Viewing the Game World of Thief -- Ropes vs. Gloves

This concerns only the degrees of visual perception offered when viewing the world during interaction and navigation and assessing the situation and planning the next moves. It's a rough comparison of how broad the view of the Thief world's surroundings is while hanging from a rope in Dark Project/Gold and Metal Age, versus hanging on a wall in Deadly Shadows. Although other concepts can be derived from the video, I am choosing to ignore bugs and glitches and limitations of the games and engines of these specific games and their time, as well as all navigation possibilities that can be limited for ropes and expanded for gloves, etc.

Ropes offer very nearly a 360° view in all directions of the surrounding, with only the thin rope ever in the way at any time. The climbing gloves offer less than 300° in all directions except rotating around the z-axis, where it's up to 360°, and that's only by ignoring the player character model, which well blocks the view overall. Only going into 3rd-person view opens it up some more.

For the glove-climbing to emulate rope-climbing's view, the gloves have to be used on a climbable column, but gloves wouldn't be critical if the column was a pipe or tree trunk or something small enough to grasp around. While in use, not just before, the ropes allow greater planning ahead and assessing of up to the total surroundings.

Given time and resources to bring in more realism, a rope climber can grip the rope with the legs, wrapped around with knees bents and using the feet, which can free the hands to manipulate objects, toss or drop objects, and even use weapons and tools. Hanging upside-down, and using one-handed weapons and items would be possible, as are two-handed weapons--but only if time and resources allowed the development of such realities.

Climbing gloves, with added realism, must already include something for the knees and feet to grip the wall more fiercely than the hands and elbows. If the animation takes into account the eyes in the sockets, and allows elbows to pull away from the wall and the spine to twist, and the knees to pull away from the wall, and the hips to move laterally to one side, then the view is greatly opened up, except for the wall the player character is attached to. I hope that if we see more wall-climbing in future Thief titles, that the player model is fully articulated for looking around, can be moved aside (automated to keep the distant view exposed), and that the knees, feet, and elbows are included in the mechanism the player character uses, not just "gloves." Climbing "gear" is simple enough, and the player shouldn't have to buy them again, so the new games can just have "climbing gear" as a part of the default thieving ensemble.

Category:

Gaming

Tags:

• Thief
• Dark
• Project
• Gold
• Metal
• Age
• Ropes
• Rope
• Arrows
• Climbing
• Gloves
• Wall
• View
• Perspective