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nano_mooseI know a lot of people hate Thief: Deadly Shadows. Before I'd played the original series, I didn't understand why, though I do now; TDS is very, very ambitious, and when ambition doesn't come off, it makes for uneven games. TDS is a good game, but it's not as utterly brilliant as TDP and TMA. I can imagine how the fans felt playing it after waiting so long through the death of Looking Glass, especially considering the huge backlash against Deus Ex: Invisible War.
But I don't hate it. In fact, I have a weird sort of affection for it that I don't exactly have for the other games. Because, despite all the signs that it was rushed - the awful frame-rate, the half-implemented features, the glitches - it was obviously made with love. The developers were trying so hard to make a game that was both a worthy addition to the franchise and more than a carbon copy, but they ran out of time, struggling against limitations. I can still play it and dream of how it might have been, had they been given enough time, because even with all the problems they had, they still turned out a great game. It's beautiful and well-written and atmospheric and funny and creepy and strange, and I'll put up with a lot of things for that combination. Plus, I've seen what happens when the inheritors of a concept don't understand what makes it brilliant. Compared to them, Thief got off light.
So yeah, despite all the problems I see in it now, TDS doesn't deserve the hatred it gets. I mean, geez, they didn't change Garrett's voice actor or give him a love interest or make him anything other than the sarcastic, sneaky bastard who may or may not have a heart of gold, did they?
That said, fuck the tutorial. I can only assume that was publisher mandated due to the sheer concentration of suck.
Anyway!
- One thing the crazy fans can legitimately complain about: Auuugh, the 3D model cutscenes are even uglier than I remember. All the characters move so stiffly and the lip-synching is off and they're weirdly muzzy and strange and the textures don't actually have any texture. It's so disappointing, because the Rustmonkey cutscenes are amazing. ...I think this game might be the reason I prefer traditional animation over 3D.
- Garrett is apparently Batman. I guess I shouldn't be surpised what with the cloak and the dead parents and the amorality. Wait.
- The Glyph in the Keeper cutscene actually changes, I think into the Glyph of destruction. (Oh god, I actually know the Glyphs well enough to recognize it. I am a nerd.) That must be one of the 'incidents' they keeping referring to. And the Keeper deals with it by shutting it away, denying it happened, which is pretty much their method for dealing with everything right up until the end of the game.
- ...Although I think the reason for that is because the moment any Keeper got an inkling of Gamall's existence, she arranged for them to vanish. Given how long she must have been doing that (centuries, was it?), it probably became a sort of natural selection...no wonder the Order is so messed up by the end.
- The fruit next to Caduca's book drying and withering and and rotting as she reads - such a subtle, blink-and-you'll-miss-it indication of what the Glyphs are doing to her.
- Garrett taking the pass for the library from Orland's hand as though the pass has personally offended him. Tee hee. Also, I love him smirking away as Orland gets into his rant about stealing from the library.
- I think I can pinpoint the exact moment when Gamall decides to kill Caduca: when Caduca corrects her mistranslation of the Compendium of Reproach.
- How did Gamall kill Caduca? From what I can tell, it looks like she'd turned to stone...or her bones instantly fossilized somehow, her skin becoming like old, cracked paint and peeling away. It's a pity they had to plaster some ridiculous stone texture on her for the ingame model, it really doesn't convey the horror the way the cutscene did.
- Garrett, at his trial, carefully testing the Glyphs keeping him in his chair with the toe of his boot, and the shot of the Enforcers as Orland glances at them, looming behind him. Both things I never made out on my old crappy screen. I'm glad I can now; the Enforcer shot in particular is really cool.
- Oh, Orland. Just…oh, Orland. You silly, silly man.
- I know I've complained before about Garrett's appearance being inconsistent, and it is, but I think the Rustmonkey!Garrett at least has a reason for looking slightly different in every cutscene: he has the sort of face that does that. He still looks bizarrely young compared to the ingame model, though. Or maybe the ingame model is wrong; it's certainly not consistant with the older games. Hmmm.
- Speaking of the older games, playing through them make the Catacombs absolutely hilarious. Farkus! Ramirez! Quintus!
- You know, it's just occurred to me that I'm not attracted to Garrett? No, seriously. Seriously! I'm obsessed with him as a character, true; I could sit down and write about him and his motivations and personality all day, but I don't think he's hot.
