This game is underrated.

[dprog1995]

Finished Thief 4, and I personally believe that it doesn't deserve that 70 MC score.

I got this game for 3 dollars and expected to play a disaster sequel/reboot.(Since I have played all the previous Thief games before this game)

But I started playing it, chose the custom difficulty setting , removed the focus mode , mini map, Markers during gameplay and interactable object highlights and I really enjoyed it and felt that it was a pretty good sequel.

-The city areas were much better than the way they were in Thief 3 and side missions were my favorite part of the game.

-The puzzles were good.(Since I played without the focus mode and object highlights it made them much more challenging.)

-I liked this that they made sword wielding enemies much more dangerous.(Since they can throw daggers at you unlike Thief 1-3 where they can't do anything to you once you climb a wall.)
I liked the addition of caged animals too.

-Giving Garrett some new moves such as swooping and changing covers, and new abilities such as hiding in closets,using new type of arrows to switch lights.

The only things of this game that I didn't really like were:
1.The story(It felt disconnected to the previous games)
2.And this that all the main missions were kinda linear with some doors blocking the previous areas.(So, no cool side missions.)

Thief 3 was a inferior game than this one imo.(Despite this that that game got like 80+ MC score)

I also prefer this over Thief 2 since Thief 2 for me had it's own issues such as reusing lots of assets and menus from Thief 1, Some disappointing levels(Lost City and final mission) and replacing zombies and spiders with robot enemies.

[Kunovega]

It's a good $5 game.

The problem is at the time of release this was a $60 mess (very buggy) that didn't live up to the franchise (bad story, ignores previous games) and the DLC were straight up predatory, especially the limited use ones.

Originally posted by dprog1995:

Finished Thief 4, and I personally believe that it doesn't deserve that 70 MC score.

I got this game for 3 dollars and expected to play a disaster sequel/reboot.(Since I have played all the previous Thief games before this game)

Again you are judging it at a sale price, imagine 6 years ago people paying full price + day one DLC on launch day in addition to the full price

But I started playing it, chose the custom difficulty setting , removed the focus mode , mini map, Markers during gameplay and interactable object highlights and I really enjoyed it and felt that it was a pretty good sequel.

-The city areas were much better than the way they were in Thief 3 and side missions were my favorite part of the game.

3 was already not very welcome by fans due to the limited sizes of city zones, 3 was a console port that never made use of what it could have been either. Neither 3 or 4 live up to 2 in potential.

It's not that Thief 4 is bad per se, it's that it wasn't anywhere near what it should have been and the price at launch along with predatory DLC was just insulting on top of that.

This isn't the way to do open world games and quite frankly thief didn't need to be open world in the first place, the design itself is flawed as all the resources spent on creating a terrible city experience could have gone into designing more and better missions.

We don't need to experience the home life and street wandering, it should be large set piece locations to explore and steal from mission by mission. And the story really shouldn't be driving the experience, we're here to be thieves, the story in 1 and 2 were something that you fell into while trying to just be a thief, it wasn't the point of what you were doing.

There's a lot of functional quality of life improvements in this engine, but the delivery is underwhelming and disrespectful to the fan base as a whole.

[dprog1995]

Like it or not, open world was the direction that Looking Glass Studio wanted to take their version of Thief 3.

I would have hated the city areas of Thief 4 if they were bad which they weren't and they actually were the best section of the game.(Since Thief is about Stealth and Exploration it was also about combat which after the first game this was ignored.)

Also, what's with the DLCs anyway ? The only useful DLC of this game was the bank heist the others were either cheat DLCs or that challenge mode.(Which didn't click with me.)

All SE games of that time had cheat DLCs that you could easily dodge by not buying or disabling them.

Edit:Thief 4 tried to be a new Thief game rather than just being the reskin of Thief 1 or 2.

[Kunovega]

Yea, SE screwed up all of the western game franchises they purchased and released during that era, then promptly abandoned most of them.

Only Tomb Raider has really continued on with SE and quite frankly it's a terrible series, the first game you didn't even raid any tombs it was just a terrible story with quick time events and lackluster action set pieces.

Hitman was nearly abandoned and only saved by the developers being able to break away and restart their company independent from SE.

