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The Making of Thief
The excellent Rock, Paper, Shotgun plays host to a behind-the-scenes piece into how Thief: Deadly Shadows was made. The interview, between Kieron Gillen and designer Jordan Thomas, features some very memorable quotes, and touches on the rough road that Looking Glass studios had to travel in order to get the game out the door. Thomas is also not shy about the success of the game from a design perspective, if not in other regards: "If you want to look at a good example - and the Ubi guys will admit this freely - the Splinter Cell series owes a lot to Looking Glass and Ion Storm games ... That's a great example of what you can do if you take that same sort of design philosophy, at its core, and apply it to a much better positioned franchise with a more mass-market core fantasy."
Sadly, while Wine runs World of Warcraft quite nicely, older games don't get much love. Thief and Thief 2 fall in the sad gap between what runs on Dosbox and what runs in Wine. There's no good way to play them.
(Even booting into Windows doesn't help if you have a recent NVidia, since they make Thief 2 look totally crap because they don't support dithering.)
This game is one of the best PC games of its kind that was ever released. Splinter Cell, which is awesome in its own right, doesn't come close to the atmosphere and environment of the Thief series, especially Thief 2. And I defy anyone who loves these games to play the Sanitarium level of Thief 3 and not be freaked out. I wish that a Thief 4 would be in the works. :( Until then, I guess Assassin's Creed is the closest successor, although it's not quite the same thing.
:)
Oh, speaking of Thief 2, I highly recommend the T2X: Shadows of the Metal Age fan-made expansion pack. It's the best Thief mod out there in my opinion. YMMV, of course.
Praise, Karras!
The Overrated mod is for reversing inappropriate, positive mods, not for voicing disagreement with a post.
That was from Thief 2 in the 'Life of the Party' mission. Probably the BEST voice acting in the series.
Here you go: http://www.omni-tech.org/temp/lotp.wav
http://www.thieveryut.com/
:)
ThieveryUT is great. It's a little bit fast-paced to get the thief experience down, though. OTOH, I suppose it has to be, or else it would suck to be a guard.
On a related note:
Check out this work-in-progress: http://sourceforge.net/projects/opde -- the OpenDarkEngine. It's currently pretty much a game framework and map viewer, but it's moving along handily since the new head dev took over and switched the system to use the Ogre rendering engine. Object rendering was just added a couple of days ago, scripting and properties work is next, and they could use help if there are any good coders out there. Screenshots here: http://darkfate.ru/index.cgi?thumbs=files/projects/opde/screenshots (the "screenshot object" images are the most recent. Yeah, they could use a sorting or dating system on that site.)
I should note that this will work for Thief 1, Thief Gold, Thief 2, AND System Shock 2. (Consider it like a spiritual successor to the failed System Shock Hack Project, which did a lot of work to decipher the various file formats.) And ---YES IT RUNS ON LINUX.--- Mac will probably work, too.
There's also the Dark Mod, a Thiefish mod for Doom 3 that's underway. http://www.thedarkmod.com/ It won't run the original levels, though, so you'll have to wait for remakes to be made, and all the excellent fan missions will be super-extra-no-way unless OpDE is finished.. Good news is they've done a lot of work on recreating Thief's sound propagation, and this work could probably be shared with OpDE, and AI and sound are the two big hurdles for any Thief remake.
- mantar