Ever wondered who premiered the “hiding in shadows”, “taking down enemies silently from behind"and " making noses to distract enemies”, that is so prevalent nowadays in many F/TPS?
While there were a lot of other games that paved the way, the genre defining 3D game series was Thief, developed be Looking Glass Studios. The first two games should be considered together, since the second was developed right after the first one and directly continues the story and it has the pretty much the same gameplay.
If you rather want a video introduction to Thief, Errant Signal has a good one
I will try to convince you that it is worthwhile to play one of the early 3D games which pioneered many mechanics that are still used today.
Is it for everyone? No! You need patience and a pretty good orientation sense in order to not get lost and frustrated. But you will be rewarded with 2 good games with clever level design! I played them last year after just trying them a bit when they originally came out. And I had a lot of fun! The gameplay is still entertaining and the worst mechanic is the melee fight. But you are a thief and shouldn’t even get in a fight, so from a certain perspective, that fits to the character you are playing.
So what is great:
As said, the level design is exquisite: very varied and fitting to the themes of the mission. A mission inside a bank plays very different from breaking into a prison or a cultists hideout. And they already use a lot of environmental storytelling in these games. Especially the second game has very atmospheric missions, you can see where Dishonoreds roots come from.
And it is also partially an immersive sim: you have a set of tools and are presented hurdles to your objective. How you solve them is up to you.
Tricking the guards and slipping into a building without anybody seeing you is as fun in this game as it is in any model stealth game. And the AI is also already well developed: you can trick them, if they see you you can hide from them in the shadows and honestly, today’s guard AI feels very same to this ones.
They also took an interesting and very fitting approach to difficulty: the levels and enemies are pretty much the same, but your objectives change. The higher the difficulty, the more loot you need to steal to proof you really are a master thief, and also you are not allowed to kill em all or anybody, since that is also unfitting to a master thief.
Story wise you are Garrett, master thief and former prodigy of the enigmatic Keepers, who try to uphold the balance in The City. No other name is every given and it seems to be the centre of human activity. The balance is in danger because two factions, the Hammerites and the Pagans are always at each others throats. The Hammerites are a catholic church combined with an industry factory. They are the power of progress and technology and bring order to the chaos. Which is the element of the Pagans, which they revere. They try to bring humanity back to it’s original roots in the ancient forest without any fire or technology to conquer nature. Garrett couldn’t care less about that and just want to be able to pay rent at the end of the month. Preferably with other peoples money however.
The weakest part of the first game are the fantastical themed levels, which are interesting in themselves, but not really fitting to the stealth game of the normal human missions. The second game nearly fully commits to being thief, greatly increasing my enjoyment of this game. The fantastical elements become understandable when you learn that the game originally was supposed to be an King Arthur themed game.
Best way to play is Thief gold edition and use the mod manager, which allows you to use high Res texture mods, these make playing the games nowadays a bit easier on the eyes.
Also: there are a ton of fan made maps for Thief 1+2, meaning you get so much more content for free.
A neighbor of mine gifted me Thief 2 Gold Edition when I was younger and it blew my mind. Getting to eavesdrop on the guards having random convos, and getting caught because I didn’t drag a body out of the way. It was wild back then. I’ve been tempted to play it again but I’m not sure how well it’s aged and I don’t want to ruin my memories
Not about thief 1 or 2, but a fun piece of Thief trivia is that Thief: Deadly Shadows (the third game in the franchise, from 2004), completely unexpectedly, has a level that routinely makes “scariest levels in video games” lists, despite Thief not being a horror game.
Oh yes, that level is still in my memories after more than a decade. And for good reason. I will make a post about Thief 3 in the future if nobody else does it first.
I remember almost nothing else about that game, but I remember that level vividly; it kept me awake the night after I played it. It was a complete non-sequitur in the context of the rest of the game, but holy shit, did it ever accomplish what they set out to do.
Oh fuck me, Robbing the Cradle was spooky as fuck.
And I was old enough that it shouldn’t have bothered me, but they sucked you right into it.
I’ve never been able to enjoy any other stealth game because of Thief 1 + 2. I played them back in the early 2000s and they were the very first stealth games I ever played. I think because they are the grandfather of stealth games and are, in my opinion, the peak of stealth games, I ended up setting my expectations too high for other games and always left them slightly or even massively disappointed. Even the shitty parts of Thief 1 where it feels barely even like a stealth game are still better than games that call themselves stealth games like Assassin’s Creed.
In modern stealth games it doesn’t really punish you for being clumsy or getting caught. In most of those circumstances it just turns into an action game. Even some of the good stealth games like Dishonered very rarely punish you. In Thief if you get caught 7 out of 10 times you are just screwed. Garrett isn’t a strong and well trained fighter like you are in most games, he’s just a Thief and that’s what he’s best at. Combat is never the smart or reliable option. And in harder difficulties you straight up fail the mission if you kill anyone.
