Thief fan missions and campaigns

[fortuni]

I have beta tested a number of his missions and the revelation came up in one of those testings, Broken Heart IIRC. He later made Anna's Secret, his first mission that raised the subject of FTM, and although the plot implied the FTM issues were about his ex-girl friend, from our discussions and how I understood everything, I believed the plot was Pedro's autobiographical story in disguise. He also used to have a link on his website for a FTM forum which he was an active poster, but it has been removed for some time now, but his posts on that website went back some time before Anna's secret was built.

I have a genuine soft spot for the guy. He can be caring, friendly, funny and intelligent etc and for those reasons I have tried over the last couple of years to cover his back when he has lashed out on TTLG, which he is prone to do.

I myself have had to deal with huge emotional difficulties and used to suffer from uncontrollable anger (cheers mum), so I think that sometimes I can emphasise with angry people, certainly I do my very best to try to see things from their point of view anyway, and try to see through the anger and deal with the real person. Maybe that is my blind spot in this situation.

I do not believe I have broken any confidentialities, Pedro has posted on TTLG about his FTM transition, and there was a link to that FTM website and of course a couple of mission, so he has made his interest in the subject public. Whether or not he has pulled the wool over my eyes, or convinsingly persauded all of you guys he's a blue blooded straight man is irrelevant. His posts in the last few days have shown an uncomfortable side of his personnality which clearly show he has issues that still need addressing, so although he has made himself a target, I hope you guys can still take onboard my original request to try your best to be gentle with him.

I know only too well from personnel experience how painful the most minor of slights can be. Even the most innocent comments used to hurl me into some very dark spaces, places I no longer go to, but their memmories are as clear today as they were in those bad days. My motivation in posting here was to try to raise your awareness of Pedro's state of emotions and so hopefully prevent further comments on TTLG that may cause him to head off to that same dark place.

And yes you right RT, I do care. I care about victims, about people in pain, people who are lost, people who don't know how to control their outbursts and people who need a friend when they need one most.

 

[SlyFoxx]

"Thieves Guild" vs. "Sabotage at Soulforge" Discuss...

 

[H3H3]

"Thieves Guild" vs. "Sabotage at Soulforge" Discuss...

Thieve's Guild, but not by much IMO. I can't be the only one that gets bored of Sabotage. Also, isn't this a fan mission thread?

 

[agentorange]

"Thieves Guild" vs. "Sabotage at Soulforge" Discuss...

Thieve's Guild, but not by much IMO. I can't be the only one that gets bored of Sabotage. Also, isn't this a fan mission thread?

Well they both feel like very poor fan missions. Far too big for their own good with a lot of empty space, especially in Soulforge, not enough detail and no regard for pacing. Same for the wizard towers mission.

 

[Unkillable Cat]

Thieves's Guild also has blackjack, hookers and booze.

BEAT THAT, KARRAS!

 

[DrKubiac]

Yeah Sabotage at Soulforge was a huge letdown. It felt bland and empty.
Thieves guild at least has a unique atmosphere and a lovely setting, even though it feels like a chore to play it.

 

[SlyFoxx]

Whew...it worked.

 

[Unna Oertdottir]

SlyFoxx should become a moderator on Planet Gossip. He knows how to deal with the very young.

 

[Icewater]

TRANNIES

 

[Max_b5]

Transphobia much? Please get out we don't want transphobics here, you Islamic Mexican faggot.

 

[Icewater]

Transphobia much? Please get out we don't want transphobics here, you Islamic Mexican faggot.

ALLAHU FRIJOLES

 

[Jazz_]

Where the hell is the dude's workshop in Death Cold Embrace first mission?
I think I have cleared the map of all the guards at this point and visited all the spots still I can't seem to find the workshop? Is it the basement flat with a few paintings in it? If I go to the inn nothing happens yet, so I must be missing something.

 

[JarlFrank]

Where the hell is the dude's workshop in Death Cold Embrace first mission?
I think I have cleared the map of all the guards at this point and visited all the spots still I can't seem to find the workshop? Is it the basement flat with a few paintings in it? If I go to the inn nothing happens yet, so I must be missing something.

Go to the apartments.

 

[Yandros]

The door to Miller's apt is locked due to it being a crime scene, and the key is in the place you would expect it to be under those circumstances.

 

[Jazz_]

Fuck I wasn't expecting

Spoiler

the horror twist, that thing charging at me out of nowhere scared the hell out of me, and the sounds...were kinda dreary.

Reminded me why I don't play horror games relying heavily on psychological horror.

