Thief fan missions and campaigns

[Jack Of Owls]

Was playing the 2nd mission of TBP and found a torture chamber/prison (that you could easily miss if you didn't turn the right way) near the treasury. There's a guy in a cell named Cicero I think who says he'll give you a big reward if you free him

Spoiler

but of course he tried to kill me as soon as his cell door slid open but I had a flashbomb ready (no kills allowed on Expert) so I made short work of him

. It's unexpected little secrets or out of the way places like this that make exploration fun in an exploration-heavy game.

 

[Jazz_]

I am actually relatively disappointed with The Black Parade, there hasn't been a mission that has wowed me like it's happened with many other FMs. Also some maps were a bit too linear-ish for my taste, Jaws of Darkness is huge but pretty linear for example, it's just subdivided in semi-linear sections you approach one by one and then you loop back to the main area. My favorite type of gameplay (open-ended exploration of a big city-scape) was not to be found in this campaign except for the first part of ''The Brand'', which was indeed my favorite part of the whole campaign but I didn't really care for the spooky manor in the second part.

I would give almost every mission a 7/7.5, except for the third one which was way too conventional and felt too long/tedious to complete on Expert.

 

[Tel Velothi]

I just finished first mission of The Black Parade - I'm surprised, because I couldn't get into gaming for years for more than 15 minutes per sitting. But exploration and little secrets are amazing - and that strange "liminal space" feeling of Thief's graphics are something else... I'm glad I can still play and enjoy gaming bros ^^

 

[Deadyawn]

Just finished The Black Parade. Loved every single mission, particularly 2 and 8 with 9 being my favorite. Barely played FMs before so I was blown away by these maps.

Between this, Archolos and Project Tamriel we 2000s lads eat like kings.

The lowres textures of thief can look fantastic with filtering disabled (in cam_ext.cfg, change the value of tex_filter_mode to 0).

How I regret that I came to this thread as I was finishing TBP because you are absolutely right.

 

[Beastro]

I am actually relatively disappointed with The Black Parade, there hasn't been a mission that has wowed me like it's happened with many other FMs. Also some maps were a bit too linear-ish for my taste, Jaws of Darkness is huge but pretty linear for example, it's just subdivided in semi-linear sections you approach one by one and then you loop back to the main area. My favorite type of gameplay (open-ended exploration of a big city-scape) was not to be found in this campaign except for the first part of ''The Brand'', which was indeed my favorite part of the whole campaign but I didn't really care for the spooky manor in the second part.

I would give almost every mission a 7/7.5, except for the third one which was way too conventional and felt too long/tedious to complete on Expert.

I felt the opposite of it being linear so far. I'm taking my time with it, but the more I think about the second mission, the less I like about it and it's design philosophy.

Spoilage

The first problem is that there's way too many ways to break in. Iirc, there's at least three in the sewers alone, then the guard captains window and no doubt more. Making such a place so porous defeats the feeling that you're breaking into somewhere restricted. This is in conflict with the very nature of the mansion itself as a pagan nobles abode.

That ties into another aggravation where human guards are in places they shouldn't be. You go through an area to get to the treasury that looks almost like the Maw itself only to find guards wandering around near the end protecting the vase. They belong there as much as in the Maw. Once you hear their whistling, the air of unknown menace evaporates and you know you're dealing with mundane threats that completely ruins the atmosphere of the environment.

This is why Constantine's mansion was done in two missions. One with guards that is normal but hints at oddness, then one with the guards removed and replaced by non-human threats with the pagan twistedness fully unveiled. To have guards in the latter mission would have equally ruined it.

What made Constantine's place work was that there were hints of it being messed up, but they were low key enough that you could dismiss him as just an eccentric noble and his place being a Thief Winchester Mansion, but this one is so weird that it cannot be anything but a pagan's home.

That then conflicts with the guards being everywhere. Wtf hasn't anyone ratted this guy out to the Hammers?

