Thief 2 Gold

>>4081470
Thief Gold didn't improve much at all. The Gold levels are not well designed, look empty with repetitive textures everywhere, and being way too long for their own good.

Depends on what content Thief 2 Gold would have added.

>>4081483
bad meme the only really bad map in gold is probably the mage towers

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>>4081495
Thieves Guild is easily the worst.

-Sewer level is never the good one
-Glitchy servant Ai gives them superman perception
-Bad NPC placement and RNG incentivize aggressive approaches by making full stealth nearly impossible
-Made worse by the fact that the mission's theme is to get two factions to blame each other instead of a third party
-Mission critical item closely guarded by an NPC that can't be snuck by in a fully lit room that you can't darken
-Another mission critical item is literally a secret
-Yet another critical item is a secret
-The main objective is a secret
-Expert loot requirement is unreasonable because most loot is low value and hidden
-Several loot items are impossible to get without a literal full frontal assault

pic related: Guess what I'm modeling for Unity

I would've liked the Karros backstory mission. I feel the game doesn't do his purpose justice. Seriously, who is this guy and why does he believe in the Mechanists? Also some of the levels that were to be added seemed similar to what was already in Thief 1 or 2. Regardless I would have enjoyed it. I'm just glad Thief 2 came out.

>>4081904
The Expert loot for Thieve's Guild is pretty unreasonable, I agree. Are you remaking the first mission?

>>4081904
>Unity

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>>4082004
Yes. It's Bafford's stairwell.

>>4082016
I had to change the renderer to get better lighting but it still sucks. I'll have to go back to Unreal. I don't know what kind of magic Otherside is using to have all that dynamic lighting in Underworld 3 but it's beyond my Unity abilities.

>>4081470
Fixing the final mission would improve things a lot.

>>4082349
Fixing Soulforge wouldn't improve anything other than Soulforge. The second half is okay, it's just that the first half is boring and because there's no human guards, the stealth has no bite.

>>4082504
I think sneaking past bots is just as good as sneaking past humans. In fact Soulforge is one of the best ghost levels because you simply don't have the resouces to incapacitate all your opposition. Soulforge doesn't need fixing in my opinion. The Maw of Chaos however... Please tell me I'm not alone in thinking how dumb it is that the literal heart of raw chaos is a strictly linear path down? The final missions had their themes ass-backwards. The ultimate faceoff against chaos is a straight line and the final fight against order is a sprawling maze? Even Deadly Shadows is guilty, in a different way. The final mission of the franchise, the destiny of the main character, is not a mission at all, just a race around the hub world.

>>4082529
Maw of Chaos and the last quarter of the first game fall apart once the player can reliably bunnyhop, but they're still enjoyable adventure levels. Soulforge by contrast feels very restricted compared to the rest of its own game because you're just wandering inside one large building.

>>4081495

The truth is now just a meme, huh?

The dip in quality for these missions is tangible.

> Thieves guild
>>4081904
basically this.

The Mage Towers is a lame puzzle with a level that is too large, and too austere in design. Everythings a puke-grey texture. It doesn't feel much like the abode of arcane magic users at all, Aside from the obviously and monotonously designed towers. Water is just a big lake, Earth is a puke-green maze, Fire is basically lava and hotplates, and Air is a series of blue halls and platforming.

Quite the stark departure from the immersive level design of the Bonehoard, a place that you feel could actually exist somewhere.
>>4082529

I feel that the point of the jumbled mission designs is not by the game designers making. What I mean to say is, I don't think they were making a point with that.

Maw of Chaos was a race down a linear path mostly because it was a trip down the weirdness and maybe was supposed to feel more cinematic, which it did. It is SORT of anti-climactic, but it still feels nice to see all the weirdness of the Maw.

Soulforge is a correction of that mistake. It's a big sneak-off against the mechanical eyes, boobytraps and different signal tower challenges. The great thing ist hat they all feel different.

The first part always carried a lot of weight for me on my playthroughs. The comments that Garrett and Karras make gives it great suspense. Remember what Hitchcock said about suspense? It applies here. You feel that
you have to rush around building that extra beacon, and that Karras might find out your ploy. He talks to you periodically as you ramble around the different machines, avoiding mechanical eyes and beasts. Getting to (I think) factory part E was always a bitch to figure out for me, without getting caught.

All in all every signal tower is a real test of your nerves, your resource management and sneaking ability. Much, MUCH more climactic than the first one.

>>4082529
Stealth with the bots is nowhere near as interesting or satisfying as stealth with humans, because their alertness triggers are so vague. It's the interplay between the two that makes Thief 2 shine, the constrast between moving past cameras and guards. Soulforge could have greatly benefited from having some human guards to break up the audio and visual monotony.

>>4081495
Gold is objectively worse
>meme
Fuck off, underage

>>4081470
>>4081483
>>4083821
Is Gold actually inferior to vanilla? I've been meaning to get into the series, so I wanna make sure I don't waste my time with an inferior version.

>>4083814
>their alertness triggers are so vague.

