Thief fan missions and campaigns

[skacky]

That's a pretty good start. Needs some wood paneling on the bottom and a little trim above the wallpaper.

 

[JarlFrank]

Yeah, I always had that feeling that the walls look a little bare, the paneling and trim would do the room a lot of good there. Not sure which technique to use for them. I guess I'll try some different things.

Other than that I'm fine with the room as is. Now I'm going to build stairs. The one thing that I hadn't tried before in either DromEd or DarkRadiant. This is going to be fun, heh. You can already see the general layout there, with the room for the staircase being at my back in this screenshot, leading downstairs into another room

 

[Max_b5]

You can always check the OMs in order to get some clues on how to improve you rooms.

 

[Dev_Anj]

It was obviously an amateur's mission, but it was endearingly so, a very short and slightly quirky mission that was pretty fun to play.

Thanks! You may have guessed it, but it was my entry for the contest. Obviously it's not going to be considered a great mission or be well remembered, but I'm happy about how it turned out. I wanted to experiment a bit with it by trying to tell a story solely through the level design and I wanted to do something more unique than a Victorian mansion break in, so

Spoiler

I turned it into a break in mission into a warehouse that's hiding some secrets.

As for the short length, since it was my very first mission I thought it was better to be small and coherent rather than be big and bloated. I'm working more seriously on a Thief: Gold mission currently, I hope it turns better than this.

That's a good first room by the way! To encourage you, let me show the status of my current mission:

Obviously a long way to go, but I'm getting there.

 

[Melan]

Don't build your missions in one big air brush if you can help it. It can work, and NewDark helps reduce crashes, but it is going to be painful even if you know what you are doing.

 

[JarlFrank]

It was obviously an amateur's mission, but it was endearingly so, a very short and slightly quirky mission that was pretty fun to play.

Thanks! You may have guessed it, but it was my entry for the contest. Obviously it's not going to be considered a great mission or be well remembered, but I'm happy about how it turned out. I wanted to experiment a bit with it by trying to tell a story solely through the level design and I wanted to do something more unique than a Victorian mansion break in, so

Spoiler

I turned it into a break in mission into a warehouse that's hiding some secrets.

As for the short length, since it was my very first mission I thought it was better to be small and coherent rather than be big and bloated. I'm working more seriously on a Thief: Gold mission currently, I hope it turns better than this.

That's a good first room by the way! To encourage you, let me show the status of my current mission:

Obviously a long way to go, but I'm getting there.

I found your first mission pretty quirky and charming - there are usually two kinds of amateur missions, the ones that are like yours, and the ones that just become tedious because they are too large for their own good (pretty much any mission with a completely screwed up sense of scale, where it takes whole minutes to get through an alley because it's just too damn long for no apparent reason, and there are dozens of barely decorated and overly large rooms around that serve no purpose). From what I've seen in your little mission, you seem to be on the right track. And that screenshot doesn't look bad either - the sense of scale seems to be right on first glance, without overly large and empty areas, which is the most important thing.

May I ask how you approach the development? Let's exchange some tips from noob to noob... and have the pros here point out what's wrong with our approaches, hah!

Don't build your missions in one big air brush if you can help it. It can work, and NewDark helps reduce crashes, but it is going to be painful even if you know what you are doing.

Yeah, about that: how do you guys usually go about designing outside areas? In DarkRadiant it's pretty easy as you just build all the walls and so on, but here you carve out the empty space before constructing the solids, or even construct the solids by carving out empty space. Do you carve out a sizeable airbrush of a district and then solidbrush all the buildings? Do you carve several airbrushes in shape of roads to give it some basic structure that way already?

 

[Dev_Anj]

May I ask how you approach the development?

Well, at first I just put in a whole bunch of brushes together and experimented with some scripts and posted a level on TTLG's Editor's Guild. Fibanocci told me to then focus on some theme or the other and to make sure my level felt like a coherent location. Then I began deconstructing the original levels of Thief Gold and Thief 2 in the editor, along with some fan missions. I found that it was quite an effective way of learning how to build and script some things, and alongside some tutorials it gave me enough confidence to make and release a mission. I then decided to participate in the 72 hours contest as it would let me experiment within a limit and the expectations of fans would be lowered. Till today I'm trying to learn more about Dromed.

