I've been an avid game player all my life, but my all-time favorite game series is Thief. All in all, there have been 3 Thief games, the first two put out by Looking Glass Studios (who also did the great System Shock series) and the third one put out by Ion Storm, all three released by Eidos. Besides playing all the games for years now I've also been a longtime member of TTLG, the web community devoted to Looking Glass Studio games, and I even have a piece of fan fiction on their website, which shows you how much of a dork I am. I'm not sure why I love these games so much? Is it because of their design, or the brooding, sinister atmosphere? The storylines, which connect all three games, and the deep backstory that gets more and more enriched with each game? With the Thief series, Looking Glass created a living, breathing artificial world with its very own history, cultures, factions, and mythology. Once you get sucked into the Thief universe, you'll be hooked for life.
If you’ve never played any of the Thief games, this is what you need to know: They take place in a sort of alternate time in Earth’s past in which medieval buildings and clothing are mixed in with Victorian architecture and steampunk technology. The games center around a master thief named Garrett who operates in a location known only as The City, a massive urban area split into various districts. Sometimes a game mission may take place outside the city, but generally, the City is usually where the missions take place. The City is run by the Baron (whose always off fighting wars against other cities) and policed by the City Watch. There are also two major factions: The Hammerites, big hammer-wielding mofos who worship a deity known as “The Builder” and the art of construction (they’re religious fanatics) and then there’s the Pagans, who are a shamanistic, agricultural group of people who live outside the City but have secret outposts inside it, usually in sewers and abandoned buildings. The Hammerites represent order and masculinity while the pagans represent chaos and femininity. The Pagans god is “The Trickster”, a Pan-like entity associated with nature. Balancing out these two extremes are a third faction, the Keepers, a shadowy secret society that carefully monitors the Pagans and Hammerites and makes sure that no one side gets to be too powerful. Garrett was trained by the Keepers, but left them as a young man to become a thief instead. In every game he finds himself getting caught up in battle between the two factions, and inevitable ends up having to save the City from some calamity.
That’s the back-story. In terms of gameplay, Thief is what’s called a “First Person Sneaker”, where stealth is more important than killing enemies wildly. All the missions take place at night, so shadows are your allies. You have this sort of light gem at the bottom of the screen that tells how visible you are: If it’s really light, for example, you’ll be visible to everyone in the area, but if you’re crouching in the shadows you’ll be barely visible at all. You also have to be careful to not make much noise: If you run across a tile floor, you’ll cause a big racket, whereas if you walk on grass you’ll make barely any noise at all (I should add here that the sound design in these games are fantastic). For tools, you get a sword (a dagger in the third Thief game), a blackjack (used to knock out guards quietly from behind), and a bow complete with different sorts of arrows: Regular arrows for killing enemies or hitting switches from across rooms, water arrows for putting out torches or fireplaces (thus creating more shadows to hide in), fire arrows for causing damage to enemies or blowing up explosives, gas arrows for knocking enemies out, noisemaker arrows to cause distractions, and (my favorite) rope arrows for climbing to higher surfaces. There’s a few other items such as health potions, invisibility potions, speed potions, mines, lock picks, and flash bombs, which are small circular devices you can toss at enemies feet to briefly blind them.
One of the great things about Thief is the immersion factor: You really do feel like a master thief living in this great, dark world. There are so many great moments that can happen in any Thief mission. Like once I was trying to break into a mansion. Unfortunately, I alerted the guards and they began looking after me, so I hid in some shadows, crouching down and not moving so I was virtually invisible. I watched as the three guards moved closer, closer, and closer to me, thinking over my options. Should I attack? I might be able to kill two of them on my own, but no way could I kill all three, unless I was really lucky. Use an invisibility potion to avoid them? Blind them with some flash bombs? In the end, I fired a noisemaker arrow in the opposite direction, so when the guards went to go investigate that sound I snuck into the mansion. There's a certain joy to be had standing outside to some manor, firing a rope arrow onto the underside of a wooden beam, watching the rope unfurl, and climbing up it to a second floor balcony, where you can lockpick a window and sneak inside.
The first Thief game (Thief: The Dark Project, later expanded as Thief Gold) set the template for the following two games. You run through a series of missions, which together form a big storyline. In between some missions are really great cut scenes that further explain the story (same for conversations overheard in the mission themselves, not to mention the mass amounts of reading material you come across… notes, scrolls, books, and so on). At the start of each mission you get a description of your goal (usually break into an establishment, steal something, and get out) and you choose the difficulty level. On the easiest level there are less guards (and less objectives) to deal with but on higher levels there’s more guards, more objectives, and you can’t kill ANYONE, even enemies (every Thief mission has innocent NPC: servants, civilians, merchants and so forth, who can’t hurt you but will run to alert guards if they see you. The servants in Thief 1 are especially amusing). After that you come to a load-out screen where gold stolen during your previous mission can be used to buy tools for the new one. Gold and tools don’t carry over from mission to mission, so it’s pointless to save items for future use. After you purchase your tools, you start the mission. Upon completing your mission, you see a stat screen of how much loot you stole, how long it took to beat the mission, how many guards you knocked out, and so forth, and then you go on to the next mission. Each mission supplies you with a map: Some maps are quite detailed, while others are crude sketches. Oftentimes, you need to do a lot of exploring to figure out where to go.
