THIEF 4 - Stolen Glory
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- čas přidán 3. 07. 2024
- (TIMESTAMPS BELOW!) Thief 4 (or Thief 2014 or just THIEF) is infamous for failing to live up to any of the standards set by its predecessors. It is considered to be one of the worst stealth games ever made, but how bad is it? In this review / analysis, I dive into the game and take a look at its features to see how flawed the game really is.
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Timestamps:
00:00 Start
04:11 Core Gameplay
07:55 - Equipment and Upgrades
13:53 Sound Design
16:34 Visuals and Setting
18:39 Level Design
30:52 (Over)animation
33:30 Loot
36:35 Development Woes
38:50 Concluding Thoughts
This game is available on steam, where it goes on sale for 3 bucks now and then. - Hry
I like thief 4 enough that i want thief 5 to retcon it as a dream, so damning with fain praise. The game even controls like bein chased in a dream, and Garretts not acting himself, like you do in a dream sometimes, also, i think eren was originally the little girl from the end of deadly shadows
I likesome of the ideas, like the new arrow types, and the ranking system (which i think a hitman style system could be great for thief) but it doesnt handle them well, excpet the lockpicking, which is really good. Both filcher and neon struct (indie thief clones) have a slide move, and implement it well, i remember liking the swoop too. Also, going through all the drawers is fun, and being able to feel around bookshelves and paintings is an improvement over having to painstakingly look at every book to see which glows
Man, i hope we get to do more with the sentients, they were really cool, especially the eye, i had a fan theory that thief 4 was something to do with the eye
Glad to have found this channel. This articulates my thoughts of Thi4f or Th4ef. I remember modding it or playing with the difficulty settings to make it less miserable.
Bit of a fun fact, but "Opportunist" is caused by picking locks, pockets, and not closing doors behind yourself/drawers when opened.
So to get Ghost, you have to be undetected with no suspicions raised, don't pick locks or pockets unless you have to, and close everything after you're done with it if it doesn't auto close. I believe using the cutter and wrench also raises opportunist. Which sucks because... well, as you noted, the best stealth options are always locked behind this shit so it just feels like you're being punished for engaging with the actual catburglar tools....
A few things as a person who played this on launch cause I got it as a random gift, it also had super big issues running well on PC. I am pretty sure the fog was made more dense and shit since launch too.
If you didn't play with a controller a lot of the minigames were impossible. If you used a gamepad without a vibrate function... You could only tell you were close to picking a lock because of the controller vibration, with no other indicators. Kingdom Come : Deliverance also made this horrible mistake.
Then there was horrible bugs like swooping against walls or into crates or tables getting you stuck, or birds detecting you even if you did walk, and the locked graphical settings where a lot of things are/were forced on, and even toggling them wouldn't do anything to change performance.
Oh another small note, is it just me, or does Thief 4 oddly enough feels like it's more influenced by games like Splinter Cell.
The light gem works the same way as the game's light indicator, the focus on immersive movements. Similarly Sam's movements in the OG games are slow and stilted due to how much they are, and you're generally locked at a slow pace through missions.
I forget if Dishonored was out around then. I feel like they intended this on being solved by Focus, ie. The stealth and speed boost Focus powers counteract the take down animation, and trivialize combat. That said the Focus minigame for lockpicking is still utterly unsolvable for me and I have no idea why it exists. I hate this game lmao
So that's how the 'ghost' accolade works? That is abysmal. No detections, kills, and knockouts is a perfect ghost run in my book. I sure 'love' the idea that you can fail ghost solely by leaving a couple drawers open.
Similarities to Splinter Cell may be coincidental, though I couldn't tell you for sure. They obviously wanted to distinguish this game from the original. Thief games in any way they could. Dishonored was out by the time Thief 4 released. I don't think I really mentioned it in this video, but there's no way they weren't influenced by Dishonored. It's just a shame they borrowed almost nothing Arkane did right.
Focus is such an awful mechanic, but mechanics like it are very common in modern stealth games (though indie developers have been picking up the slack there). Thief 4 wants you to use it more than most, thanks to the absurd number of overpowered upgrades you can acquire for it. I despise it, so I hardly used it in my playthrough outside of gathering footage.
I do agree that focusing while lockpicking consistently made it harder. It's like Oblivion lockpicking where I haven't bothered to learn how it works because I can easily completely bypass it. Just one more problem to add to the pile of trainwrecks that is Thief 4.
