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Oct. 20th, 2009 09:57 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
which_chickMission/Chapter/Ojective/Task 1 of Thief Gold: complete on normal-people difficulty. I did not see everything that a post-mission reading of a complete-treasure walkthrough says is there, but I was not going for completeness and I suck at map-based games. Hard. (I have no sense of direction at all.) I was somewhat disappointed that it didn't make you sneak *out* of the place once you'd robbed it, but apparently that happens in the heavier difficulty settings. Part 2 involves a mine. It's dark. A lot of dark. There are what appear to be, for lack of a better term, zombies. I am not amused by zombies. I am an urban thief with a resume and stuff, and I'm in the freaking country breaking a guy out of a mine because he owes me money and because he has been penned up in the mine by religious zealots of a sect called the Hammerites. (I am reminded of the marching hammers from Pink Floyd's The Wall.) I kind of get the impression that the Hammerites are not a friendly and community-service oriented bunch of zealots. They strike me as the other kind, the kind with rubber aprons, a very direct approach to purification, and a fair amount of scripture about smiting.
Character motivations are perhaps not a priority, in this first-person looter. (I so totally think that's cute. For people like my mom, "normal" modern-ish video games like Quake and Half-Life and Doom are first-person *shooter* video games. There are bad guys and you shoot them. You are one guy and you see out the guy's eyes, with usually a view of his weapon (and sometimes his hands/forearms). First person viewpoint. Shooter, because you shoot. A lot. Here, in Thief, combat is not a very smart idea. I don't see much of the dude I'm playing (because I'm looking through his eyes. That's what makes it first person, after all.) but having him engage in hand-to-hand is a bad idea. Having him skulk about and sneak up on people and club them with his blackjack and/or evade them entirely -- that's a better idea and results in fewer character deaths, mostly MINE although it also helps the NPC (non-player character) population, too.
It's OK that the narrative is not as filling as a movie or book. The dude in Doom doesn't have a name and, while there is a narrative, it isn't really the point of the thing. The POINT of the thing is to kill the bad guys. The dude in Quake II (Bitterman, says Wikipedia) does not have a whole lot of characterization going on. Again, it's about killing things. Gordon Freeman (Half-Life) has more storyline to work with (and talking NPC characters), but it's still not a movie. At least this guy (his name is Garrett, we are told) talks to us, some. (He's got a great voice, smugness notwithstanding. If you could hide in a wisp of shadow while guards walked right past you, you'd sound smug, too.) Anyway, perhaps I am incorrect in looking at this as a choose-your-own-adventure movie in which there are a lot of do-overs after you choose unwisely. Perhaps narrative isn't really the *point* of video games... or perhaps not the ONLY point. After all, if you want to do an animated narrative *without* choice/audience participation, you make what is called a movie. If you want to make a video game without narrative, you do something like Tetris or BeJeweled or whatever. There's strategy there but no narrative to speak of. No, this thing has *some* narrative and some problem-solving and some strategy and *sigh* zombies. The zombies creep me right the hell out but you can't turn off the sound because then you don't know what is coming to get you.
Reading the complete-loot, complete-world-exploration walkthrough for the level I've completed (I am really hoping to make it through without reading walkthroughs before I've played the given mission -- makes the accomplishment more satisfactory.) illustrated for me how differently people can choose to play the same game, even a fairly rigid, mission-based game like this. Mind, I'm not slamming Thief. It was 1998. That's how games were done back then, reasonably linear gameplay towards defined and orderly goals. The more loosely-defined explorable worlds like those seen in Grand Theft Auto III came along later... and yet, still, people took a linear gameplay system and *did* see absolutely everything that there was to see with it, found every single piece of treasure, spent hideous amounts of time detailing exactly how to get through and explore every inch of explorable surface. If that's your thing, go ahead. If what you want is to complete the missions reasonably effectively, go ahead and do that. Is one way a more-valid way to play video games than the other way? I don't think so. There's no wrong way to eat a Reese's.
Character motivations are perhaps not a priority, in this first-person looter. (I so totally think that's cute. For people like my mom, "normal" modern-ish video games like Quake and Half-Life and Doom are first-person *shooter* video games. There are bad guys and you shoot them. You are one guy and you see out the guy's eyes, with usually a view of his weapon (and sometimes his hands/forearms). First person viewpoint. Shooter, because you shoot. A lot. Here, in Thief, combat is not a very smart idea. I don't see much of the dude I'm playing (because I'm looking through his eyes. That's what makes it first person, after all.) but having him engage in hand-to-hand is a bad idea. Having him skulk about and sneak up on people and club them with his blackjack and/or evade them entirely -- that's a better idea and results in fewer character deaths, mostly MINE although it also helps the NPC (non-player character) population, too.
It's OK that the narrative is not as filling as a movie or book. The dude in Doom doesn't have a name and, while there is a narrative, it isn't really the point of the thing. The POINT of the thing is to kill the bad guys. The dude in Quake II (Bitterman, says Wikipedia) does not have a whole lot of characterization going on. Again, it's about killing things. Gordon Freeman (Half-Life) has more storyline to work with (and talking NPC characters), but it's still not a movie. At least this guy (his name is Garrett, we are told) talks to us, some. (He's got a great voice, smugness notwithstanding. If you could hide in a wisp of shadow while guards walked right past you, you'd sound smug, too.) Anyway, perhaps I am incorrect in looking at this as a choose-your-own-adventure movie in which there are a lot of do-overs after you choose unwisely. Perhaps narrative isn't really the *point* of video games... or perhaps not the ONLY point. After all, if you want to do an animated narrative *without* choice/audience participation, you make what is called a movie. If you want to make a video game without narrative, you do something like Tetris or BeJeweled or whatever. There's strategy there but no narrative to speak of. No, this thing has *some* narrative and some problem-solving and some strategy and *sigh* zombies. The zombies creep me right the hell out but you can't turn off the sound because then you don't know what is coming to get you.
Reading the complete-loot, complete-world-exploration walkthrough for the level I've completed (I am really hoping to make it through without reading walkthroughs before I've played the given mission -- makes the accomplishment more satisfactory.) illustrated for me how differently people can choose to play the same game, even a fairly rigid, mission-based game like this. Mind, I'm not slamming Thief. It was 1998. That's how games were done back then, reasonably linear gameplay towards defined and orderly goals. The more loosely-defined explorable worlds like those seen in Grand Theft Auto III came along later... and yet, still, people took a linear gameplay system and *did* see absolutely everything that there was to see with it, found every single piece of treasure, spent hideous amounts of time detailing exactly how to get through and explore every inch of explorable surface. If that's your thing, go ahead. If what you want is to complete the missions reasonably effectively, go ahead and do that. Is one way a more-valid way to play video games than the other way? I don't think so. There's no wrong way to eat a Reese's.
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Date: 2009-10-21 11:10 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-10-21 08:21 pm (UTC)Though there are some modern games such as Prototype which manage to have a free-roaming environment and also grant flexibility in how you complete the actual challenges in the game, and that's an awfully nice combination. Grand Theft Auto III was at least sometimes good in that respect, too -- I remember one mission in GTA: San Andreas where the goal was to defeat some incredibly tough enemies camped out on a mountaintop. Rather than go through the whole scripted experience the designers had laid out for me, I went back to the airfield, got a Harrier jet and ruined their day with air-to-ground missiles. Good times.