My approach is to build based on an idea I get and see if it can be turned into a level in Dromed. If it can be, I start expanding on it, first trying to build the basic structures and then adding objects and lights to get a general feel. I regularly zoom into the architecture in the editor and go into game mode to check for any problems. Once that's done, I begin to expand more on the levels with additional objects, guards, more lights, etc. Room brushes are then placed, followed by implementing objectives.

All this may change though since I released only a single short mission, and I may find a better approach to be more productive with designing levels.

 

[Melan]

Yeah, about that: how do you guys usually go about designing outside areas? In DarkRadiant it's pretty easy as you just build all the walls and so on, but here you carve out the empty space before constructing the solids, or even construct the solids by carving out empty space. Do you carve out a sizeable airbrush of a district and then solidbrush all the buildings? Do you carve several airbrushes in shape of roads to give it some basic structure that way already?

I have tried multiple methods, and the one that worked best for me was to use air brushes which are large enough to let you build housefronts and detailed 3d facades, but small enough to "define" individual areas like a square or a street. It even helps if I have a slightly random arrangement of cubical spaces, maybe with a few extra solids, since they get me started with ideas of constructing a 3d space.

If you look at missions, most OMs were created by carving out tunnels and relatively small rooms, connected with corridors. This is a safe way to make a mission, easy to roombrush, and biased towards more labyrinthine spaces. On the downside, it can also "fence you in", making it hard to build proper rooftops, and making your mission look like a series of tunnels. A few missions get away with using an open plan, like Rocksbourg 1 (I think), as well as Calendra's Legacy, which was infamously built absolutely contrary to good practice, by carving out four huge air brushes, adding four or five multi-sized cones for "hills", then building the mission around them. This method is not recommended for beginners.

The most important tip is to keep your brushwork easy to interpret in the editing windows. I once had the beginnings of a Cragscleft-style mine mission, but could not make heads or tails of the interlocking dodecahedrons, wedges and pyramids I worked with, so I ended up canning it. As your construction gets more complex, learn to use area brushes that let you focus on individual areas.

 

[JarlFrank]

May I ask how you approach the development?

Well, at first I just put in a whole bunch of brushes together and experimented with some scripts and posted a level on TTLG's Editor's Guild. Fibanocci told me to then focus on some theme or the other and to make sure my level felt like a coherent location. Then I began deconstructing the original levels of Thief Gold and Thief 2 in the editor, along with some fan missions. I found that it was quite an effective way of learning how to build and script some things, and alongside some tutorials it gave me enough confidence to make and release a mission. I then decided to participate in the 72 hours contest as it would let me experiment within a limit and the expectations of fans would be lowered. Till today I'm trying to learn more about Dromed.

My approach is to build based on an idea I get and see if it can be turned into a level in Dromed. If it can be, I start expanding on it, first trying to build the basic structures and then adding objects and lights to get a general feel. I regularly zoom into the architecture in the editor and go into game mode to check for any problems. Once that's done, I begin to expand more on the levels with additional objects, guards, more lights, etc. Room brushes are then placed, followed by implementing objectives.

All this may change though since I released only a single short mission, and I may find a better approach to be more productive with designing levels.

Hm, sounds slightly similar to what I'm doing, but I tend to roombrush earlier - as soon as a room is finished, I roombrush it. Makes it easier to playtest during the mission editing process, as whenever I add a little detail I go alt+g to check it out ingame, and stuff like that only works properly when everything is roombrushed properly.

 

[Unkillable Cat]

After a well-deserved break from taffing, I'm back to playing some FMs...or to be more precise. finishing off the list of FMs I intended to replay. I'm down to two now, and will take on "Keeper of the Prophecies" sometime later. Right now, it's a rematch with "Calendra's Legacy", which deserves an in-depth look.