@@marriedtomychair Small note, but once you figure out Oblivion lockpicking it's kinda frustrating how easy it is. When you push up a tumbler, if it makes two clink sounds, you click, and it unlocks. Whereas the one in Thief 4 involves moving all the tumblers at once.
And yeah that was my main thing. If Focus was a bit nerfed, and instead functioned more like magic, or Garret's mechanical eye and etc. from the other games or whatever it would've been less aggravating.
But it starts off a bit too strong, and then it only gets worse. Also I think you forgot to mention the "trinket" items. They're mostly hot garbage.
Basso's reduces costs of resources (like arrows, not upgrades) by 25% which I guess adds up over time, while pretty much all of the rest of them have to do with boosting your health and focus gauge or the amount food and poppies restore, which are bad because they're so plentiful. Then there's one that's obscene that costs like... 28,000 from googling that decreases enemies ability to spot you and pretty much breaks the game.
Not that they'd save the game or anything, but they're another example of a poorly implemented system.
@@marriedtomychair Also, sorry for the extra reply, I am pretty sure the idea of "Ghost" is literally not leaving a trace. So picking locks, pockets, breaking trap boxes, using distractions, or wrenching grates, and glancing at the wiki and installing the game, putting out _torches_ causes opportunist to increase.
I'm not sure if cracking a safes breaks Ghost too. So pretty much engaging with anything but the line of sight BS causes you to lose ghost which is awful.
It means you're forced to take what you essentially called blatantly wrong routes, because most that shit is locked behind a wrench gate.
@@ArmoredSoul1 Yeah, the trinkets are such a small thing I probably only off-handedly mentioned them. There were multiple trinkets that cost 28k, which is ridiculous beyond belief. You outright cannot get 28k throughout a single run of the main campaign, even if you collect 100% loot and complete all challenges. The game lets you replay missions and retain money for a reason. I do appreciate the ability to replay missions, but it's a shame the game isn't fun enough to warrant it.
Allegedly, you can collect 100% loot and still get ghost in all missions. It's just painful and not particularly fun. Ghosting in this game simply isn't worth it. The gadgets and environmental interactions are half the fun of the series, even in Thief 4. So if you forbid yourself from using those things, the game becomes an even more boring chore. In a series about hiding in the darkness, indirectly punishing the player for extinguishing torches and candles is absurd. Opportunist is simply the objective way to play this game.
Also, yes, I have heard that about Oblivion lockpicking. I just grind alteration and/or go for skeleton key. Personally, I tend to dislike lockpicking minigames as a rule of thumb, so I'll go to great lengths to bypass them or make them faster. One of the only upgrades I purchased in Thief 4 was the maxed-out lockpicking upgrade, after all.
The Dark Project possibly my favorite game of all time. I saw it being played in passing back in 2009 and was immediately captured by the atmosphere and theme. Thief 4 was a major let-down, but maybe I’ll enjoy it if I just pretend it’s a completely different story.
You will not. I tried. This is not a stealth game just like Modern Military Shooter is not a shooter. Thief4 is a Modern Stealthy Shooter.
I gave up on it when I was hiding in a room where no guard can follow or hear me and I just switched on the light, I realized I'm undetectable there so I thought why not make some trouble, let's jump to the table... oh, yes, you can't just jump whenever you want, that would break the immersion being a fantasy thief. And in that moment all of my will to continue this game just vanished.
Or: TEEF (thanks Razorfist. We might not agree on stuff like Blade Runner 2049, but we CAN agree on how TEEF is a perfect nickname for this failed reboot).
As someone who hasn't played TEEF yet, even I'M baffled by some of the choices made: Why is the tone so needlessly gritty? Why did they have to simplify everything in the gameplay and alienate the key demographic? Why do people say modern swear words like "Fuck" every other word when the original trilogy established that they say "Taff" and the dialogue showed restraint back then? Why even set this game in the Thief equivalent of the present day to begin with when doing so (in the words of Bruce Wayne) just raises too many questions? *WHAT WERE THEY THINKING HERE?*
Basically, it's a misguided franchise killer through-and-through.
Franchise killer? I don't know. They definetely lost their original fanbase here. Remember that "this is not 1998 anymore" crap the developers pushed?
By the way your questions are kinda wrong. They didn't changed the original things you talking about. They had some money and zero idea so they took a franchise's name they owned and used it to make some money. They used the "Thief" name to make some money. Thi4f is a game what borned from creative bankrupcy. Those changes you talking about are not changes because this is not a Thief game, they just hired a suit who told them what is popular and they put into the game.