|
It's always fun to watch someone play the Thief games! With respect to blackjacking, some levels make it tougher to knock everyone out than to ghost the whole thing. One of the hardest things I did in Thief Gold was knocking out every guard in the casino. Of course, you're generally expected to only KO the ones you need to and sneak past the others. The other great thing about this engine is of course the crate stacking. Shipping/Receiving has enough crates to stack all the way to the skybox if I remember rightly. Getting Basso to ghost the first mission requires crate abuse as well.
|
#
¿
Jun 25, 2019 15:17
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 9, 2024 06:21 |
|
|
drygear posted:It's totally more difficult to blackjack everyone than to skip some. I'm prone to verbal gaffes, one kind is where I say the exact opposite of what I mean to, and another is where I really overstate something. I'm tempted to edit that part of the commentary out when I rework the episode but I don't want to be too George Lucas about it so I might not. Nah, no need to go in and change it, because your point is entirely valid - blackjacking guards makes things a whole lot easier. I just wanted to bring up a sort of extreme that you can go to it where it goes back around to being harder again. And even then it's only in some situations and by following self-imposed restrictions (e.g. if I go for a total KO mission, I allow no level two alerts and no body dragging). I'll see how the re-upped videos look, but yeah, a few dark areas might be improved by tweaking. Shipping & Receiving really shows the contrast in some parts. I found it somewhat harder to watch when my room was bright, but it was fine at night and with slightly dimmed lights.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 27, 2019 06:27
|
|
|
To me, Framed almost seems too much designed for a no-KO run. The layout is fine, but a lot of it feels empty, as if they took out stuff in order to make it more accessible to players who aren't used to that style. But with all the back and forth you have to do, it's a bit tiresome. The later non-KO mission is a lot better in the guard design and I don't hate it for the one after it, I reserve my dislike for that one; since there's a lot more overlap in zones, and it's far more open-ended. I would agree that Ambushed is the superior city mission, as it's one of the few that lets you wander through various parts of the city, and it has a mostly-authentic feel of the city at night. If you ever play T2X, that's one thing it does really well. You feel like you're sneaking through a city, instead of some impossibly large building complex.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 13, 2019 23:02
|
|
|
I suppose what really bothers me in Shoalsgate Station is the way the guards are spread out unevenly. There are a few areas that are densely packed and amount to puzzles you have to get by, and then a fair amount of empty unpatrolled space. It seems just a bit too contrived based on where Garrett has to go. Contrast that with the bank, which is enormous but has most of this space interconnected via sound and odd architecture. As bizarre as it is, it works quite well and makes for a very deep experience. And while there are the more lightly-guarded locations in the level, it feels a lot more natural and serves to heighten the tension as you work towards the vault. As for T2X, the first mission is awful and does so much wrong and made me give up on it. I won't say that the rest is all better than it, but it shows how low it can go. You can see the ambition in it, but it does not always work. The second mission is immediately better and much more Thief-like.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 16, 2019 20:08
|
|
|
I think that's a fair assessment of the way the plot and characters worked in this game. It's like each individual mission was written with all the requisite nuance and flavor of contributing to the narrative, but then nobody actually worked on telling that main story. As a result you get a Truart who's barely there as a character or even antagonist, and even Karras doesn't get fleshed out much until the end. It's not that it's bad, it's just a flaw, especially compared to the first. Recently I was kind of stuck dealing with an illness that left me unable to move around much, and this thread made me re-install T2 to try out the updated Dark engine and the enhanced textures. It looks fine and is still a lot of fun to play through even today.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 23, 2019 22:12
|
|
|
This is a mission that shouldn't succeed, since you aren't doing much thievery, and yet it does. Did you know that Dewdrop can do something special? Get some mechanists to chase/attack you while carrying him. The courier mission prior is a lot of fun if you lure the zombie out of the graveyard. None of the city guards can kill it (though I think the mechanist hammers might) so you can take your pet zombie all over the place and watch him devour everyone.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 2, 2019 14:55
|
|
|
No worries about waiting, the update pace has been good. Dewdrop just needs at least two mechanists actively chasing you and close by. Possibly you have to go near one of the floating fairy lights. The times I've tried it I had to go near those lights anyway since it's the easiest place to get multiple enemies noticing you and not stuck on a tree or something. The patch (1.18) is required but you'll have it if you're using T2Fix.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 5, 2019 02:44
|
|
|
That's amazing. I never knew about the extra mechanists that show up if you don't disable the alarm. I just always turned it off. And I can't believe you murdered Longdaddy in cold blood.  This game actually came out after System Shock 2; the nebulous connection between LGS and Irrational was I think part of the legal mess that Nightdive had to deal with to get it released (EA's interest being another big part of it).
|
|
#
¿
Aug 9, 2019 21:11
|
|
|
You can get Dromed, the level editor, working pretty easily if you want to view the levels in their full glory. I've never used it to edit any missions, but you can move the camera around fairly easily (using the key cluster around Z-Q-E-C). I may be able to post a screenshot later on of this one. I think it's an excellent design in terms of progression and layout. It feels much bigger than it actually is.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 15, 2019 22:53
|
|
|
Here's a wireframe image of the level, taken from Dromed. You can make out the lighthouse on the right and the elevator shaft below it. The initial start area is roughly in the center (the room in red where the white crosshairs are pointing). The 'subaquatic' bases are straight ahead, but they don't go too far back. Markham's ship is on the left side, and we can see it's actually higher up than the starting cave! 
Kangra fucked around with this message at 19:10 on Aug 16, 2019 |
|
#
¿
Aug 16, 2019 19:07
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 9, 2024 06:21 |
|
|
It's good that Sabotage at Soulforge is a pretty decent final mission; it's a lot better than Into the Maw in the first game. Masks was a lot more enjoyable with a co-commentator, since they could add observations from seeing the map in the previous mission, while also being able to talk about what you were doing now. It's abundantly clear that it's one good mission stretched out, but even then it's kind of a mess. The whole security light puzzle is way too obtuse -- when you enter the room there's no hint as to what they do, or why they turn on/off in odd patterns but never all off at once. The idea is that the colors correspond to the room's wall color, except they barely match (notably the 'blue' light is purple). You also have all the misaligned or incomplete objects, like the pipe in the secret passage. Additionally, it barely feels like the time spent casing is applicable. Chests and more loot* suddenly appear, you really don't learn much about how to get to the masks other than the secret passage, and even the additional guards don't present much challenge. Incidentally you can completely bypass the cuckoo clock to get to the third floor, and it's usually where I start. By climbing up to the second level (it's easier & less noisy to stack crates by the wall where you start) you can sneak past the guards and use a vine arrow to get up the wooden balcony structure. There is a Watcher out there, so you have to be careful and quick getting to the door, but then you're in free. I think it's not even locked in Casing. One neat note about the clock though, is that once you fix it, it actually 'works', so when you set the time to midnight, the passage closes one minute later as it changes to 12:01. * A great deal of the loot in Casing is just in the form of coins. But they're often really well hidden in random spots, which is why so much of it was missed in your run.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 12, 2019 16:37
|
|