 

[Jazz_]

I'm loving DCE, the campaign has me hooked, great work Yandros and RandomTaffer. Although I'm kinda stuck now,

Spoiler

The mission is ''The Ritual''. I'm in the Mechanist Building and some doors are locked by I can't find the keys for them anywhere in the building? The only key I found so far opens the door to exit the building, I'm looking for the key to open the refrigerator which I assume is in that building.

 

[Unkillable Cat]

Spoiler

You need to find an office key that opens an office on the lower floor.

IIRC one of the Mechanists has it on her belt. Also, you may need another key (switch perhaps?) in that office to reach the freezer key, so snoop around once inside.

 

[Mechs Delight]

I just took a quick peek at Terra's new mission ("Five Nights at Dayport") and I really have to wonder, are Terra and Cardia distant cousins or something?

 

[Unkillable Cat]

Oh, it's out? I HAVE to take a look at that one.

I know it's gonna be oddball, at best, but let's see how much so...

EDIT: That was fast.

"Five Nights At Dayport" is a fan-made take on the game "Five Nights at Freddy's", where instead if being the night watch at a spooky and delapidated pizza parlor, you're at the Dayport Museum in the Thief universe. The goal is to survive until 6 AM each night, while avoiding death at the hands of a gallery of things that should not move at all, using what little resources are at hand.

As we all know the Dark Engine that powers the Thief games is very versatile, so it doesn't take a stretch of the imagination to see that it could be used to create a homage/me-too clone of another simple game like FnaF. The question is: How much was lost in translation in making FnaD?

Too much, as it turns out.

Spoiler

The biggest difference between the two is that you're not confined to a single location; you can move about the museum at will. That doesn't mean that there isn't a camera system, but the option of player mobility makes the cameras almost useless. You can use them to check up on certain rooms beforehand to see if there's anything moving there, but because of the poor image quality of the cameras that's all they're good for. They had several uses in FnaF, but in FnaD they feel like they were forced into the FM just because the original had them. So much more could have been done with them.

Problem #2 is that for a museum, there sure isn't a lot to do. There are dozens of cool-looking exhibits, most of them with plaques, but none of them are readable. What made FnaF into the overnight success that it was, is that it had a sub-layer of story to the game that was mostly revealed via carefully hidden bits of exposition, such as newspaper clippings taped to the walls that you could see on the camera. Thief is a game that centers around exploration and rewarding the player for doing so, yet this FM does neither. The only reason the player moves about the museum is because he's given a set of tasks chores that need to be completed. The big task of the second night, for example, involves finding three exhibition items (not exposition items as the in-game readme falsely states) and returning them to their rightful locations... and yet the game doesn't tell you where they were supposed to be in the first place! You literally have to stumble about in the dark checking every conceivable location until you find something frobbable, and if you haven't already, you have to find where they belong. If the player had, for example, been allowed to spend the first night walking about the museum and read up on all the exhibits in it, they might have a better grasp on the situation, instead of being forced to go into it blind.

The FM does this almost every damn night: You're told you have to do something, but aren't given any further instructions. Clean up stains on the floor? No problem, but why not tell me in what rooms they're in, since people know that they're there? Better yet, why not tell me what each room of the museum is called? Which room is 'the artifact room'? At least the 'camera room' is kinda hard to miss, and yet a lot of confusion could have been eliminated by writing a few words on the map.

This doesn't make the whole thing a pointless ordeal: Thief excels at creating spooky atmospheres and creepy locales, and FnaF was all about that. So what sounds to be a perfect matrimony of design tools and intent, leaves us with a dark museum with ominous-looking statues, badly-looping music and opportunities for well-placed sound cues to give us the creeps. Except Terra is the author of this FM. Readers familiar with his prior FMs know what tricks he tends to use, and that they tend to fall kinda flat. FnaD is no exception. Flashbomb in the face? Check. Vision blocked out and something placed behind you? Check. Jumpscare via unusually loud audio? Check.

But it's not all a swing and a miss: A children's nursery rhyme is played at one point, yet I was mostly bothered by it because it doesn't rhyme... like a joke with the wrong punchline. But there are a couple of times when those swings hit home, but they feel accidential rather than truly intended. A tombstone with your name on it appears in the last place you'd imagine one to be. Some exhibits are moved about and end up in the strangest of places. And here's the creepiest part of the entire FM: In one room there's a dead-end hallway with an Egyptian sarcophagus at the end. The hairs on my neck rose every time I went down this hallway. The way it looks and where it's located, and how the hallway is decorated, everything about this is such a strong example of Foreshadowing for something truly horrifying, it felt like a crime to me for the author not to take advantage of it. We're talking 'Scratches'-levels of suspense build-up here. And yet... nothing ever happens there. It's a non-issue. It's things like these that slowly build up a strong feeling of disappointment that kills the mood of the FM.

