Darren New <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote:
> That was one of the things I liked about Thief. The harder levels 
> weren't "people are harder to hurt" or "health is less healing". The 
> harder levels were almost different games, with different/additional 
> goals and access to different places.

  Thief 2 was the same. Harder difficulty level meant, for example,
"you can't kill anyone" and "you have to collect more loot", instead
of the classical (and way more boring) enemies have more health and
make more damage.

  Thief 3 tried a similar concept, but IMO didn't succeed so well.
The goals (which change with the difficulty level) were all the same
in all levels, instead of being level-specific like in Thief 2. This
made it a bit less interesting.

> Not unlike how Deus Ex gives you at least two ways to solve every problem.

  I'm currently playing Rainbow Six: Vegas. It often has the same kind
of non-linearity in that you are not necessarily restrained to one single
path along one single corridor, but often you can choose several ways of
passing the level. For example, some levels might consist of a big two-story
room which you can enter from no less than 6 different doors, located at
different parts of the room, both at the lower and the upper level. You
can look behind the door with a snake cam and estimate which door would
be the best to enter and clear the room.

  And forget about simply storming in the room and shoot everything that
moves. If you do that, you are dead. You have to be more tactical than
that. You die very easily in this game, from just a few shots (if the
enemy can aim at your head, you'll die from a single shot). Curiously
there's no life bar: You can just take a few hits and you are dead.
However, you recuperate in some tens of seconds. This works pretty well.

  And death really is a penalty in this game, and you really don't want
to die. If you die, you'll have to restart the level (or from the last
automatic auto-saving checkpoint in that level). You can't save anywhere
besides the checkpoing auto-saves. At first this seems like it sucks a lot,
but in fact it works very well, IMO. As said, it makes death truely a
penalty, so strong in fact, that you'll do whatever it takes to not to
die. This induces you to play tactically and carefully, which is the
whole point in the game.
  Some people might not like the lack of being able to save the game,
but it works very well for me at least.

  Ah, and you have two sidekicks who are, in fact, very helpful and
basically never get in your way on their own (you *can* shoot them,
but you'll have to deliberately aim at them or deliberately locate
yourself so that they are in the line of fire). You can command the
sidekicks to follow you or go to a certain place (aim towards the place
and press space). The sidekicks can take care of themselves pretty well
(ie. you don't have to babysit them at all), although they can also die
if you carelessly send them into heavy crossfire. They are also excellent
at watching your back while your attention is on something else (eg.
examining the other side of a door with a snake cam). It works surprisingly
well.

-- 
                                                          - Warp

Post a reply to this message