(INB4 "Let the hate flow through you" image)

Mission 1: A Meeting with Basso

After successfully ripping off the Larloch Society (by killing everyone in it) and bedding his exposition-clad partner-in-crime, Garrett immediately runs off with the MacGuffin to score a buyer and keeping all the profits for himself. But first he has to get to the buyer, which not only involves getting through a quarantine/curfew, but also meeting Basso and instructing him to drop off some gear...just in case.

# OH GODS THE WRITING, MAKE IT STAHP!!! I cringed so badly during the intro video alone that I'll need a chiropractor to fix that.

# Fortunately the video ends and the mission starts for real. There's a blue mist everywhere, but beside from that everything looks good.

# One factor that goes barely noticed at first, but will play a factor throughout, is the weather. Lightning strikes regularly, and while there's no chance of being struck by lightning, it DOES light up most of the map briefly. Even places indoors. A lot of thought and care has been put into this single aspect, which makes finding dark hiding spots that much harder.

# Expert difficulty forces ghosting, but this is not as bad as it sounds. You can walk about among the townspeople without problems, as long as you're not seen while pick-pocketing and aren't spotted in the "no-go zones" (also known as the "don't be an idiot" objective). Fortunately the "no-go zones" are pretty easy to spot.

# What isn't so easy to spot/predict is when the "don't be an idiot" objective fails, and for what reason. I pickpocketed a drunkard standing by the sea, then retreated into a shadow not so far away while waiting for a townsman to walk by who had a purse I was interested in. I had been standing there for a good 20 seconds in perfect darkness (yes, I accounted for the lightning) when the mission fails because of that objective. Another time I was in a perfectly safe zone in front of the gate where you meet Basso, only for the objective to fail for no discernible reason. There are two guards there, and one of them can be pickpocketed, but I hadn't even made an attempt!

# There's a drawbridge that civilians seem to be able to activate via telepathy, it comes down as they approach and goes up again when they move away. It won't budge for me, though, and there are no controls in sight.

# Most readables are of the standard fare, though the "Valuable Old Tome" clearly rises above the rest.

# You can find the room where you and Mercedes spent the night, complete with hot tub, wine bottle and all. Well...not all, it seems. Mercedes has cleared out, leaving nothing but a "Taff off!"-note for Garrett...but she seems to have taken the king-size bed with her! If she's capable of lugging around something of that size without any discomfort or odd looks by others, then surely she could have stolen the MacGuffin without Garrett's help? (I'm not even gonna comment on the voyeuristic Paganite that's outside her room.)

# This mission has no loot objective, but don't think that there isn't some to be found. While most standard loot stashes will only yield a handful of gold, there are a couple of optional locations to explore.

# Chief among them is Arkhyn's tomb, which offers a considerable challenge for any fedora-wearing taffers out there. The tomb isn't the toughest part of the map, though...

#...the toughest part by far is the police station, due to two reasons: Bugs and scripted sequences. The bugs involve coppers getting stuck in the darndest places, meaning they'll either be completely out of your way, or completely in your way. The scripted sequences are nicely done. A patrolling copper, if seeing something unusual, will walk over to a lightswitch and turn on the lights. Better yet, once you enter the office a guard that has stood still as a stone suddenly decides to enter the office and have a look around...and he starts by turning on the lights. Fortunately this scripted sequence can be survived, but it takes a clever taffer to do so.

# Also, I got thanked for being a good thief.

# To wrap up the mission, I head to the Inn, only for one of the patrons there to go apeshit and try to attack me. Curiosuly enough, the "don't be an idiot" objective doesn't fail.

# Mission complete, total loot count was 1410 out of 1605.

Overall, for a forced ghost mission this one is not bad, especially when its age is factored in. It has lots of little touches that give it a charm of its own, but taffers going for the loot will have to work for it. I give it 7/10.

Next up...the horror...

 

[Max_b5]

Broken Gears aside, this is the first time I really get into using rotations, cylinders and that kind of stuff to build a mission. So far it's giving me lovely results.

 

[JarlFrank]

Sweet, reminds me of Cragscleft and the mine area in stinkykitty's mission pack.