Which brings us to Problem #3. While there are enemies, they're all deaf. But while they're not blind, they're trying to spot a taffer in a museum where almost all the lights are off, at night. You actually have to put effort into getting spotted by the enemies here. This makes almost all attempts at stealth redundant. All you have to do is stay out of the lighted sections and occassionaly time your movements so that the enemies don't see you. That's it. They do not represent any threat whatsoever. The enemies of FnaF are a constant danger, but you'll learn how to counter them. Doing something similar in FnaD is perfectly possible, it just isn't done. This was by far the biggest disappointment for me in regards to FnaD; the enemies are a non-issue. Until Night 5.

Night 5 traditionally in FnaF games turns things on their heads and creates new challenges for the player, or at the very least cranks things up to 11. FnaD is no exception and how it does this is very simple: By turning on the lights. No more skulking about in the dark. But it's the other thing that's changed that completely ruins the FM for me: All enemy encounters on Night 5 are forced. You WILL be spotted by every enemy, you MUST fight AND kill every enemy, and the only weapon you're given (at least on Expert level) is a sword. No healing potions, no flash bombs, no arrows, no nothing. This goes completely against both Thief AND FnaF game dynamics, and is also the point where I dropped this FM and walked away.

I had high hopes for this one, making a Thief version out of one of the biggest surprise hits in gaming in recent years sounded like a brilliant idea. And while a lot of what's present is sound, the biggest problem is that it's unfinished: More work is needed, and there's plenty of room for it.

Terra, if you're reading this: Go back and finish this FM.

 

[Jazz_]

So...

Spoiler

I'm still stuck in that Machinist Building, I have the key I got from the guard but that key only opens the exit door for me, the office doors can't be opened with that key and I can't pick them either, can this be a bug perhaps? I have searched that building very carefully and there are no switches or other keys to be found as far as I can tell. Also, since I was stuck there I went to the Hammerite Cathedral and I got the key to get inside the restricted library, which I assume must be an important location plot-wise, yet I can't interact with anything in the room, am I missing something?

 

[H3H3]

Spoiler

The biggest difference between the two is that you're not confined to a single location; you can move about the museum at will. That doesn't mean that there isn't a camera system, but the option of player mobility makes the cameras almost useless. You can use them to check up on certain rooms beforehand to see if there's anything moving there, but because of the poor image quality of the cameras that's all they're good for. They had several uses in FnaF, but in FnaD they feel like they were forced into the FM just because the original had them. So much more could have been done with them.

Problem #2 is that for a museum, there sure isn't a lot to do. There are dozens of cool-looking exhibits, most of them with plaques, but none of them are readable. What made FnaF into the overnight success that it was, is that it had a sub-layer of story to the game that was mostly revealed via carefully hidden bits of exposition, such as newspaper clippings taped to the walls that you could see on the camera. Thief is a game that centers around exploration and rewarding the player for doing so, yet this FM does neither. The only reason the player moves about the museum is because he's given a set of tasks chores that need to be completed. The big task of the second night, for example, involves finding three exhibition items (not exposition items as the in-game readme falsely states) and returning them to their rightful locations... and yet the game doesn't tell you where they were supposed to be in the first place! You literally have to stumble about in the dark checking every conceivable location until you find something frobbable, and if you haven't already, you have to find where they belong. If the player had, for example, been allowed to spend the first night walking about the museum and read up on all the exhibits in it, they might have a better grasp on the situation, instead of being forced to go into it blind.

The FM does this almost every damn night: You're told you have to do something, but aren't given any further instructions. Clean up stains on the floor? No problem, but why not tell me in what rooms they're in, since people know that they're there? Better yet, why not tell me what each room of the museum is called? Which room is 'the artifact room'? At least the 'camera room' is kinda hard to miss, and yet a lot of confusion could have been eliminated by writing a few words on the map.

This doesn't make the whole thing a pointless ordeal: Thief excels at creating spooky atmospheres and creepy locales, and FnaF was all about that. So what sounds to be a perfect matrimony of design tools and intent, leaves us with a dark museum with ominous-looking statues, badly-looping music and opportunities for well-placed sound cues to give us the creeps. Except Terra is the author of this FM. Readers familiar with his prior FMs know that he tends to use them, and that they tend to fall kinda flat. FnaD is no exception. Flashbomb in the face? Check. Vision blocked out and something placed behind you? Check. Jumpscare via unusually loud audio? Check.