Meanwhile Thief and Deus Ex sit in limbo with no future plans, both examples of how to screw up a good franchise and insult your fanbase with predatory DLC. Neither is actually a bad game, they just aren't what they should have been and were launched with tons of bugs at full price and day one worthless DLC on top of being truncated shorter experiences with little respect for their previous games in the franchises.

I mean, even the bank which isn't a bad DLC was a day one release, as in, that's cut content that should have been in the base game.

[Sci Fi Samurai]

Unto itself it's not a bad game, but had some problems that make it fall short of the standards of previous iterations in the series.

Why they needed to reboot the world is not something I'll understand. Why'd they choose to do that? I miss the Hammerites, Pagans, and Seekers. Thief Catcher General was a pretty lame bad guy too, it's like they tried shoving every possible bad guy thing into him to make sure everyone hated him. Felt contrived.

Also, not being able to go back to previous areas of a mission was not cool. Garett had a grappling hook, should've been easy.

[dprog1995]

Thief catcher general wasn't a good villain. But he at least had a very good bossfight battle.(The only bossfight battle in the whole franchise.)

The story of Thief 4 was really bad when the most interesting part of it was the first chapter where you could see the father-daughter relationship of Garrett and Erin.

I think Garrett shouldn't have been the main character in this game since he got a good closure at the end of Thief 3 and imo it would have been better if he was a mentor type character in this game.

[Kunovega]

Originally posted by dprog1995:

Thief catcher general wasn't a good villain. But he at least had a very good bossfight battle.(The only bossfight battle in the whole franchise.)

The story of Thief 4 was really bad when the most interesting part of it was the first chapter where you could see the father-daughter relationship of Garrett and Erin.

I think Garrett shouldn't have been the main character in this game since he got a good closure at the end of Thief 3 and imo it would have been better if he was a mentor type character in this game.

If they had continued the story from 3 that was the expectation, you find a street urchin at the end and leave with him (her?)

[The Underdog]

It was released around the same time as Dishonored and was unfairly compared to it.

[dprog1995]

Originally posted by The Underdog:

It was released around the same time as Dishonored and was unfairly compared to it.

Isn't Dishonored completely different ?

I have heard that in that game if you want you can just murder everyone like a Predator.(Which just makes you get the bad ending.)

While in Thief combat is much less emphasized.(Thief 1 had the most combat but even then that was mostly against the zombies and spiders)

Edit: Also, doesn't Thief have more exploration compared to Dishonored ?

[Kunovega]

Originally posted by dprog1995:

Originally posted by The Underdog:

It was released around the same time as Dishonored and was unfairly compared to it.

Isn't Dishonored completely different ?

I have heard that in that game if you want you can just murder everyone like a Predator.(Which just makes you get the bad ending.)

While in Thief combat is much less emphasized.(Thief 1 had the most combat but even then that was mostly against the zombies and spiders)

Edit: Also, doesn't Thief have more exploration compared to Dishonored ?

They are different but share some similarity in stealth mechanics. The comparison is also due to the fact that many of the dishonered development team were part of the original Thief development team, so it was a bit of old thief team vs new thief team rivalry. The dev team for Thief (2014) was just put together by Square-Enix from teams they didn't currently have working on anything else, but none of them had previously worked on Thief.

Square basically inherited 4 big western franchises from their Eidos purchase: Deus Ex, Thief, Hitman and Tomb Raider and when they decided to put out new versions of them only Hitman had its full original development team still working on it (as SE fully owned ioi at the time)

Deus Ex had some of it's old team mixed with new team members while Tomb Raider and Thief were entirely new teams to the series.

SE set the sales expectations super high, higher than any of those franchises had ever achieved in the past and then marked them all failures when they didn't reach the target sales numbers.

ioi was allowed to buy themselves away (with new investors) and keep their rights to Hitman (and Freedom Fighters, which SE never produced). Tomb Raider team was allowed to keep making games (they hadn't hit their numbers but they were the most successful of the four) and the teams for Thief and Deus Ex were moved over to work on new Marvel games (that Square had just gotten the license rights for) while the franchises were put on hold (it's been mentioned they were available for sale, but no one has met SE's expected asking price, whatever that happens to be)

So, it might be unfair to compare new Thief with Dishonored, but it's because a lot of people assumed that's what Thief would have become in spirit due to how many original ex-Thief devs were working on it at the time.