 

[Dev_Anj]

Indeed the screenshots you've posted so far look like Craigscleft, and that's a good thing! I think that sort of setting is severely underutilized in fan missions, and I trust you'll pull it well after having played your last mission.

For those interested, Keeper of Infinity 2 has released! I mean, the Russian version. While I didn't play the first one, and only looked around the second level in the editor for betatesting, I know how controversial the first mission in this campaign was, so let's see.

http://darkfate.org/view/details/files/fan-missions/thief2/keeper_of_infinity_2

Needless to say it's also a hefty download, since it contains a remastered version of the first level along with the new level.

 

[Unkillable Cat]

Mission 2: Midnight in Murkbell

The time of reckoning has come. Let's get this over with.

"Midnight in Murkbell" is infamous, for various reasons. It ranks highly on my list of "Worst Thief FMs ever made" while others laud and applaud it. Seeing as I last played it...sometime before 2009, I feel it is right that I have another look at it. And what a look! I spent 10 hours playing this mission several times over.

In this mission, Garrett is finalizing the deal to sell the MacGuffin from Calendra's Cistern. This entails a race against time through the city, stealthily dodging the entire Murkbell Police, and finally wading knee-deep in the dead to recover the MacGuffin and destroy it.

# At least this mission's video isn't as cringe-inducing as the first one. Instead it's just useless.

# The item shop has a potion for sale priced at 3000 gold, when it's impossible to even have that much gold from the previous mission. Bug or not, it shouldn't be there.

# Mission starts with a scripted sequence in a "locked box" while I listen to some old crone laying down the score. She's not the buyer, only the appraisor. She does, however, give me 25000 gems (!!!) in advance, and the other half is waiting for me with the buyer. (Why this bit wasn't put in the briefing video is completely beyond me.)

# Said buyer is waiting to meet me, but I only have 10 minutes to get to him. In a straight line he's only a 10-second walk away from the starting position, but "clevah" level design means I have to cross HALF the city to get to him, with countless twists and turns along the way. He's directly South of where I start, yet I have to start by going North. I remember saying to myself back when I first played this, and it bares repeating: It is IMPOSSIBLE for anyone fresh to this mission, using only the map that's provided, to reach the buyer in time, no matter how well that map gets memorized. Meta-knowledge and saving/reloading is the ONLY way to get this done in time. That or some cheating, of course, but more on that later.

# Since I had completed this pointless race before, I saw no reason to complete it again by fair means, so I resolved to find some shortcuts. The only one I found was the obvious one: Buying the Speed Potion at the start, then running East out of the Black Die Inn instead of North, and using the Speed Potion to jump across the canal. 33% of the journey done in about 15 seconds. There's another shortcut, but it's hard to spot even though it's marked on the map. Look up when on the West side of the museum, and you'll see an open window. Shooting a rope arrow at the window gets you inside, and from there you have a clear run at the cathedral grounds.

# Outside the cathedral you have to dodge patrolling priests and grab loot in plain sight. There's supposed to be a priest outside with a key to the cathedral back door, but I never came across him. Another entrance is provided via the only window on the entire cathedral, which is inconveniently located on the far side of the cathedral from where you reach it. This part alone is a 40-second walk if you know what you're doing, longer if you don't.

# If you entered via the window, you're located on the second floor in the southwest corner and need to get to a room in the northeast corner of the ground floor. Because they're the two most distant points in the entire building, obviously.

# Predictable double-cross is predictable. Hands up if anyone playing did NOT see that one coming.

# After dropping off the MacGuffin we have a city full of patrolling coppers, but no means to put them down. Challenging, but not impossible.

# A nice atmospheric touch (and foreshadowing) is that from this point onwards you can hear ominous moans of Undead now and again.

# Garrett's rented room, in which he meets up with Mercedes again, is above Whore Court. HOW APPROPRIATE.

# One clever trick that taffers can pull off at this point, is grabbing Garrett's gear from his apartment WITHOUT triggering the Mercedes conversation. Simply hug the eastern wall after entering, then inch along the northward wall up to the bed. From there you should be able to grab everything. Go back the same way you came. This gives you all the gear (including the blackjack!) without all the Undead that'll infest the town. The upside is that now you can go and deal with all those pesky coppers all over town. The downside is that you'll have to return here later and trigger the Mercedes conversation.