He's so blatantly pagan and so blatantly twisted that you even find writings of people working for him having second thoughts about doing so that want to quit. Then there's how the place if so rife with would-be thieves wanting to fuck him over that you find multiple bodies of the servants who failed trying. The chance of one of them running off to the Hammers and informing them in exchange for some payment is so bloody high in a setting like Thief's City that this damages the world building.

Then there's the issue where the design of the mansion is too open. You can get anywhere from almost anywhere else, so locations don't come together to form a house. You feel like you're just in some area wandering around from place to place where every forking direction leads to everywhere else. I know it could be argued that this is part of the pagan design of the place, but I'm even feeling the same vibe in the third mission's Hammerite place.

One of the design elements that made Thief make you feel like a thief was how places were laid out. Each section of a mission had a clear sense of being a wing of a building or location and that aided the sense that you were bring a proper thief methodically scouring around eliminating loot section by section. In the missions so far, they're so wide open you just go from area to area to area not feeling like any one has been sanitized and the rest are left uncovered you can't eliminate sections because everything feels like one big one.

That then ties into what I do agree with Jazz about, this makes the game feel tedious. You keep wandering from.new place to new place, the atmosphere of casing a joint is lost in the frustration of the openness.

I'm realizing there's such a thing as having too big a Thief mission, or rather, having a campaign that's only huge Thief missions is a problem. The large, meandering nature I laid out worked with the first mission because it's the bloody streets of the City. You expect that as you go from house to house and store to store cleaning them up, but the scale doesn't get reduced no matter where you go, and it's a problem when an typical nobles mansion feels larger than a whole section of the city that it's in.

 

[Unkillable Cat]

Beastro I'd love to hear your thoughts on the ninth mission in particular, please keep the running commentary going.

But to answer one point I'd like to bring up:

Spoiler

How Thiaf went about things: At only one point in the entire game are there more than two ways to get into a place, and sometimes they aren't even that many. And that one point? It's the jeweller's shop in the first mission, which was used as a showcase for demo and media purposes, which has a whoppin' four points of entry.

The mansion in The Black Parade has quite a lot of points of entry, yes. Makes me wonder if that was done to give players a sense of satisfaction ("I found a way into this heavily guarded mansion, I AM TEH SMART") or whether it's to highlight the fact that the mansion is structurally equal to Swiss cheese.

 

[Jack Of Owls]

TBP not only encourages me to play on Expert so I experience everything in a mission (or at least unlocking the potential to experience everything), but it also helps wean me off HD mods for Thief games (dire warnings from the project leads that if you use HD mods, you won't see things the way the FM mission authors intended things to be seen... such evil boys, exploiting our OCDs and autisms like that).

 

[Denim Destroyer]

Now that the topic has been brought up, I do agree that Black Parade can be too open at times. Bonehoard has only one point of egress while The Black Parade equivalent has two, it is a secret but an incredibly easy one to find. The castles in Mission 9 have four points of entry with most of them being unguarded. I would have a harder time sneaking into Ramirez abode compared to the monstrous behemoth that is the mage castles in mission 9. The designers might have fallen for the misconception that a game like Thief should have as many options as possible instead of as many as reasonable.

 

[Jack Of Owls]

When I played the original Thief (not Gold) when it first came out, I had no trouble getting out of the Bonehoard (or at least I think it was the Bonehoard... I'm no good with memorizing these names and locations in these games) but then a few years later I played Thief Gold and couldn't find my way out. I wonder what that was all about. Modifications to the mission with TG, or modifications to my brain with the early onset of vascular dementia?

 

[Jack Of Owls]

Got a kick out of one of the original programmers for Thief: The Dark Project playing TBP on YT this week and he saved his progress just after he died (one of those QuickSave only guys) and lost all his progress, because the game lets you do that. "Who wrote that bug?" he asked only rhetorically, because he knew the answer all too well I'm always in fear of that with TBP; that I'll save when I die. So I stopped being a QuickSavetard. TBP cures you of so many bad gaming habits except The Big One - save scumming.

