Fortunately, they've been dropped for the third game. The levels also became more domestic, with far more of the game based on creeping around large buildings and city streets.
This enabled the team to concentrate more heavily on the stealth aspects of Thief and dull down the combat, which became very much a last resort for the player.
For Randy, the new focus of Thief II was very much a double-edged sword: "In some ways, the new angle was really successful, but in other ways we took it a bit too far and for many players the game lost some of its lustre, depth and unpredictability. Needless to say, fans of the series are hugely excited about the prospect of a third Thief episode.
Though Looking Glass Studios is long since defunct, several of the original team have been gathered together at Ion Storm, under the watchful eye of Warren 'Deus Ex' Spector.
The new game. Thief: Deadly Shadows , was put on the back burner while Deus Ex: Invisible War was completed, but the team at Ion Storm is now working day and night to get it finished.
What we've seen so far is very promising, and suggests the developers have stuck to what made the original so great, focusing on creating an immersive, interactive world, with the focus on softly, softly, rather than wading in with a big sword. We're off to Ion Storm to play the game next issue, so stay tuned for a full preview soon. But regardless of the success or otherwise of the new sequel, it's the original game that will always be remembered as the pioneering classic, the one that proved the viability of an entirely new style of gameplay.
In the words of designer Randy Smith: "It's really flattering when we see games that have stealth models that are clearly based on Thief. Many games have stealth elements these days, but Thief seems to have defined a point on one side of the spectrum.
If you want to make a comprehensible game that's truly first and foremost about stealth, you need to look to Thief as your starting point. Games developers are always banging on about realism. They're obsessed. Picture the scene: It's an average afternoon at Dennis Publishing. Everyone in the building is busy forging ahead with an exciting career in the cut-'n'-thrust, cut-'n'-paste world of magazine production.
Every desk is an epicentre of efficiency, every floor a hive of industry. Except for the basement, that is, where the feckless slackers on PC ZONE are lounging in chairs, eating pies and having a new game demonstrated to them. Yes, demonstrated. These days an increasing number of software houses aren't content to simply bung a pair of CDs in a jiffy bag and mail it our way.
Oh no. They have to come in and personally test drive the game before our very eyes, as if we were children. Or simpletons. Or just too damn lazy to play it for ourselves. They know us too well. Occasionally the program under scrutiny is glaringly rubbish, and an embarrassing and awkward ceremony ensues wherein the games company PR droid asks uncomfortable W questions like What do w you think of it?
Better to bottle it up and let it all flow out in the finished V article. The droid can biro his lungs out on his own sodding time. Anyway, the only reason I a company sends in one of their glassy-eyed henchmen to demonstrate the code in the first place is so they can sit there and point out all the details.
And this is where the obsession with realism starts to kick in. Look at that flaming torch on the wall," they'll say, pointing at a clutch of pixels.
Look, see - the shadows actually flicker. See how they flicker? Realism, realism, realism. Trouble is, while the visuals may be realistic, the action itself is absolute toon time; the authenticity fetish suddenly evaporates, and instead we're left with screenfuls of absurd gung-ho conflict, with severed arms and legs and heads and bullets and blood and laser rifles and hordes of slavering octopoid invaders from the planet Zaglon B. But hey, those shadows flicker. What's this got to do with Thief?
The makers of Thief are trying to create a 3D first-person perspective action-adventure game with realistic gameplay. Do they have a hope in hell? Probably not. But if anyone can pull it off, the guys from Looking Glass Studios can. While many developers are content to hurl the player into a 3D environment stuffed with bad guys, chainguns and ceaseless u mayhem, Looking Glass have always done things differently, concentrating instead on concentrating instead on storyline, atmospherics and pacing.
Thief carries on that tradition. The concept is simple: when all's said and done, it's a game in which you play a slippery little bastard. You take the role of Garrett, a seedy ne'er-do-well who makes a living offering his services in exchange for money. Our hero is well versed in the art of petty criminal I behaviour - sneaking around, skulking in the shadows, smacking people on the back of the head, pinching stuff then legging it - and therein lurks the bulk of the gameplay.
A typical level requires you to break into an opulent mansion and pilfer a precious artefact. Easy peasy. Except the place is a quite big, and b regularly patrolled by guards. So what do you do? You've got some weapons - a sword, a blackjack and a bow and arrow - but there's lots of guards and only one of you, and this isn't Duke Nukem; run in the front door waving a sword around and they'll be all over you like fat men in a cake shop.
So rather than cantering headlong into each location, weapon drawn, you are encouraged to walk on tiptoes, preferably in the dark and on a soft surface; slip in the back way; keep in the shadows. Should you encounter a guard, the best course of action is to sneak past or take him out quietly by whopping him on the back of the skull with a blackjack.
You can whip out your sword and attempt to carve him into chunks small enough to stir fry in a spider's wok, but that's the last resort. Aside from the hideous brutality of such action, it's also noisy; someone might hear the struggle and come looking for you.
An altogether classier - and quieter - option is to use your bow and arrow to eliminate him from a distance. Once he's laid out on the floor, sling his body over your shoulder and dump it somewhere inconspicuous to prevent anyone from coming across his sprawling corpse and subsequently raising the alarm. And so on and so forth. The game starts slowly, but once you're in the thick of things Thief is genuinely nerve-jangling.