Can you elaborate on this? In my experience they have the exact same behaviors as humans do. They patrol and do idle banter. They bark at detections. They have a search mode where they occasionally stand still and scan. They can remain in a heightened alertness state where they resume patrol with better perception and less idle banter.

The difference is with servant bots. Unalerted ones are blind and their search for threat confirmation is a radial stationary scan.

>>4083814
>Soulforge could have greatly benefited from having some human guards to break up the audio and visual monotony.

But there are human guards among the bots. Slave servant mechanists do patrol the cathedral. There just aren't that many of them. And you couldn't have actual normal humans because Karras was crazy and wanted to meet the Builder alone.

CATHEDRAL MISSIONS ARE FUCKING WORST

jk but its still scary as fuck. any tips?

>>4081470
>improve the base game as gold did
gold missions except opera were the worst gaming experience in my life

>>4084143

1: Play original Dark Project, put a skull in the doorway, grab The Eye and escape through the front door.

2: Play Thief Gold, stack bones and skulls next to the cathedral wall. Scale the wall. Jump onto balcony, climb onto the roof. Get in through the garden. Sell all 4 talismans to the Hand Brotherhood.

>>4083993
> can you explain this

not clearly without replaying the game again. I understand that the point of them was to be more clumsy and confusing than human guards, to show their inferiority. Stealth with the bots is good in short bursts, but when you have to deal with them for an extended period, such as in Life of the Party, their behavior becomes very difficult to read in relation to the pace of the gameplay.

>>4082056
Why the hell aren't you using Unreal 4, it's easy as piss.

t. UE4 level designer

>>4085878
I probably should. Afterall I didn't start out with Unity. I started with UDK.

>>4085885
Well I haven't ever used Unity or even Unreal 3 but I can tell you that setting up lighting is pretty convenient for the most part with UE4 - though I haven't really been using it to the level that would be needed for a game like Thief.

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>>4085896
Does UE4 support this type of light cookie? Unity just got support for it and it's really convenient because it's easy to render lighting into a cross shaped map.

>>4085909
You could probably work out something similar pretty easily. You should try out UE4 it's just an install away, really.

Where the fuck do I get the Thief games? Assuming I literally have no money.

>>4086158
GOG is fucking best

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>>4086158
GOG copies are perfectly functional and FM-compatible. Search the TTLG Thief forums for various fixes.

Meanwhile, some of my 3d stuff again

>>4085878

>not redoing it for The Dark Mod

>>4088180
Remaking Thief levels for Dark Mod is probably more difficult than it seems, because the Doom3 engine's shadow volumes don't support indirect bounces. TDP's lighting may be primitive, but the lightmaps have been rendered with indirect bounces.

>>4086868
you nailed the modeling butt interior is too mordern
good job tho

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>>4088426
My approach was to use materials of the old times to recreate modern things in a way that kinda makes sense in a world where you have torches, cobblestone streets and wooden ships, but also electric generators, starlight-gathering collector towers, highrise apartment buildings and steam-powered robots.

>>4083876
No it isn't. Just parroted by retards on /vr/ get Thief Gold and Tfix.

>>4083821
How is it objectivley worse? It's 3 new missions + tweaks to previous missions? How about you provide some meaningful criticisms as to how they ruined the previous missions by adding fire shadows to a few of them? I personally don't like Mage Towers but Song of The Caverns and Thieve's Guild were solid.

>>4083876

It is. The Gold levels simply aren't necessary for the plot of the game, they don't add anything to the experience but some half-baked, badly designed levels that draw out the game.

TDP is the way to go. The only reason why Gold is liked and recommended is that it's basically the only one you can get on GOG and Steam. The original is preferable though.

>>4088546

Don't listen to this idiot.

>>4088559

The only relevant tweak that is a good playthrough is the entirely optional tinybigworld segment in The Sword. The Thieves Guild level is terrible for reasons that have been already stated, but I will reiterate.

> convoluted level design
> ugly level design
Sewer levels are universally hated for a reason. Traversing what is mostly a canal where shit flows through is not as good as exploring the ruins of a zombie-overrun city quarter, a lost city, or fantastical Trickster realms.

> half-baked texturing and modelling

Seriously, some of the rooms are made up of one texture.

> missions add nothing to the story and feel horribly tacked on at the last minute

Thieves Guild has some unnecessary ways of achieving objectives. The level design makes it unclear where you're going - you never know whether you're getting closer to one of the mansions until you just stumble upon it. Bonehoard gave you a clever sound cue to help.

Then you have to get the key from one of the leader's men, open his house, get a key for the safe of the OTHER guy's house, get a key to aforesaid guy's house, get in, find the safe, get the vase, and finally leave. It's a complete chore.

Mage Towers was a pretty vacuous and entirely tedious job of going through the 4 predictably themed towers.

Song of the Caverns is partially decent. Getting to the Opera House is good, the level feels like it has some good designs from time to time, but it too is way too barren. A lot of the hallways and rooms have no loot or interesting locations to speak of.

>>4083814
If you don't shit yourself when a bot is moving past you, somethings wrong with you.

Also I think you're exaggerating. The bots have the same levels of alertness as humans, and they indicate it similarly.