 

[Beastro]

Got a kick out of one of the original programmers for Thief: The Dark Project playing TBP on YT this week and he saved his progress just after he died (one of those QuickSave only guys) and lost all his progress, because the game lets you do that. "Who wrote that bug?" he asked only rhetorically, because he knew the answer all too well I'm always in fear of that with TBP; that I'll save when I die. So I stopped being a QuickSavetard. TBP cures you of so many bad gaming habits except The Big One - save scumming.

Tbh you need to save scum to be safe with the platforming and this is a campaign with a lot of it.

I don't like how sometimes holding space bar auto grabs ledges while other times I need to time hitting space to do it right. The only way I can find out which it is with a ledge is to save and then try to jump.

 

[Unkillable Cat]

I never picked up the habit of being a QuickSaveTard, in general.

And in my experience it's not the problem of having to time when to hold down Jump, but how long to hold it in certain cases so that the mantle-action completes successfully.

 

[Beastro]

Spoilage

The spread out loot in TBP is starting to piss me off because it's interfering with the verisimilitude of the game.

Thief had three levels of loot locations: the concentrations, the scattered bits, and the secret hidden stuff. The concentrations seem to be gone and replaced entirely with a mix of scattered stuff and secrets tucked away.

Before, you usually could get your amount of required mission loot from the concentrations and maybe a little scattered stuff, getting a lot was for challenges. I know this campaign isn't for newbies, but that isn't my point talking about it here. The thing about those concentrations is they were the highlight of theiving, those ones where you go wild grabbing a bunch of stuff in a choice location you worked to get into, like a dining room.

Now though in TBP, the dining rooms have maybe a golden candle stick a goblet or two rather than three times that many items, IF they have anything at all to loot besides maybe some food. I know the items need to be spaced out to make use of the map room, and they can't just fill it tons with loot or the amount you'd get would be crazy but this aspect ruins a key part of Thief's immersion.

Also

I don't think I've found a single damn fire arrow in a fireplace or water arrow in a bathroom.

Those are VITAL elements of Thief item placement! How else could people ever have fire and water without them???

 

[Wirdschowerdn]

SaveAfterDietards need to stop dying instead of slandering Quicksave chads.

 

[catfood]

When I played the original Thief (not Gold) when it first came out, I had no trouble getting out of the Bonehoard (or at least I think it was the Bonehoard... I'm no good with memorizing these names and locations in these games) but then a few years later I played Thief Gold and couldn't find my way out. I wonder what that was all about. Modifications to the mission with TG, or modifications to my brain with the early onset of vascular dementia?

I think the only mission that was substantially altered in Gold was The Lost City. I don't think any others suffered any major alterations.

 

[Beastro]

Anyone know how to get into this area in the third mission of TDP? Driving me nuts:

Blah

it's at the end of the sewer pipes by the lake that the monastery well is fed by:

 

[JarlFrank]

Was playing the 2nd mission of TBP and found a torture chamber/prison (that you could easily miss if you didn't turn the right way) near the treasury. There's a guy in a cell named Cicero I think who says he'll give you a big reward if you free him

You got your mission count wrong, that's from mission 3.

 

[Beastro]

So, Mission 3:

Spoilage

I enjoyed this one more, but the multiple entrances still kinda bugged me. I don't get why a secret entrance has to have multiple branching ways to enter. This is the second time a sewer system has had that, I can see doing it once.

Felt pretty lost in the place, especially since I entered via the sewers this time and came out the basement in the very back of the place. Would have been better to come in the entrance. By missions end I was able to figure the layout out.

Got over 2200 gold out of the 2600 or so total. Didn't feel like I was finding a lot of really hidden stuff in this one, so that much surprised me.

I really enjoyed the exchange in the library where one Hammer is trying to teach a new Hammer their manner of speaking and he keeps wanting to say "taffers". The voices sound much like the originals. Wouldn't be shocked if they used AI to duplicate them for new lines.

Loot was still sparse again, but didn't seem as bad in places, though some areas, like the factory, were totally unconnected to the rest of the map and I only managed to go their way to clean up on the way out.