Now, his voice, I definitely think is hot. I kind of swooned when he did that soft little chuckle in the post-mission briefing after the Museum. You lot can keep your Alan Rickmans, I have Stephen Russell for my inappropriate and vocally motivated old guy crush. I don't know if the fact that I have a crush on the character's voice rather than the character himself makes me more or less of a freak than the people who believe a given villain would give up killing things/becoming a god/watching the world burn for them. This may warrant further thought.
- Another thing that warrants further thought: I can't decide whether or not I love Viktoria. I mean, I like her - she's competent and ass-kicking and shown to have Garrett pretty much wrapped around her little finger for the most part and she has characterization that doesn't revolve solely around her weird camaraderie with him given that she's pretty much the Pagan warlord. And even though she spends a lot of time totally naked, it's not played up as fanservice-y or sexual, just...what she is. (The art style of the game helps with that, obviously.) I can't work out why I don't like her more than I do. Maybe 'cause G already has my heart, I don't know.
- One of the things I really love about Thief is that no villain is really 'evil'. Mostly, they're human - even when they're not. They're petty and arrogant and and greedy and vengeful (all of which, interestingly, are characteristics of the protagonist at one time or another). Their agendas make sense to them, and frequently they're sympathetic. Unfortunately, their plans would be a detriment to you, personally, and since you, personally, are in a position to thwart them, you do.
Take the Trickster - what did he want? He wanted to destroy the City. Consider: it's the opposite of everything the Pagans are. It's a huge, hungry thing that gobbles trees and covers grass and blacks out the stars. They can fight as much as they like, but someday they will lose for good - and then their forest will be burnt and gone, forever.
Now, take Karras: whatever else he was, he believed. He thought that he was the Builder's vessel; he thought the world would be glorious once he'd succeeded in his mission. He was, of course, wrong. He was also, by the end, quite insane. But it did not for an instant cross his brilliant mind that his plan was anything other than absolutely right until, I think, he saw that wall of red.
And take Gamall, who wanted life. She wanted to live. She wanted it so much she made herself into a monster taking it, but I think, by the end, what she had wasn't really life. She was clearly insane and everyone she'd ever known was dead, and she just got more and more desperate and more and more careless, clinging to her imagined power, until her arrogance undid her. I don't think she was ever happy with what she had. I...think she was a little tragic, myself. Especially considering her punishment.
- Treading around spoilers here, but oh my god sometimes Garrett's development just does not make sense, which I think is a side effect of both being written by multiple writers and the tug-of-war between making him a player surrogate and making him an actual character.* Fortunately, my glorious brain has chosen to carefully edit out any character traits that do not align with my perception of him! Much like those lovely young lady authors do when they admire certain villainous fellows in their preferred works of fiction.
Well, I'm kidding, I really honestly do try and keep my mental view of him consistent with the guy I'm piloting around, it's just - hard, sometimes. The problem is that given the opportunity for player choice in Thief, coupled with the Lord British Postulate, the writers had to fix it so that his dialogue would make sense both if Garrett was a meticulously precise professional who never killed unless it was absolutely necessary and a sociopath who'd slit a guard's throat for breathing in his general direction. Because the games are clearly intended to be played on Expert, where killing anyone immediately fails the mission, I like to go for the former interpretation. And because I'm an optimist, I also tend to believe that he's sarcastic, cynical, greedy, arrogant, vaguely misanthropic and terribly, terribly pragmatic, but not, in fact, bad. After all, the City isn't exactly an idealistic setting (I'd love to see what would happen to a naïve and youthful hero with a magic sword in it. I doubt he'd have the sword long, for a start). You don't survive there by being nice, particularly if you have to fend for yourself. It makes sense to me that those moments when he does show compassion only really happen when he knows that no one else will ever hear of them. So, in my mind, he was genuinely shocked and horrified by what the Mechanists did in the Pagan Enclave. He did whatever he could for Lotus while he was dying because he was dying - all alone and for nothing and in despair. He was upset when Viktoria gave herself up for him because his feelings about her were confused and he didn't get enough time to sort them out, and now he never will. (Also, in my head, not love, or even really friendship, but even kind of liking someone enough to treat them with respect is such a rare thing for him that losing it hurt.) I think my Garrett would have taken the route he does at the end of TDS...but I feel like it should have been earned a bit more.
This is the problem with writing fanfic for characters from games with high interactivity, as opposed to, say, any Japanese RPG. There's a gulf between how the character is played and how he's portrayed.
...That was far longer than I intended it to be, so, er, have some fanart as a reward for getting through my crazy. The Circle just had an update and some of this stuff is really darned nice.
