Thread:Vorknkx/@comment-3547390-20150204202730/@comment-3547390-20150321142006

Heh, mood and atmosphere are key to involvement in the world. The levels stop becoming a "go from point a to point b" and become more about the trip of getting there. Personally, that is what I feel Duke 3d did wrong.

Instead of spamming every wall, you could move forward and thus in turn be having a faster paced gameplay in a slower paced environment. The elimination of the use key was a godsend to me.

You are pretty much right. Modern shooters are virtual backdrops, they give you a piece of the action but never reward or allow for exploration. They spend so much time on realism that the places become uninteresting, while they spend so much time on making it into a movie that it loses the stuff that is enjoyable in a game. There was some review for Thief 2 that says it is the opposite of everything in today's market, I would happen to agree with them. Looking Glass Studios was a company about immersion and about furthering your involvement with the game world. Thief 2 is in a league completely on its own. The biggest flaw of that series was the "terrible graphics", which showed that even in 1998 people were extremely judgmental about graphics and could be turned off from an amazing game. It also didn't help that everyone loved Multiplayer gaming at the time and that FPS without that functionality were basically ignored.