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Thief 3 Deadly Shadows Bug Neuters In-Game AI
Channard writes "You can add another footnote to the strange fortunes of Ion Storm. It's been revealed that Thief: Deadly Shadows has a bug that affects the intelligence of the guards and other characters in the game, both in the PC and Xbox versions. Ion Storm Austin, the creators of the game, really went to work on the character AI in Deadly Shadows - on Expert level, the guards notice things like open doors, missing objects and the like. The catch, as reported on the official Ion Storm forums, is that a bug in the game resets the difficulty level to Normal level if you save and load your position in-game. The word from one of the Thief developers is that: 'We're looking into it.Can't say anything more for now, and there aren't any guarantees... but the find isn't being ignored.' The PC version should be relatively easy to patch, but fixing the Xbox version would be trickier, perhaps requiring a full recall (Microsoft doesn't allow the Xbox Live service to be used for anything other than patches that affect online play.)"
Ah WWF No Mercy. About 50% of the cartrdiges had bad batteries causing the games to lose all their save data. It really sucks when a year and a half of stats and create-a-wrestlers disapear.
:) Every season mode match at exactly the 3:00 mark, every single enemy of yours in the league will run in to interfere in your match.. except.. THEY ATTACK YOUR OPPONENT! The poor AI and bad programming make playing anything but a normal match pointless. But oh well.. that's my only choice so I have to enjoy it for what it is, and be thankful that the dev team was fired.
:)
Morrowind was more tolerable. At least nothing was ever lost. Well.. except maybe all the loading time from reseting after crashes.
WWE RAW2 - Game is so buggy at times it's barely playable. At times you literally lose control of your character. How nice. The PC will often try to pin the player in excess of 20 times in a row. The player is unable to get up in between these pinnings. Basically it's 5 minutes of button mashing and cursing.
Buffy 2: Chaos Bleeds - Check out the official message boards. You will see the same repated messages over and over. In on mode you can't play more than 5 minutes most of the time without a crash. In the story mode / single player game most copies would lock up the console at the same specific points for all users. Nothing was ever done about it. It really sucks constantly replaying through 2 hour levels and having it crash right before the end.
The only way I could see all of the game was to get a game save from the xbox mag that had all levels opened. The first game was great, but this sequel was handed off to another team who complettly killed it off.
I know of a few more. But I don't own them, so I can't do the bugs justice.
"The nature of this one is pretty obscure."
Anyone that has ever played Thief, unless they were looking for a serious challenge (and had 4 hours to kill), has probably saved their game from time to time. This isn't an obscure bug that occurs only when you're in the pantry holding the knife and looking at your feet. Anytime you save the game during a mission, and then re-load that save game, enemy AI gets reset to normal. That's major and something that should have been found during QA. There's little excuse for having a save that doesn't save the state of the game.
Someone already thought of that - certainly owners of modded X-Boxes could also try that - but it apparently doesn't work, according to the intial post in this thread at the Ion Storm boards. Shame.
I don't take this as completely crazy. Patches for bugs - and this one is somewhat obscure in the testing - happen all the time. Too bad for consoles, but I disagree with the concept of them anyway.
It does let me in on a bit of how testing occurred. When we deploy a system, there is a "dashboard" (ug, i hate the term) of all the settings in the program visible on another screen. As you walk through the application, you can check the values live. If thief had a mode to display this (and most FPS have a console that should deliver this), they'd be able to check AI settings. Perhaps they did and it still isn't working correctly - now thats a bug.
mug
I don't have the full version yet, but I just double-checked in the demo and it appears you can set the difficulty on a per level basis. Is this true? If so, just play through a whole level without loading. Don't save and load after each enemy you manage to sneak by. That doesn't strike me as very 'expert' of a tactic.
Buy the game or don't buy it. This bug sucks, but is not a showstopper at all. A game deleting your boot sector when it is uninstalled, now thats a bug. The guy claiming to find the bug didn't shy away from making wild demands or promoting himself as a savior to gamers either. What a turnoff.
sorry, but did you understand the bash? no you didn't. it was a bash against their inability to control their licensees.
the platform is supposedly better because of their _required_ licensing they *can*(and according to them do) control what gets shipped to the shops and what doesn't. they act as if they control the quality, so they'd better deliver that promise as well..
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Just a couple months ago Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow was released with a bug that would crash the system if you stayed in the game browser for more than ten seconds. Hard to imagine how that one got missed...
PHEM - party like it's 1997-2003!
Um, that's precisely what I said: "The problem is, the difficulty isn't reset to the NORMAL specified in the .ini, but apparantly to some default setting specified in the game executable."
That's two replies which appear to have missed this; tsk!
"Microsoft doesn't allow the Xbox Live service to be used for anything other than patches that affect online play."
Except for their own games. MechAssault has been patched, specificially the game loading code to close the exploit that allowed software modding the XBox. Deleting the MechAssault save data gets rid of the patch and reopens the exploit.
It is very sad, and it will eventually change, but not immediately by any means. Personally, I think there needs to be a union for video game professionals.
You mean like IGDA? JOIN.
Unfortunately, too many college kids are happy to "live the dream" of working in video games
True.. a lot of places hire graduates because "they have more to prove,".. e.g., they're willing to work a lot for nothing. But what those zillion kids don't have is release titles.. hang in there a while, get some good titles under your belt, and you'll find it a lot easier to get into positions at good studios (who put out bestselling titles, retain their workforce, and know how to (gasp) schedule.) Good studios don't want to risk their AAA titles (god, I hate that term) on a bunch of noobs. It's just how it is.
Unless you're lucky enough to land a job at a sweet place right out of school, you're going to hop around a bit as you find a place that works for you (and pays what you're worth.) If you're staying at the same place for 3 years working 80+ hour weeks, you're doing yourself a huge disservice.
Furthermore, it only runs on win2k/xp and nvidia or ati boards less than 2 years old which reduces their market quite a bit.
I think it is obvious that they simply planned to cash in on the money that fans of the original would shell out, rather than make a quality game. Well, that is pretty much the definition of 'sequel' in the movie industry. I guess the video game industry is following their lead.