>>4088631
I don't really mind the Mage Towers or the altered original missions, and I think Song of the Caverns is great. The biggest problem I have with the Thieves Guild can be summed up with a simplified walkthrough:

1. Ridiculous gymnastics to get through first area without violence (unnecessarily high NPC alertness level)
2.Climb down "a specific side of a rope" to get to second area undetected
3. Find a secret switch to proceed
4. Flip levers you don't know the purpose of in order to proceed
5. Do a mandatory knockout and find a secret key
6. Steal a secret piece of mandatory special loot
7.Navigate multi-NPC RNG patrols in an area fully lit by electric lights with no switches
8. Find a mandatory key inside a secret compartment
9. Dive into a secret tunnel to find lever to access next area
10. Find secret safe to steal main objective

It's the perfect mission for those who enjoy knocking out everyone and who already know the entire level top to bottom. For ghosters it may cause involuntary spontaneous suicide, and for first timers it's a needle in multiple haystacks, and the needle is made of hay. Oh, and the haystacks are sprayed with feces.

>>4088631
Spacing out the four talismans to more than two missions sounds like something that helps the game's story.

>>4088671
You put it way better than I did.

It's also a mission that is too long for what you're supposed to do. The Sword is your typical "enter mansion, traverse weirdness, retrieve object, leave" kind of deal. Thieves Guild makes you go to two different locations, get objects, go back and forth until you get main object. The fact that there's so many obligatory knockouts involved pisses me off. Essentially unghostable unless you've memorised everything and/or savescum. Fuck that mission.

>>4090128
It does, if the placement of the Talismans made any sense at all.

Somehow the Keepers managed to let queer Mages have one of the Talismans. If you look at the mission briefing https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uuw7Zl4rUqg
you'll see why this is stupid. The Keepers essentially say about them: "We don't know where they come from. They live outside the City. We have fuck-all knowledge about their powers. We have to be careful with them."

What kind of an assessment is that? They hold one of the damn Talismans, the keys to dooming the entire world. Good job m80s.

The Water Talisman is placed so conspicuously that the oafish guards of the local Opera House manage to find it before Garrett. The traps the Keepers put up were also ridiculously weak and takes like 5 minutes to beat in-game.

The Lost City was perfectly fine for storing two Talismans. It's an abandoned location that you'd need the key from the chapel in the barred quarter to even get into. The Hammerite Temple is well guarded and has several layers of security before you can get to the Talismans. In Song of the Caverns it's just in some posh whore's chest. The Mages have good security but are such an incalculable factor they should never have gotten hold of a Talisman.

What the fuck.

>>4090410
The earth mages of the Hand Brotherhood can feel the raw elemental power emanating from the talisman. The keepers gave it to them probably after an accurate appraisal of its legitimacy by the mages. It's not just a magical key, it binds the Haunted Cathedral to the very bones of the world. The mages can sense its power, and are more than adequate guardians for it considering how much they respect that power.

The cavern shrine for the water talisman was a weak excuse. They should have explained the ease of acquiring it by having it be the very end of a collapsed labyrinth of numerous traps that the construction crew of city sewers accidentally broken through. Or that the opera house used to be a different establishment, a high security military fortress or something. Or maybe a delicious irony of the very element of the talisman ending up forming centuries of frost forming and thawing in the structures of the shrine, eventually collapsing it from the wear. However that would be hard to explain to the player with conversations or readables.

>>4090470
The Talismans keep the evil within the cathedral sealed in there - what is likely meant is the Eye.

That still does not explain why the Keepers would hand over one of the big keyes to a potential zombie apocalypse over to such a big unknown. The Keepers do NOTHING lightly. THe texts in the Keeper Chapel emphasise this. The only reason they are hiding the Talismans with the Hammerites is because they have no choice.

And thinking about it, the Hammerites have a vested interest in keeping the Talismans safe. The fact that the Keepers just pawn off the Earth Talisman to a bunch of fanatical Mages they know virtually nothing about is baffling. They might have handed it over to potential allies of the Trickster for all we know. Elemental magic is something that the Pagans are familiar with. It's a bad idea.

I wouldn't want to get rid of the Opera level because it's a cool setting. It should have been done better though, and have a better explanation. Hell it could have been a standalone before The Sword. The idea of a Keeper trapped subterranean level is very appealing, and could have been a level like the Bonehoard to stand on its own. Instead you get 5 minutes of diving through water, blackjacking a few craymen and getting to the most easily solvable but pretentiously over-cryptically described trap of all times.

>>4090470
maybe you need to replay the mission, but that's the kind of explanation they give for Song of the Caverns, the opera staff found the chamber while doing pest control.

>>4090707
>the most easily solvable but pretentiously over-cryptically described trap of all times.


Maybe the real trap was overthinking?

>>4091929
based on his overly long posts that might have been the real trap

>>4090707
I remember being very excited to do some spelunking in Songs of the Caverns. It's still a good level, but I would've loved to play a real cave level.

>>4093290
>overly long

By whose standards; yours? You can't even be arsed to capitalize or punctuate your sentence.

>>4093639

autism