If you're clumsy, death comes quickly - a few quick hacks from a rival sword and it's curtains. Knowing your life hangs in the balance each time you tread on a creaky floorboard helps keep the mind surprisingly keen.
Sound effects are an all-important staple of the gameplay - all the characters can hear. Not only does a careless footfall alert the bad guys to your presence, it also alerts you to theirs. Often you have to rely on your sense of hearing to work out the whereabouts of the guards as they pad about - make sure your speakers are wired up the right way round.
One particularly neat feature is the Cpeer round the corner' key, which does exactly what it says on the tin. Being able to poke your head round and have a quick butcher's down the corridor can save your life on countless occasions; although there's nothing more unnerving than finding yourself staring eyeball to eyeball at an equally surprised guard.
So there you go. It's all shaping up to be an exhilarating experience, if nothing else. Let's go back to that whole Crealism' thing. It's all very well having ultra-realism when it enhances the gameplay and makes it more believable and therefore involving - but if the entire thing were naught but an exercise in everyday life emulation, Thief would be Thankfully, it isn't. While on the whole it presents a far more believable environment than, say, Duke Nukem, there are also occasions where it feels about as true to life as Ivor The Engine.
Example: for some reason, Garrett is equipped with special Cmagic' arrows which do special Cmagic' things. There's a Cwater arrow' which is used for dousing lanterns thereby enabling you to pass by in total darkness , and a Cmoss arrow' which muffles the sound of your footsteps. Now, at the risk of sounding like a gaggle of pedantic, sneering shitcakes, wouldn't a kind ofCwater balloon' thing make more sense than an arrow?
And if you wanted to walk around silently for a moment, wouldn't you simply slip off your shoes? Still, as long as they don't feel contrived and out of place, like they're plugging a hole in the game design, we'll let it go.
Besides, shooting arrows into an enemy's lughole is Remember fun? Thought so. Speaking of fun, the behaviour of the enemy guards is hilarious. In most respects, they're scarily true-to-life. While on duty, they behave impeccably: they stand around whistling or muttering to themselves, fidgeting and pacing around in a faintly bored manner, and generally doing little in the way of actual guarding, just like the real thing.
But occasionally their behaviour veers from the believable to the ridiculous within milliseconds, in a manner so disconcertingly schizophrenic that you start to question their sanity.
Let's say you accidentally make a sound, at which point a nearby guard might shout: Who goes there? Then moments later the same guard lightens the mood somewhat by saying aloud, in the hammiest manner imaginable: Oh, 1 must be imagining things. What is this? You half expect to turn around and see Jim Davidson, dressed as Buttons, performing a comic turn.
Perhaps you might even ready your sword in anticipation, dribbling at the prospect of hacking his legs off below the knee, then stamping up and down on his arrogant little face until his eyeballs burst all over your shoes. Pantomime or not, it's a laugh and a half when they catch you. Funnier still is the way they all speak with a bizarre approximation of the English accent, reminiscent of Dick Van Dyke's infamous star turn in Mary Poppins and equally hilarious.
Mind you, Van Dyke never started cussing, the way the Thief guards start hurling insults at you once it all kicks off. Not content to be simply amusing, the guards absolute devils to hide from. Skulking around in the darkness while an unaware guard stomps by, absentmindedly mumbling to himself is a uniquely tense gaming experience that you won't find anywhere else. All in all, it's an intriguing prospect. We can't wait to get our hands on the finished version - especially since the preview version has a weird control setup.
As Thief s gameplay relies on careful, precise manoeuvring, it was oddly frustrating to discover that the preview version came with a bizarre, unchangeable control system. Here at ZONE we're fussy. We like our Y axis reversed when we're mouseketeering through a Quake-alike. But since there was no option to do this, we spent most of our time in the world of Thief staring at our shoes, or the ceiling, or the wall, or basically just about anywhere other than where we intended to.
In fact, it was a bit like that walk you do when you're tired and you've had far too much to drink, and you alternate between trying to loll your head back to rest on your shoulders, and leaning forward to vomit all over the floor.
Not the ideal state for cat burglary, basically. Unless you're a scouser, in which case you're probably: a a genuine burglar, and b perpetually drunk anyway, in which case congratulations - this is your life. Anyway, since you'll be able to fully customise the controls in the full version, until they fit you like a glove, that last bit was irrelevant.
Oh, and we apologise if you are a scouser even though you probably stole this mag to read it -assuming you can read. We were ranting.
Thief: The Dark Project is out later this year, and it will probably rock bells. Install the game Full Installation. Execute it to remove the CD-Check. EXE [ bytes] Play the Game!
From the action-bar choose File and select CD-Copy. Game or Patch Questions? Visit FileForums. Magazines Banners. Thief Gold v1. Thief: Gold v1. Thief: The Dark Project. How to get Thief working on new computers [Saleck. Thief Thief 2 Thief 3 Thief Always make a backup of the files that are overwritten by the File Archive, as the original files are usually required to update the game to a newer version or to play Online! Official Thief: The Dark Project v1.
Play Instructions: Install the game - Full Installation. The update installer only works on a unpatched retail installation of Thief! Play Instructions: Copy the full contents of the CD to a temporary directory e. Play Instructions: Install the game Mb. Play Instructions: Create a Thief game directory e. Play Instructions: Install the game Full Installation.
Use the following settings all other settings should be left default :. Image Tab. Enter a Image filename. Copy options Tab.
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