Exhuminator wrote:Xeogred wrote:The apprentice, Dishonored, has clearly become the master and destroys this game.
That's because some of the people who worked on the original Thief 1 & 2, also worked on Dishonored. Where the talent goes, the technique follows.
Makes sense.
Development on Thief 2014 was a real disaster though. Sounds like it was scrapped and rebuilt from the ground up possibly more than once or twice. And I don't think many of the key staff behind Deus Ex Human Revolution were involved, since I think that game was completely fantastic. But I guess that's a testament to how bloated dev teams are thesedays, despite sharing that same main name, it's hard to tell who's really working on it.
It's a shame because the art direction is amazing though and it has the right tone, a lot of cool ideas, but... mechanically the game falls flat on its face on critical elements. The level design in the hub areas is so ultra complex it's straight up annoying, to get to a street over you sometimes have to go around a block, climb through buildings, go through weird hidden paths and windows, then go through a loading screen, to simply get on the other side of some street you were at originally. And this is how the entire hub areas are designed. It's so claustrophobic and annoying, then there's the invisible walls at some heights, whereas vertical scaling in Dishonored was a beautiful thing and you could get on top of just about any building in the vicinity.
And then the enemy AI and sound design just didn't really work. And well, it's a stealth game, so... sound is a little important. This really hurts it. Once you're detected you may as well die or restart, there was something very frustrating about it, like I would have rather had Sam Fischer radio in to immediately tell me I failed and auto restart to a checkpoint, lol. I get that it's a stealth game, but you can usually recoup a bit in other games of this style, but here it was just... frustrating to deal with because you get caught by the games wonky sound design and the inconsistent enemy line of sight.
Otherwise it's a very well polished game visually and I'm glad I stuck it through, but it's a shame it messed up some major things.
I'd probably give it a 6/10, but only recommended to hardcore fans who are very interested in it.