Regarding the missions themselves, Garrett has lots of options. He can walk, run, or creep. He can kneel down and walk while crouching. He can mantle up walls and ledges, climb ladders and ropes. He can swim underwater for a brief period of time, stack crates on top of each other, pick up almost any object he comes across, and so forth. Garrett’s not very fast, though, and as a fighter he’s kind of weak, so as noted above its good to avoid combat… always a good idea to knock a guard out from behind rather then kill them. You should never leave bodies out in the open… hide them in the shadows! In addition, when you wound someone they can leave bloodstains on the ground that can alert others, but those can be washed away with water arrows. The AI of the guards is pretty good: They’ll notice if something valuable has been stolen, and if wounded they’ll often run off to find more guards to help them.
One of my other favorite things about Thief is the level of freedom you have. Stacking crates and other objects, you can go almost anywhere in the game, even to area that the programmers obviously never expected you to go. And there’s usually many ways to beat a mission. The very first mission in Thief 1, for example, involves breaking into a rich lord’s mansion, stealing his scepter, and getting out. You start right by the front gate, where you hear 3 guards having a conversation. You could try to fight them, but one of them has a bow so it’s unlikely you’ll win. Or, you could get their attention, have them chase you, hide someplace safe, then sneak through the front gates while they’re looking for you. Or, you could walk along the perimeter of the castle until you find a well, which takes you into a river that leads to the castle’s basement. Then there’s another mission that requires you to break into yet another mansion. You could try to get in through the front, or you can grab a bunch of crates and use them to make a makeshift staircase and climb over the castle wall that way. There’s so many options. Another good things is that often times the missions are HUGE: The final mission of Thief 2 alone took me hours to explore fully. There’s one mission in Thief 2 that requires you to travel along the city’s rooftops until you reach a giant tower you need to break into. The rooftops are filled with side quests and secrets and are almost a mission on there own, and then when you reach the tower you see that it’s a massive six story building complete with elevators, a ballroom, offices, libraries, kitchens, guest bedrooms, servant quarters, utility closets, and so forth. Just exploring the stages alone is half the fun, and many of them do seem like actual buildings one could work and live in (many have restrooms, storage rooms, spare rooms, secret passages, and so forth). The graphics in the Thief games aren’t the greatest but the stage design and architecture is really awesome. Overall, Thief 1 is the most medieval looking of the games, while Thief 2 is the most Victorian and Thief 3 is a hybrid of the two styles.
I'd have to say my favorite Thief game is the second one. Great storyline, better graphics, GIGANTIC missions, and while there's less undead enemies then in the first game I really loved the Mechanists, a Hammerite splinter faction. They have all these cool steam-operated robots and security devices, and their leader, Karras, could be one of my favorite computer game characters of all time, though his voice annoys some old-time fans. The final mission of Thief 2, which takes place in this enormous Factory/Cathedral, is perhaps my favorite mission, with breathtaking architecture and scenery... an industrial masterpiece! God, Thief had so many cool missions... haunted churches, opera houses, clock towers, a bank, even a haunted insane asylum (cripes, that was a scary stage).
Sadly, Looking Glass Studios went out of business shortly after Thief 2 came out (and before they could make System Shock 3, unfortunately). Fortunately, Eidos and Ion Storm got the rights to the Thief franchise and released the third game in the Thief series, “Thief: Deadly Shadows” in 2004. While a good game, the first two are still much better. Part of the problem was because this new thief game was also released on console, they dumbed it down a bit: Putting in an optional 3rd person mode (which I never use, it really distances yourself from Garrett), making Garrett be unable to swim (if he falls into water it kills him instantly, ala the early GTA games), and there’s less freedom: Many buildings you can’t climb on top of, and they replaced the great rope arrows with worthless climbing claws that are hard to use and unable to mantle on to higher surfaces! Also, there was loading times placed into each mission (something you never saw in the first two games) and in between missions they put in a sort of “hub” where you could freely explore other districts of the city, but these districts were very small and there was little to do. What made the third game good was the improved graphics, a killer sound design and use of shadows and lighting, a good storyline, and tons of references to the old games that would probably stump new players: There’s this one crypt section where some of the dead peoples names are of those killed in the first two games, for example. They also used a lot of the old familiar sound effects and guard voices, and Stephen Russell returned to voice Garrett for a third time (his cynical, world-weary and sarcastic voice really makes Garrett a cool, likeable character). I did like how it explored the Keeper organization in greater detail too, as that faction was largely in the background the first two games.
Will there ever be a Thief 4? One can only hope... But anyway, if you liked System Shock 2 (probably the scariest game I ever played) you'll probably like the Thief series a lot. If anyone else here has played these games, I'd love to hear some of your thoughts and favorite Thief moments. |