[dprog1995]

But still, just because Dishonored developers made some previous Thief games while the Thief 4 team didn't make any doesn't in any way prove that Dishonored is a better Thief game than Thief 4.

[Kunovega]

Originally posted by dprog1995:

But still, just because Dishonored developers made some previous Thief games while the Thief 4 team didn't make any doesn't in any way prove that Dishonored is a better Thief game than Thief 4.

I never said it did, I merely explained why some people made comparisons

[terminal_]

It definitely is underrated. It didn't have the impact the originals had back in the early 2000's and their attempt to sprinkle a bit of modern AAA magic failed spectacularly. But it's a good game if judged on its own. Deep down it really is a very immersive experience. I played it 4 years ago, 2 years after launch and I still vividly remember some of the set pieces (the brothel, the morgue, the asylum, the mansion).

[Flow]

I thought this game was hot garbage when it came out.
It felt like a badly designed and oversimplified ripoff
of a successful franchise developed to cash in on it
but now that some time has passed I reconsider my opinion,
and based on these highly intelligent statements
now I see that this game truly is cold garbage.

[dprog1995]

Originally posted by ℱlow:

I thought this game was hot garbage when it came out.
It felt like a badly designed and oversimplified ripoff
of a successful franchise developed to cash in on it
but now that some time has passed I reconsider my opinion,
and based on these highly intelligent statements
now I see that this game truly is cold garbage.

Thanks for your highly intelligent statement.
You deserve a novel prize for such a simplified reply.

Also lol, Thief was never a successful franchise.(Thief 2 killed Looking Glass studio and Thief 3 killed Ion storm.)

Edit: BTW, it only feels as a simplified game if you don't disable all the hints and assists.(That I just did in the first few hours.)

[Kunovega]

Originally posted by dprog1995:

Originally posted by ℱlow:

I thought this game was hot garbage when it came out.
It felt like a badly designed and oversimplified ripoff
of a successful franchise developed to cash in on it
but now that some time has passed I reconsider my opinion,
and based on these highly intelligent statements
now I see that this game truly is cold garbage.

Thanks for your highly intelligent statement.
You deserve a novel prize for such a simplified reply.

Also lol, Thief was never a successful franchise.(Thief 2 killed Looking Glass studio and Thief 3 killed Ion storm.)

Either you weren't around, or you just don't remember, but Thief was the only reason Looking Glass survived at all during those final two years, it most certainly did not kill the company. Looking Glass would have been dead after Terra Nova, Thief saved it but only with enough cash to save it for a couple more years. Thief 2 sold well enough that it should have boosted them even further, but it was already too late and it was the fact they had borrowed heavily to produce other games simultaneously that really crippled them. The company was bankrupt before Thief 2 could overcome the debt they had created.

If you wanted to look for the games that failed to make them money the list would start with Terra Nova, System Shock 2, Flight Unlimited 3 and British Open Championship Golf, those were the games that put them in debt.

Thief kept them alive an extra 2 years and Thief 2 was simply too late to save them from a bankruptcy that was already in progress due to their other game failures. Thief 2's success (which came shortly after) was a windfall for the publisher, not a reason to close the developer. Neither of those Thief games was a failure. It's the games you don't even know about that killed the developer, not the ones that sold well.

https://www.ttlg.com/articles/lgsclosing.asp

As for Ion Storm: Dominion Storm Over Gift, Daikatana and Anachronox sucked up most of their money as critical failures. The actual succesful games they produced (Deus Ex, Deux Ex Invisible War and Thief Deadly Shadows) were simply not enough to overcome the debts that their 3 failures had created.

https://www.pcgamer.com/the-history-of-ion-storm/

It's a bit strange, you are actually trying to claim that successful games killed those two companies, when in reality those companies were doomed to fail due to the debts they had already created from other failed games, the Thief titles they produced were comparative success, just not enough to pull out of the death spiral they were already in due to other failures.