Another thing that sets Thief apart is that it treats you like a regular dude and not some badass super human that always has all the info you need for a mission. Sometimes you get incomplete maps that you have to take notes on yourself. Sometimes you don’t even get a map that is reliable and you have to use it based on vibes. Sometimes you get thrown into a mission completely unprepared and go up against enemies and situations that are extremely difficult. Sometimes you get missions that are super straight forward and easy if you know how to be a thief.
All in all, these games are definitely peak stealth games. The first one is waaay more painful and some of the missions are just awful. But the good ones stand out and you definitely feel relieved when you get to them. The second game is 10x better than the first and has a lot less bullshit and a lot more stealth. Plus you get all kinds of cooler stuff because of lore reasons and it just makes it so much more enjoyable. I highly recommend to anyone that truly likes stealth games to play them if you haven’t. Thief 1 is a decent 8/10 for me and Thief 2 is an easy 10/10, especially for the stealth genre.
I have the same problem. Thief is the absolute pinnacle of the genre and nothing has even come close
Yeah, the biggest problem in my opinion is that they don’t commit to stealth, because they think the fan base is too small. So everything has to be solvable by violence as well. Which in turn leads to a worse experience than if they focused fully on that.
Which is why I’m so surprised that the indie Retro wave hasn’t yet created something like Thief with a new story/world. Should be easier nowadays with game engines and editors and I think there is no real competition there yet.
I guess there’s The Dark Mod to scratch that itch. It’s a completely community made stealth game using the Doom 3 engine. It pretty much feels the same as the first two Thief games.
Even some of the good stealth games like Dishonered very rarely punish you.
I guess this is one of those things where Thief and Splinter Cell have just trained me to want that ghost playthrough and enforce it myself. I’m aware you can do pitched combat in Dishonored but I really don’t get why a player would be interested. There’s action games for that itch.
For me, stealth is pretty strongly focused on cultivating that feeling of besting a superior force through knowledge (of place, timings, toolkits etc.) and I definitely love Thief and particularly The Metal Age (my first exposure to the series) for their approaches to that.In games like Dishonored, playing on the highest difficulty setting mitigated that problem of discovery being insufficiently punishing.
Some of my all-time favorites! I imagine there were precursors in terms of game design, but these were the first games I ever played where the enemy AI seemed actually intelligent. Like, guards would notice if you made noise, or if a torch had been extinguished. If they found the body of another guard they’d start searching for you. Pretty standard stuff these days, but that was a very fresh concept at release.
The studio behind Thief (Looking Glass) collaborated with Irrational Games on System Shock 2. Thief 1/2 and SS2 both used the Dark Engine, which leads me to my favourite piece of game dev lore/trivia. Because Thief was developed first, the game engine had code for sword parries. During SS2’s development they had persistent issues with that parry code activating when it shouldn’t. Testers would be trying to bean a psychic monkey with a pipe wrench and the monkey would parry with an invisible sword.
The DarkMod is not a mod, but a full thief game.
FOSS
What I remember isn’t so much the gameplay but the quality of the writing, voice acting, and world building. Thief 1 & 2 were bonkers amazing in that regard! I wish they had more games set in that universe.
Here’s a sample of what’s waiting if anyone wants a taste of the amazing dialogue:
Oddly enough I have a reverse relationship with this game compared to many others in the thread. I played Dishonored first, and I feel like THAT game spoiled the stealth genre for me. I tried Thief chasing that feeling and was sorely let down. I think if I’d played Thief first like a lot of you guys, I might have that attachment to it. And I know that Thief is likely a large reason why Dishonored exists to begin with, especially with the level design in mind. It just didn’t feel compelling to play, game mechanic wise or story wise. I ended up wanting to just play Dishonored halfway through. I pushed through till the end, it just felt like a worse version of a game i loved. May give the second one a shot, might stick with me more. But the first one left a not-so-pleasant taste
Underrated mechanic was the map.
Just a scrawled paper that you could write your own notes on.
Oh, also rope arrows. Fantastic level design to make them compelling but sane.
I remember getting lost in one of the missions, literally muttering “Where am I?” in English even though I’m German and opening the map to a page that said “Where am I?” written by Garrett.
Can’t get more immersive than that!
Wait, you could write on the map? Sure that was in Thief1&2? I can’t remember anything like that.
Oh for sure Thief 2. Used to scribble down guard routes/timings on areas I’d have to traverse multiple times.
Yeah but the giant spiders give me nightmares