*That's why Gordon Freeman doesn't talk. The Valve writers obviously worked very hard on making the Half-Life story compelling and dramatic despite this handicap, but I think they may have slipped up trying to add in a romantic subplot.
For those of you uninterested in Thief and/or spoilers! I just...find these pictures really gorgeous and awesome!
But I don't hate it. In fact, I have a weird sort of affection for it that I don't exactly have for the other games. Because, despite all the signs that it was rushed - the awful frame-rate, the half-implemented features, the glitches - it was obviously made with love. The developers were trying so hard to make a game that was both a worthy addition to the franchise and more than a carbon copy, but they ran out of time, struggling against limitations. I can still play it and dream of how it might have been, had they been given enough time, because even with all the problems they had, they still turned out a great game. It's beautiful and well-written and atmospheric and funny and creepy and strange, and I'll put up with a lot of things for that combination. Plus, I've seen what happens when the inheritors of a concept don't understand what makes it brilliant. Compared to them, Thief got off light.
So yeah, despite all the problems I see in it now, TDS doesn't deserve the hatred it gets. I mean, geez, they didn't change Garrett's voice actor or give him a love interest or make him anything other than the sarcastic, sneaky bastard who may or may not have a heart of gold, did they?
That said, fuck the tutorial. I can only assume that was publisher mandated due to the sheer concentration of suck.
Anyway!
- One thing the crazy fans can legitimately complain about: Auuugh, the 3D model cutscenes are even uglier than I remember. All the characters move so stiffly and the lip-synching is off and they're weirdly muzzy and strange and the textures don't actually have any texture. It's so disappointing, because the Rustmonkey cutscenes are amazing. ...I think this game might be the reason I prefer traditional animation over 3D.
- Garrett is apparently Batman. I guess I shouldn't be surpised what with the cloak and the dead parents and the amorality. Wait.
- The Glyph in the Keeper cutscene actually changes, I think into the Glyph of destruction. (Oh god, I actually know the Glyphs well enough to recognize it. I am a nerd.) That must be one of the 'incidents' they keeping referring to. And the Keeper deals with it by shutting it away, denying it happened, which is pretty much their method for dealing with everything right up until the end of the game.
- ...Although I think the reason for that is because the moment any Keeper got an inkling of Gamall's existence, she arranged for them to vanish. Given how long she must have been doing that (centuries, was it?), it probably became a sort of natural selection...no wonder the Order is so messed up by the end.
- The fruit next to Caduca's book drying and withering and and rotting as she reads - such a subtle, blink-and-you'll-miss-it indication of what the Glyphs are doing to her.
- Garrett taking the pass for the library from Orland's hand as though the pass has personally offended him. Tee hee. Also, I love him smirking away as Orland gets into his rant about stealing from the library.
- I think I can pinpoint the exact moment when Gamall decides to kill Caduca: when Caduca corrects her mistranslation of the Compendium of Reproach.
- How did Gamall kill Caduca? From what I can tell, it looks like she'd turned to stone...or her bones instantly fossilized somehow, her skin becoming like old, cracked paint and peeling away. It's a pity they had to plaster some ridiculous stone texture on her for the ingame model, it really doesn't convey the horror the way the cutscene did.
- Garrett, at his trial, carefully testing the Glyphs keeping him in his chair with the toe of his boot, and the shot of the Enforcers as Orland glances at them, looming behind him. Both things I never made out on my old crappy screen. I'm glad I can now; the Enforcer shot in particular is really cool.
- Oh, Orland. Just…oh, Orland. You silly, silly man.
- I know I've complained before about Garrett's appearance being inconsistent, and it is, but I think the Rustmonkey!Garrett at least has a reason for looking slightly different in every cutscene: he has the sort of face that does that. He still looks bizarrely young compared to the ingame model, though. Or maybe the ingame model is wrong; it's certainly not consistant with the older games. Hmmm.
- Speaking of the older games, playing through them make the Catacombs absolutely hilarious. Farkus! Ramirez! Quintus!
- You know, it's just occurred to me that I'm not attracted to Garrett? No, seriously. Seriously! I'm obsessed with him as a character, true; I could sit down and write about him and his motivations and personality all day, but I don't think he's hot.
Now, his voice, I definitely think is hot. I kind of swooned when he did that soft little chuckle in the post-mission briefing after the Museum. You lot can keep your Alan Rickmans, I have Stephen Russell for my inappropriate and vocally motivated old guy crush. I don't know if the fact that I have a crush on the character's voice rather than the character himself makes me more or less of a freak than the people who believe a given villain would give up killing things/becoming a god/watching the world burn for them. This may warrant further thought.
