really the only problem I had with Thief 3 is a couple boring levels and that fucking consolized interface. Kills the atmosphere every time I bring it up.

None of this matters though. A game like Thief wouldn't sell today - that's why we have Dishonored.

...

The one in your photo is fantastic. Gems of Provenance, right? That's one of the best FM campaigns in recent years.
Other than that, off the top of my head:
Godbreaker: just came out, consists of one solid(#1) and two spectacular(#2 and #3) missions
The Black Frog: campaign by gaetane. Very high production values. Check out her other missions first, they've got connected storylines.
Ominous Bequest followed by Broken Triad are also good stuff.

Why are none of these on moddb?

Check thiefmissions.com for Thief FMs

THIS new

There's no point in making another thief because it will never have that magic the originals have. No one makes worlds that immersive anymore, to where the game systems are programmed and then interact with each other. It goes beyond you being the creator of your story, but requires that the game be designed as a simulation. Modern games don't do that anymore and it would be impossible to have something like thief 1 or 2 today, and that is what makes thief thief. Why would you settle for anything less like dishonored, that game is trash.

>strolling through the city with your new friend Lauryl as everybody including the guards run away screaming

>Why are we still here?
We are here to talk older games that are after the year 2000 since the faggots at /vr/ will ban you if you post a game from 2001.
>inb4 not true
I got banned for making a Wizardry 8 thread.So fuck them and i moved to Sup Forums since i can have games from every year here.

That is Gems of Provenance, or more specifically The Widow's Ire, which is two missions which were also the first two missions of Gems of Provenance. I haven't gotten around to the rest of Gems yet but the missions I played were great. The author definitely understands what made The Dark Project so eerie.

What's the problem with moddb?

I can't hold all this smug from your characters, user.

>these guys used to be leagues ahead of other devs when it came to technology

>Pre-alpha Prototype
Are you people retarded
The concepts I'm seeing here are brilliant

youtube.com/watch?v=DgRUJqrBVIM
Damn..........gaming is ruined...................

>fire arrows
youtube.com/watch?v=zTd_0FRAwOQ

You may be right user

It was easier to do that on a budget back in the day when 3d games with texture mapping weren't really a thing.

What went wrong with thief 4?
No really, i forgot almost everything about that game
All i remember is that they say actual real life swear words instead of taffer and that there is one of those mechanical cherub things that doesn't do anything

I don't think there are any great concepts on display in that video. A lot of the things they've talked about are cool but I'm not going to assume any of that's making it into the game until I see it. Nonetheless I'll reserve judgement till the game's out.

webm related summed it all up, right when the game was first shown to the public.

Make no mistake, all these devs have been polluted living in the gaming industry.
Ion Storm which had a lot of exLGS at the time notably made both Deadly Shadows and Invisible War

There's a lot of space to fuck things up, but by the way they're making it so far, I think they have their heart in the right place.

Said no Thief fan ever.

Looking Glass made plenty of mistakes, like the FMV cutscenes in Terra Nova Strike Force Centauri that nearly put them out of business before they made Thief. I'm personally of the opinion that the RPG elements in SS2 were a huge mistake, though that can maybe be pinned to Irrational.

What was wrong with the RPG elements?

I strongly preferred the way that System Shock handled character progression through equipment rather than abstract EXP/modules and skills. Even though the LGS games span different genres, they all felt like iterations on the immersive sim idea brought to the table by Ultima Underworld. With Ultima Underworld, the idea was to use the power of then-modern computers to remove the abstractions of prior dungeon crawlers and RPG. So rather than having the game presented as a series of 2d digital paintings (or even wireframe drawings) which the player navigates with discrete hops between squares on a grid, the game was genuinely 3d with continuous movement, the ability to jump and look up and down, simple 3d physics, realtime rather than turn-based combat, things like that. However there were still remnants of those prior games, in the form of skills and EXP, and the robotic dialogue system.
System Shock is a lot like UUW, but it did away with those things, and I always thought it felt a lot more natural. In that game you don't upgrade your character's reloading skill in increments using abstract experience points, you (the player) get better at reloading the more you do it (reloading's a silly example because it's so simple but you get what I mean, it's player skill vs. character skill). SS2 reverted back to the old RPG elements, and as a consequence you end up with humorous situations like the trained soldier who's a dead eye with a pistol but can't figure out how to use a rifle.