But it's not all a swing and a miss: A children's nursery rhyme is played at one point, yet I was mostly bothered by it because it doesn't rhyme... like a joke with the wrong punchline. But there are a couple of times when those swings hit home, but they feel accidential rather than truly intended. A tombstone with your name on it appears in the last place you'd imagine one to be. Some exhibits are moved about and end up in the strangest of places. And here's the creepiest part of the entire FM: In one room there's a dead-end hallway with an Egyptian sarcophagus at the end. The hairs on my neck rose every time I went down this hallway. The way it looks and where it's located, and how the hallway is decorated, everything about this is such a strong example of Foreshadowing for something truly horrifying, it felt like a crime to me for the author not to take advantage of it. We're talking 'Scratches'-levels of suspense build-up here. And yet... nothing ever happens there. It's a non-issue. It's things like these that slowly build up a strong feeling of disappointment that kills the mood of the FM.

Which brings us to Problem #3. While there are enemies, they're all deaf. But while they're not blind, they're trying to spot a taffer in a museum where almost all the lights are off, at night. You actually have to put effort into getting spotted by the enemies here. This makes almost all attempts at stealth redundant. All you have to do is stay out of the lighted sections and occassionaly time your movements so that the enemies don't see you. That's it. They do not represent any threat whatsoever. The enemies of FnaF are a constant danger, but you'll learn how to counter them. Doing something similar in FnaD is perfectly possible, it just isn't done. This was by far the biggest disappointment for me in regards to FnaD; the enemies are a non-issue. Until Night 5.

Night 5 traditionally in FnaF games turns things on their heads and creates new challenges for the player, or at the very least cranks things up to 11. FnaD is no exception and how it does this is very simple: By turning on the lights. No more skulking about in the dark. But it's the other thing that's changed that completely ruins the FM for me: All enemy encounters on Night 5 are forced. You WILL be spotted by every enemy, you MUST fight AND kill every enemy, and the only weapon you're given (at least on Expert level) is a sword. No healing potions, no flash bombs, no arrows, no nothing. This goes completely against both Thief AND FnaF game dynamics, and is also the point where I dropped this FM and walked away.

Another issue is that FNAD loses most of its horror on a second playthrough. This is cause you clearly have to fulfil the mission objectives in a certain sequence, so that pretty much means that you'll know what jumpscare or audio cue is coming when you play it again. Even if FNAF isn't all that great, it still had that unpredictability in every playthrough. You didn't know which animatronic was currently out to get you or in what order (even if you got their pattern down), which added more tension to every replay. I'm not even sure if you can randomise elements such as this in Dromed and if not, maybe the Dark Engine wasn't the right platform to make a FNAF clone on.

 

[Unkillable Cat]

So...

Spoiler

I'm still stuck in that Machinist Building, I have the key I got from the guard but that key only opens the exit door for me, the office doors can't be opened with that key and I can't pick them either, can this be a bug perhaps? I have searched that building very carefully and there are no switches or other keys to be found as far as I can tell. Also, since I was stuck there I went to the Hammerite Cathedral and I got the key to get inside the restricted library, which I assume must be an important location plot-wise, yet I can't interact with anything in the room, am I missing something?

Spoiler

I think it depends on how you got in. The key to the office downstairs is in Cavador's office, and the only way in there is via outdoor acrobatics.

As for the Forbidden library... it's a great place to get high.

Another issue is that FNAD loses most of its horror on a second playthrough. This is cause you clearly have to fulfil the mission objectives in a certain sequence, so that pretty much means that you'll know what jumpscare or audio cue is coming when you play it again. Even if FNAF isn't all that great, it still had that unpredictability in every playthrough. You didn't know which animatronic was currently out to get you or in what order (even if you got their pattern down), which added more tension to every replay. I'm not even sure if you can randomise elements such as this in Dromed and if not, maybe the Dark Engine wasn't the right platform to make a FNAF clone on.

One solution to this problem is to have things in different places on different difficulty levels... including jumpscares, audio cues and whatnot.

Maybe it's even possible to go the extra distance and cram in Night 6 (or even Night 7) only on the higher difficulty levels.

 

[Icewater]

So...

Spoiler

I'm still stuck in that Machinist Building, I have the key I got from the guard but that key only opens the exit door for me, the office doors can't be opened with that key and I can't pick them either, can this be a bug perhaps? I have searched that building very carefully and there are no switches or other keys to be found as far as I can tell. Also, since I was stuck there I went to the Hammerite Cathedral and I got the key to get inside the restricted library, which I assume must be an important location plot-wise, yet I can't interact with anything in the room, am I missing something?

Spoiler

Restricted library: climb.

 

[Yandros]

Jazz_:

Spoiler

Get into the office over the main entrance via the window - there are ways to approach it from either side.

 

[SMDM-GORT]

H3H3

Hmmm... It might be possible to randomize those jump-scares with the use of a combination of NVLinkBuilder and FlickerTriggers for certain areas. I may have to experiment with that to see if it can be done.