# There is a catch, though. If for any reason a human dies in the mission before you've talked to Mercedes (even though it's not by your hands) it WILL be counted towards the "Don't kill anyone" objective when you do eventually talk to her and the mission will fail. The thing is, there is a critter in the game that will count as being killed if knocked out. I don't know which one, since I'm not made aware of it until I talk to Mercedes. It's one of the guards in the north-eastern part of the city, that much is for certain.

# The above, combined with me seeing guards being trapped in the strangest places (one of the museum guards decided to hang out in the fountain all day) makes Calendra's Legacy risky to play, as events beyond your control can screw you over with you being unable to do anything about it except restart the mission and hope for the best.

# After having met Mercedes, I sneak out and hide in the shadows while I wait for a nearby stationary guard to resume his patrol and wander off. Instead, Mercedes walks outside and casually blasts him with a fireball. I'm not allowed to kill anyone, but she can murder to her heart's content?!? Mercedes then ran off down an alleyway until she ran into a Skeleton. They exchanged blows which led to Skeleton being scattered all over the place. Thinking I could use her as a bodyguard, I stick around to see where she moves to next. True to her form, she chose to disappear right in front of me. Bitch.

# While in the windmill, I dropped down from the beams onto the bags on the ground, only to die from SHAS (Sudden Heart Attack Syndrome). I advise others to drop down somewhere else.

# When the Undead come out, you don't just get the standard fare of Zombies, Haunts and Apparitions. Skeletons, Vampires, Mummies and other nasties have also joined in, and regardless of how much Undead-slaying gear you've acquired, it won't be enough. It'll NEVER be enough, not even with the completed amulet. There are more Undead in this mission than in "Down in the Bonehoard" or the "Sepulchre of the Sinistral".

# Triggering the Undead also healed me to full health. Dunno why, but thanks.

# One thing this mission DOES get right are the jumpscares. I almost fell out of my chair when a door that I had previously been through, suddenly burst open with zombies and a vampire charging at me!

# Another creepy moment is the children's room in the caretaker's house.

# My loot count: 4875 out of 5250. My damage count? Close to 27000 points of damage, and with 144 critters killed. Midnight MASSACRE in Murkbell, more like it.

Overall? While not as all-encompassingly bad as I remembered it to be, it's still pretty bad. Pointless timed objective is pointless, needless exposition at the start of the mission is needless. The level layout is well-designed (with the museum being a high point) but just about everything else is not. It's buggy and can be broken to become something completely different than intended. For once the writing isn't a problem - it's a little silly with Mercedes (and her diary) but that's it. Midnight in Murkbell is clearly trying to be both a cityscape mission AND an undead slaying mission, but doesn't succeed at either. One point that must be mentioned, is that this is a different version than the one I played back in the day. I never encountered that one undead critter that counted as a living one, for example.

I give "Midnight in Murkbell" 5/10, which should take it out of the "Worst FMs of all time" list. Now on to the final mission...

How to make Midnight in Murkbell FUN

There's a way to break this mission so that it becomes enjoyable. It's quite simple.

# While Ol' Croneface is babbling at the start, jump up on the table (it might help to first remove the bottle from the table) then do a running jump at the curtain right in front of the table, aiming for a point right between the ceiling beam and the ceiling itself. Hold down JUMP, and if you did it right, you'll mantle over the invisible wall and be free to run around before you've even been handed the sack of gems.

# Said sack of gems is then magically given to me over a distance of about 100 meters, through at least several pieces of architecture, as Garrett runs through the streets of Murkbell.