And now I see this is an overlong explanation of a simple idea. But anyway, Thief was like System Shock. You don't spend 5000g to make +10% less noise on hard surfaces, you just play the game and through your own experience start to recognize when it's appropriate to use equipment in order to silence your footsteps, and you get a better feel for how close you can get to a guard before they hear you, and so on. SS, Terra Nova SFC, and Thief were all like this, and which is a logical continuation from UUW, but then all of a sudden SS2, which unlike those games was a joint effort between LGS and Irrational, takes a step back. That's why I suspect it's Irrational's doing.

Anyway, how about them texture mods?

Jesus Christ, man, this looks like shit!

Adding to the mistake list
>the entire last 3rd or 4th of System Shock 2 was a mess, especially the part where they accidentally produced the gag placeholder ending instead of the actual ending and had to ship it
>only 1 out of the 3 Thief Gold missions was as good as it should have been
>the levels in both Thief games tend to get worse toward the end of each game
>British Open Championship Gold

Thief has godawful early 2000s PC controls. I have no idea what went through dev heads at the time, but it wasn't good.

Good thing they had the foresight to let you rebind them then.

There are quite simply way too fucking many functions in the first place.

games are in every way better than they used to be

>they accidentally produced the gag placeholder ending instead of the actual ending and had to ship it
Can't tell if you're being serious here.

Most of them are unnecessary. The controls I use are:
>WASD + space for movement
>q, e for leaning, alt+w for forward leaning
>ctrl crouch
>shift creep
>scroll wheel inventory
>LMB attack, RMB frob
>g hide weapon, b hide inventory item
>`, 0-9 for weapon and arrow selection
With this, Thief controls great. Because of the way the game is designed, it actually feels less clunky than most modern games that I've played.

They didn't, you and the rest of Sup Forums are just retarded and have too much nostalgia and too much of a desire to be a contrarian hipster to realize that, with the exception of perhaps this parituclar generation, games have generally gotten better over time.

Beyond the obvious increase in graphics and audio quality, games have content, are cheaper relative to inflation, are more mechanically complex, and are way, way, way more fucking polished. There's also way more games coming out that are good or better thanks to how easy it is to make games now with the indie scene, and shovelware is dead, which alone would bumbp up the average game quality by a huge margin.

It just seems like games are worse because there's less innovation and variety in the AAA scene, and instead of reovlutionary stuff every few years, there's rather incremental improvements, but was inevitable as the medium matured. Also, if the majority of games that come out are good to great or even excellenet, then that no longer seems like an exception to the rule and stands out less. We take the quality for granted now.

Alright, I'll try this out next time I fire the old game up. Hopefully I change my tune, because I'd really like to not have buyer's remorse about it anymore.

99% of everything is shit, the shit is just forgotten eventually.
Old games being better is just a meme reinforced by nostalgia and confirmation bias. There were as many good and bad games back then as there is today.

>“Due to miscommunications or differing ideas, a different cinematic video was created from the one that I originally scripted,” [...] Upon getting his hands on the video for the ending sequence, Levine didn’t see anything that he wrote in the script. “We didn’t have much to work with. It was like when you look in the cupboard and you’re trying to make soup, and you have a bag of salt and couple of pinto beans.” Working with fixed assets can be extremely challenging especially with limited time and resources as well as fighting the technology back then. Levine remembers, “We had to write to the assets we had at that point, and all we could do was edit it. We completely ran out of time and that cut scene wasn’t the right ending for the game.”
irrationalgames.com/insider/what-might-have-been/

Nah fuck off. There's not a lot of functions at all, and everything's useful.
Other than the weapon keys, the control scheme could easily be mapped to a gamepad.
How do you run?