They tried to do a concentrated loot in the treasury, but even that was pretty small and mainly a bunch of coins.

Overall I'm happy with this mission and it just reinforces that the second mission shouldn't have been the second mission.

My only big complaint is that this Hammer area is more a Mechanist feeling place with the scale of the cathedral while I liked Thief 1s older style of Hammer sites and wish they'd kept with their aesthetic rather than tried to make a Hammerite version of a Mechanist cathedral. I understand if this is them trying to set up and bridge the shift to the Mechanists, such as the one Hammerite raging about weeds growing around wishing they'd be eradicated which is actually quiet un-Hammerite as they never showed a hatred for flora and fauna, just the pagan crap that venerates it.

 

[Beastro]

Was playing the 2nd mission of TBP and found a torture chamber/prison (that you could easily miss if you didn't turn the right way) near the treasury. There's a guy in a cell named Cicero I think who says he'll give you a big reward if you free him

Spoiler

but of course he tried to kill me as soon as his cell door slid open but I had a flashbomb ready (no kills allowed on Expert) so I made short work of him

. It's unexpected little secrets or out of the way places like this that make exploration fun in an exploration-heavy game.

Reponse

Odd, he didn't attack me, just ran off. I followed him wondering how long he'd last and he ran straight into one of the guards circling the alarm system and got beat down.

 

[Unkillable Cat]

Anyone know how to get into this area in the third mission of TDP? Driving me nuts:

I asked the same question days ago on TTLG. Still no response.

More importantly, someone claims to have been able to find all the loot in this mission without getting in there, so perhaps it is unreachable?

 

[catfood]

Well this was really bad. Missed half the loot. Oof. I have no idea where all of it was. Maybe there was a huge stash of it somewhere, I don't know... In the alchemist's shop I believe, there was a gated entryway with a ladder leading down and a lever on the wall. I searched and searched and but I could not find a way there. I assume it's an exit way, but from where I have no idea. Anyway this mission was very weird. It's like two in one, but I think I agree with @Baestro in that loot is too far spaced out. I don't even know how it was spread out in this mission. Half of it on one side of the wall and half on the other? I feel that I missed half of the content on this map. I upped the gamma all the way to max too because I couldn't see shit most of the time and I still missed so much.

 

[JarlFrank]

The voices sound much like the originals. Wouldn't be shocked if they used AI to duplicate them for new lines.

All voices were spoken by people, no AI was used in TBP's creation.
The Hammerite priest voice is spoken by FenPhoenix, a Youtuber who's been Let's Playing Thief FMs for over a decade and can do a really good Hammer voice.
For some of the guards they even managed to get Dan Thron, one of the original voice actors who worked on Thief.

 

[Deadyawn]

The only voices I found unconvincing sometimes were Hume's and the occasional thug. Just about everyone else fits perfectly. As said above, the hammer voices were on point. The french chef was a laugh.

 

[Jack Of Owls]

Voice acting in TBP has been really good so far (about to start Mission 4 after taking a two day break for Xmas eve; a break I needed because the campaign can be exhausting), better than the voice acting I heard in the few minutes I played of a recent TDM mission to test out my controller setup (King of the Mountain, I think it was). It's been at least as good in the VA department as in Black Mesa with all the additional lines they added for the scientists. Very seamless and fitting right in

 

[Jack Of Owls]

Was playing the 2nd mission of TBP and found a torture chamber/prison (that you could easily miss if you didn't turn the right way) near the treasury. There's a guy in a cell named Cicero I think who says he'll give you a big reward if you free him

Spoiler

but of course he tried to kill me as soon as his cell door slid open but I had a flashbomb ready (no kills allowed on Expert) so I made short work of him

. It's unexpected little secrets or out of the way places like this that make exploration fun in an exploration-heavy game.

Reponse

Odd, he didn't attack me, just ran off. I followed him wondering how long he'd last and he ran straight into one of the guards circling the alarm system and got beat down.

There were no guards left to beat him down for me. By that time I had blackjacked them all. Maybe that's why he attacked me.