# Garrett will talk out loud to a person that he's too far away to hear. But where are we going, and why?

# Looking at the map of the whole district, if you draw a line from roughly where the "X" is marked on the cathedral, towards the Black Die Inn (the starting point), then extend that line into a circle with its center on the Black Die Inn, you'll have the outline of the Plot Displacement Field. If you stay within this field, the conversation between Ol' Croneface and Garrett concludes normally. But if you manage to get outside of it before you've given New Objectives...well, things get interesting.

# Namely, Garrett then has free reign of the city, with no Undead, roaming coppers or a time limit! It comes at a price, though. There's no stash of gear at your apartment except a Water Arrow...but then again there's no Mercedes either, so that's a plus. You can still get the sword from the Falstaff Mages, and many other places can be burglarized without difficulty.

# Most noticeably, the museum. Answer me this question...what happens when all the currently displayed objectives are completed?

# If you outrun Ol' Croneface before she gives you the timed objective, there are only two things that need to be done...and both of them can be found in the museum.

# Congratulations, Midnight in Murkbell has now been transformed into a nice little museum heist. Don't forget to grab the ultra-violet lens in the museum shed.

 

[Melan]

Midnight in Murkbell is my waifu, and I will not allow her honour to be insulted like this.

 

[Dev_Anj]

I really should get to playing Calendra's Legacy someday. I've heard a lot about it on TTLG and here, and it gave Purah a career inspite of being incredibly controversial so it ought to be interesting at least.

 

[Unkillable Cat]

I really should get to playing Calendra's Legacy someday. I've heard a lot about it on TTLG and here, and it gave Purah a career inspite of being incredibly controversial so it ought to be interesting at least.

I highly doubt that Calendra's Legacy alone got him a job in the industry, but more the culmination of his work in general. No one in their right mind would have hired him if CL was his only work.

One further point I forgot to mention, which makes a strong connection to "Autumn in Lampfire Hills" is the psychic - a very clever (but also very delicate) manner of getting exposition across in a game such as Thief. In both Lampfire Hills and Murkbell you can break into the house of someone who sees the future, and in both cases said psychic chooses to stay out of the way, leaving only a pittance of loot, some sage advice and words of mockery for Garrett to find. I'm surprised more FM authors haven't picked up on this, and tried to come up with a variant of this manner of exposition. Probably because the "ancient prophecy" trope is overdone and this is too similar.

 

[Riskbreaker]

Needless to say it's also a hefty download, since it contains a remastered version of the first level along with the new level.

http://www.ttlg.com/forums/showthread.php?t=146159
English version is out too. Here's hoping that gameplay won't be as sanity-shattering as it was in the first mission.

Turns out that original KoI mission was still lying in me FM folder. This bit from its readme file is rather funny:

Spoiler

Everything is OK with my mission logic, you just need to understand it.

 

[skacky]

Sadly, pretty much agree with Unkillable Cat on Murkbell. It's a mission that becomes fun only after you know it by heart.

 

[JarlFrank]

Mostly but not entirely agree with Unkillable Cat on Murkbell. I didn't have any problems getting to the goal in time when I played it the first time, but the time limit was still rather annoying and felt pointless to me. This is a goddamn Thief game, why do you make me speedrun I wanna explore slowly and get sidetracked and do random taffery along the way. Spawning the undead once you get your blackjack (but not your sword, if I remember correctly?) was also a questionable decision. That gives you quite a bit of required ghosting, and of course you have no idea about any of that beforehand. It is a better idea to ghost some places before the undead spawn because that actually makes it easier, but you just think "ok so I saw this big city mission now and have to get my equipment which I don't have yet, I'll just go get it then it's taffing time!"
YEAH BUT IS IT?
Nope, again something unexpected happens, and not really in a good way: it breaks the player's expectations, the player has been promised a city to explore with buildings to break into and then the mission author pretty much says "thought you could play normally now and go into all those places with your blackjack, eh? NOPE! Have some undead, also you don't have a sword lol", and the whole thing you've been looking forward to just won't happen until you get yourself that sword. Eh. I think that's the most annoying part of the mission: in the way it is designed as a place, it teases the player with opportunities of taffery, and then constantly breaks the promise by introducing something that prevents the player from doing what he had been looking forward to.