- Another thing that warrants further thought: I can't decide whether or not I love Viktoria. I mean, I like her - she's competent and ass-kicking and shown to have Garrett pretty much wrapped around her little finger for the most part and she has characterization that doesn't revolve solely around her weird camaraderie with him given that she's pretty much the Pagan warlord. And even though she spends a lot of time totally naked, it's not played up as fanservice-y or sexual, just...what she is. (The art style of the game helps with that, obviously.) I can't work out why I don't like her more than I do. Maybe 'cause G already has my heart, I don't know.
- One of the things I really love about Thief is that no villain is really 'evil'. Mostly, they're human - even when they're not. They're petty and arrogant and and greedy and vengeful (all of which, interestingly, are characteristics of the protagonist at one time or another). Their agendas make sense to them, and frequently they're sympathetic. Unfortunately, their plans would be a detriment to you, personally, and since you, personally, are in a position to thwart them, you do.
Take the Trickster - what did he want? He wanted to destroy the City. Consider: it's the opposite of everything the Pagans are. It's a huge, hungry thing that gobbles trees and covers grass and blacks out the stars. They can fight as much as they like, but someday they will lose for good - and then their forest will be burnt and gone, forever.
Now, take Karras: whatever else he was, he believed. He thought that he was the Builder's vessel; he thought the world would be glorious once he'd succeeded in his mission. He was, of course, wrong. He was also, by the end, quite insane. But it did not for an instant cross his brilliant mind that his plan was anything other than absolutely right until, I think, he saw that wall of red.
And take Gamall, who wanted life. She wanted to live. She wanted it so much she made herself into a monster taking it, but I think, by the end, what she had wasn't really life. She was clearly insane and everyone she'd ever known was dead, and she just got more and more desperate and more and more careless, clinging to her imagined power, until her arrogance undid her. I don't think she was ever happy with what she had. I...think she was a little tragic, myself. Especially considering her punishment.
- Treading around spoilers here, but oh my god sometimes Garrett's development just does not make sense, which I think is a side effect of both being written by multiple writers and the tug-of-war between making him a player surrogate and making him an actual character.* Fortunately, my glorious brain has chosen to carefully edit out any character traits that do not align with my perception of him! Much like those lovely young lady authors do when they admire certain villainous fellows in their preferred works of fiction.
Well, I'm kidding, I really honestly do try and keep my mental view of him consistent with the guy I'm piloting around, it's just - hard, sometimes. The problem is that given the opportunity for player choice in Thief, coupled with the Lord British Postulate, the writers had to fix it so that his dialogue would make sense both if Garrett was a meticulously precise professional who never killed unless it was absolutely necessary and a sociopath who'd slit a guard's throat for breathing in his general direction. Because the games are clearly intended to be played on Expert, where killing anyone immediately fails the mission, I like to go for the former interpretation. And because I'm an optimist, I also tend to believe that he's sarcastic, cynical, greedy, arrogant, vaguely misanthropic and terribly, terribly pragmatic, but not, in fact, bad. After all, the City isn't exactly an idealistic setting (I'd love to see what would happen to a naïve and youthful hero with a magic sword in it. I doubt he'd have the sword long, for a start). You don't survive there by being nice, particularly if you have to fend for yourself. It makes sense to me that those moments when he does show compassion only really happen when he knows that no one else will ever hear of them. So, in my mind, he was genuinely shocked and horrified by what the Mechanists did in the Pagan Enclave. He did whatever he could for Lotus while he was dying because he was dying - all alone and for nothing and in despair. He was upset when Viktoria gave herself up for him because his feelings about her were confused and he didn't get enough time to sort them out, and now he never will. (Also, in my head, not love, or even really friendship, but even kind of liking someone enough to treat them with respect is such a rare thing for him that losing it hurt.) I think my Garrett would have taken the route he does at the end of TDS...but I feel like it should have been earned a bit more.
This is the problem with writing fanfic for characters from games with high interactivity, as opposed to, say, any Japanese RPG. There's a gulf between how the character is played and how he's portrayed.
...That was far longer than I intended it to be, so, er, have some fanart as a reward for getting through my crazy. The Circle just had an update and some of this stuff is really darned nice.
*That's why Gordon Freeman doesn't talk. The Valve writers obviously worked very hard on making the Half-Life story compelling and dramatic despite this handicap, but I think they may have slipped up trying to add in a romantic subplot.
For those of you uninterested in Thief and/or spoilers! I just...find these pictures really gorgeous and awesome!
