The Thief Series

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The Best Thief Installment


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Inb4 the audio system in the brand new game gets BTFO by a 1998 game with an incredibly janky engine. Considering the voice acting in the trailer (besides Russell)...
 
Inb4 the audio system in the brand new game gets BTFO by a 1998 game with an incredibly janky engine. Considering the voice acting in the trailer (besides Russell)...
That janky engine has been repeatedly updated over the years following a source code leak. Tons of bug fixes, new features, and some old, arbitrary limits were lifted by an order of magnitude. Here's some examples plucked out of the patch notes:

NewDark v1.19
- Added support for 32-bit color
- Added DDS/PNG image support
- Added full 24/32-bit TGA/BMP image support
- Increased the maximum number of frames allowed in animated textures from 20 to 99, and increased the allowable filename length for animated textures (before the underscore) to support more than 7
- Fixed sound cap per schema type bug and upped max sound channels to 48
- Fixed a bug which limited number of sound channels to 16 even if more were selected
- Increased the maximum number of visible on-screen terrain polies from 1024 to 20480
- Increased the maximum number of visible on-screen objects from 128 to 1280
- Increased brush limit from 7068 to 16384
- Increased rooms limit from 1024 to 4096
- Increased ambient sound limit from 256 to 1024
- Increased cell limit from 28672 to 32760
- Increased the maximum number of sides in a cylinder from 10 to 26.
- Increased automap location limit from 64 to 256 locations per page
- DromEd will no longer stop working after 03:14:07 on Tuesday, 19 January 2038

v1.22
- fixed a crash that could happen during loading of larger (somewhere above 100MB) mis files
- increased max map pages per mission to 32
- increased MAX_GLOBAL_RENDER, MAX_GLOBAL_PLANES and MAX_GLOBAL_POINTS

v1.23
- added simple object LOD support (see new Shape->"Model LOD" property in modders_notes.txt)

Now almost every mapper is building their missions for NewDark:


But even before the NewDark era, mappers were pushing the limits of the Dark Engine as hard as possible:

 
We already have countless sequels, it's called fan missions. This could have been a great opportunity to just hire some big FM creator names and just throw money and a tard wrangler at them to pump a game out that everyone would like, they can still do it in the old engine and everything, but nope. They're gonna get taffers who at most only have ever played Thief 4, put it in Unreal 5, and will write anti-Builder propaganda.
 
We already have countless sequels, it's called fan missions. This could have been a great opportunity to just hire some big FM creator names and just throw money and a tard wrangler at them to pump a game out that everyone would like, they can still do it in the old engine and everything, but nope. They're gonna get taffers who at most only have ever played Thief 4, put it in Unreal 5, and will write anti-Builder propaganda.
Out of all the crappy things Square Enix could do to Thief in current year, making a PSVR2 game is one of the least offensive. It's easy to ignore if it goes wrong, and it will probably spur more interest in developing a VR version of the originals/NewDark. If it's a flop the IP will be put on the shelf for another decade. It probably can't even be in Unreal 5 if it has to run at a stable 90-120 Hz framerate or whatever the headset is targeting.
 
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Didn't knew there was a Thief thread here, and it is also the way I find out they're making a a VR game that's linked to the original trilogy.
Out of all the crappy things Square Enix could do to Thief in current year,
SE has not had the rights to the series ever since Embracer bought Eidos Montreal with all the IPs the worked on (It's also the reason a new DX game was killed when their Saudi deal fell through). Still, even if the game is VR only as long as the devs care enough for the source material, it should be just fine. Arkham Shadow was developed by a studio other than Rocksteady but it still was leagues better than their own Arkham VR, with its own place in the timeline and care for the IP.

Also with the recently annouced dud remake of DX and a Thief VR game being developed by separate studios, what's EM doing currently and why did they allow the projects to have this disperse levels of quality? I know they laid a lot of people recently and the only leadership person left from the DXHR-MD era is both games director, so their autistic levels of detail and dedication featured in those games are no longer present in whatever they're doing. Is being a support studio for the latest Fable that big of a task?
 
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Niche Gamer: Thief VR: Legacy of Shadow reveals first look at gameplay
Garrett is trapped in The Eye.
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3:02 there's some attempt at banter where magpie talks shit at garret, like, bitch, do you even?
fucking hell, i hope stephen got paid at least, it's good to see him as garret instead of whatever the fuck bethesda wants him to be.
 
I preferred the first game. Thief 2 looked better and had better-designed levels but the antagonist of the game and his minions were just annoying. Burroks and undead weren't as bad as the walking bomb-throwers. The nice thing about Thief 2 was that they designed the levels before actually coming up with the objectives therefore the levels are more complicated and realistic. The mechanist shit was annoying and also took away from the realism in the world building of the first game. The idea of a religious order that created believable 19th century technology but held onto it to keep it in their control seems more realistic. Like a guild that was around so long it became a religious institution. The mechanist technology makes no sense due to it being more advanced than our own current tech with no explanation as to how that's possible.

The third game was ok for worldbuilding but it seemed unpolished. The re-spawning crystals and dorky fights with the citizens of the city were cringy. I wish the game let you explore more of the pagan forests. Also Garret made sense in the first game because he had the super power of being able to mostly see in the dark which led to him trying to pick-pocket one of the members of that weird organization that watched everyone. By the second game, the technology to see in the dark was available to the mechanists since their leader built his bionic eye.

The religious conflict in the 2nd game also made no sense. The whole point of the Hammers was that they were a special guild. There's no reason why they would've given up their roles to some nerd who was good at building atomotons. Their conflict wasn't over complex religious matters but just petty organizational issues. Also, most "religious conflicts" in real life were usually over secular issues with each side using religion as a justification. If the game was realistic, the nerd would've been murdered by some random assassin and his technology stolen by wealthy locals who wanted to break into the industrial sector without being hammered into the ground.
 
The mechanist technology makes no sense due to it being more advanced than our own current tech with no explanation as to how that's possible.
there's magic in the thief universe...
The religious conflict in the 2nd game also made no sense. The whole point of the Hammers was that they were a special guild. There's no reason why they would've given up their roles to some nerd who was good at building atomotons. Their conflict wasn't over complex religious matters but just petty organizational issues. Also, most "religious conflicts" in real life were usually over secular issues with each side using religion as a justification. If the game was realistic, the nerd would've been murdered by some random assassin and his technology stolen by wealthy locals who wanted to break into the industrial sector without being hammered into the ground.
someone didn't eavesdrop much on thief 2 or did the missions to figure out who is the basis of the mechanical servants...
i do like that karras is voiced by stephen, he doesn't sound like himself at all, similar situation to jon st. john voicing the jester announcer in twisted metal.
 
Any big new The Dark Mod must play levelsets? I kind of wish they'd make campaign packs for it similar to certain Quake mods instead of just one off levels.
 
I'm gonna play this, looks epic.
You have to upgrade to NewDark v1.28 to play. This is a relatively new version from a purportedly different French coder, released in May 2025. I haven't been playing for a few months so I hadn't heard of it.

I was able to start the mission on v1.27, but the briefing video didn't play (probably because 1.28 adds a bunch of new supported video types), and I got an error message at the beginning about fall damage or something. I didn't crash immediately as promised, but I went ahead and quit to install the new version using T2Fix. Pretty easy, even on a "protected" GOG folder that was not unmodified but already using v1.27.

It looks very pretty:

screen001.webp
 
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