 

[Unkillable Cat]

for that, JarlFrank. It's actually worse than you put it forth, you're supposed to ghost/dodge through the city while getting back to the apartment, so even if you get the idea to explore the city without going back for your gear, you'll still have to deal with two dozen coppers that weren't there a minute ago.

There are just so many bizarre design decisions abound in Calendra's Legacy. An example is the Falstaff Wizards. When you first enter, there's only one wizard present, and he has some goods to pickpocket. But if you do steal his purse while he's still conscious, two more wizards are spawned on the floor below. I had to knock him out first and snatch the purse while he was en-route to sleepyland.

Anyway, I'm done with Calendra's Legacy, here's the third and final part.

Mission 3: A Winter's Eve

Despite the definite end of the MacGuffin by Garrett having thrown it into a smelter, the story drags on, and Mercedes is still a part of it. After a godawful cutscene, Garrett finds himself in a industrial plant during wintertime heading to a meeting with her.

# Seriously, that cutscene is terrible. It did do one thing for me, it corrected my back as I cringed so hard it looped my back in on itself.

# You start the mission with the loot you gained from "Midnight in Murkbell" + 1000 gold, even though three months have passed since the last mission. Considering Garrett's absurdely high cost of living, I find that hard to believe, and doubly so when Mercedes gets thrown into the mix.

# The mission starts with a big fight between a squad of Hammerites and a gang of thieves, for seemingly no reason. Said fight then escalates into a full-out war as more Hammerites and more Thieves can be encountered, and lured to fight one another instead of you ever having to draw your blade.

# At least this mission doesn't have a "no killing" objective imposed, so feel free to take part in the fray!

# Once you've met Mercedes, she actually serves as a pretty neat bodyguard. Just lead any hostiles to her, and she'll kill them with instant-travel fireballs! :D

# Across the bridge where I'm supposed to meet Mercedes is the second-biggest Hammerite statue I've ever seen.

# The "Unsettling Prayer" is not unsettling because of its purpose, but because of its choice of rhetoric. Croquet balls through hoops, really?

# I don't care what the circumstances are, spawning guards behind the position of the player (even though it's at a distance) is NEVER a good thing. This happens SEVERAL times in the mission.

# What also happens several times in the mission are "forced" encounters - where the easiest, most obvious way through is by violence. Getting into Gaston's lair is the best example, though the positioning of the Keepers in the parlor in Darkwatch is also very suspicious.

# IT BITES! IT BITES! IT BITES! IT BITES! IT BITES! *silence* Oh good, Mr. Boggs finally drowned. How he could say that while both underwater and unconscious will just have to be one of Life's Little Unsolved Mysteries.

# Activating the freight elevator in the factory created a noise loud enough for nearby critters to come investigate - namely, Mercedes. She decides to open the gate she's asking me to open for her to come investigate. WTF, woman?!?

# I don't see the logic behind the Skeleton Key. A 2000 gold item from the shop that opens several doors in the mission, most of which can be opened anyway? It opens the pawnshop, which seems to only have one other entrance, and I'm still trying to figure out how to be able to get up there. It opens the warehouse, only to find that the guard with the key is standing right on the other side of the door. Finally it opens both Gaston's chest and his lock-up stash, which just sounds all kinds of wrong when you think about it. There's a "Misplaced Key" in the Thieves's Guild, but it only opens Gaston's chest. Am I missing something here?

# Gaston's journal is trying hard to rival Calendra's diary for worst readable in a Thief FM.

# While I found the area where the Easter Egg is located, I didn't find the Easter Egg itself. Only autistic Taffers would have found it without meta-knowledge, and it only gives you 100 Fire Arrows.

# The voice acting for the Keepers is nice, but inconsistent. They sound like wheezy nerds when calling for backup.

# Darkwatch is AMAZING from an architectural perspective. Well worth the effort of getting there.

# (The) Grimoire can be found in Darkwatch. It's a long-ass readable (20+ pages) telling the story of some girl and a spellbook. I skipped ahead to the end - "shameless plug for Purah's novel". This Grimoire is so bad it might be worth screen-capping it so that all of you can suffer (or maybe I'll just extract it from the game files).

# Apparentely the grand library in Darkwatch (you'll know it when you see it) is so big that it snows in there.

# The ending was both abrupt and anticlimatic, big titties aside. While normally I would complain that the story just ends on a cliffhanger, I'm just relieved it's over now.

Overall? Up until Darkwatch, this mission was easily the worst part of Calendra's Legacy. The story is over, the only reason this mission is here is to line up story elements for possible future missions and plugging Purah's work. Either way it's just him covering his own ass. That alone makes this mission a crime. Fortunately it almost makes up for it entirely with Darkwatch, now THAT was a fun place to visit and look around. Otherwise this mission falls into the same trap as "Midnight in Murkbell": Highly questionable design decisions combined with bad design decisions set against very nice architecture. Except for Darkwatch itself there's NO reason to play this mission, in my opinion. I give it 4/10, and that's all because of Darkwatch.

Calendra's Legacy overall: Like so many other Thief FMs, this one has aged badly. It may have broken ground and set standards back in the day, but now it feels like an embarrassment, especially the writing. The bugs don't help as well, and the amount of typos present throughout makes it all look amateurish ("Scipting by" in the credits? "Special thanks to Gargy Gygax" in the credits? No one picked up on these?) and yet this was clearly made and released to plug Purah and his work. Colour me unimpressed, but clearly someone took the bait. The combined score of the 3 missions total 16/30, which translates to a 5/10 rating...and that sounds just about right for Calendra's Legacy - despite its moments of brilliance, it fails to rise. (I DO put forth the disclaimer, however, that if CL gets the "remastered" treatment that Calendra's Cistern did, that there may be cause to re-visit CL at a later date.)

Now I'm off to try "Keeper of Infinity" to see if it's improved.

 

[Max_b5]

Maybe it's just me but did anyone else notice that Mercedes looks A LOT like Lara Croft in Tomb Raider TLR?

That aside I agree with the Cat on the questionable design decisions, especially in the second mission. Why would you put Half-Life style action in a stealth game and why would Garrett wander around with no equipment at all? Unless there was a reason I've probably missed, that makes no sense to me.

 

[JarlFrank]

The whole Calendra series seems like a bunch of interesting but questionable decisions to me, like the author wanted to try out some cool new scripting things while missing the point of making an actual Thief mission. My favourite of the bunch has to be the first mission of the CL campaign, because it doesn't have as many annoyances as the others, and that semi-secret crypt is just awesome.

I never played the third mission because I didn't make it through Murkbell yet (it's still on my list, but I have some other, better missions on my replay-list, along with missions I haven't played yet, so I guess it'll be a while until I do), but neither Calendra's Cistern nor Midnight in Murkbell has really managed to capture me. Cistern has that annoying body part fetch quest and a semi-linear design with a lot of scripting, which is pretty impressive from a technical standpoint but it was kind of a letdown in the gameplay department. It's an okay mission, I found it reasonably enjoyable, but I wasn't amazed by it, and with the reputation it has I expected a little more. I think that even at the time, there were some better missions around from the gameplay perspective. CC is technically impressive, but that's mostly it. The design is, in many places, rather annoying.

CL just continues that legacy (pun semi-intended), with Murkbell having a very cool city section to explore, but that exploration is ruined by the author's compulsion to show every how good he is at implementing cool little scripts and introducing !!PLOT TWISTS!!, rather than just focusing on the elements that make the mission good: architecture and exploration, because he obviously is quite good at delivering that. By adding so many scripts and plot twists, he essentially ruins the elements that make the mission good by preventing the player from actually using them. Wanna explore that city? Too bad, you have a time limit. Wanna explore it now? Too bad, you don't have a blackjack (and apparently, as Unkillable Cat says, there are more guards - I forgot about that, as it's been a while since I played it; a quick look into DarkLoader says last time played was 07.01.2013, which is almost exactly to the day three years ago... wow, time flies). Ok, you go get your blackjack, so you can finally enjoy exploring that city! Nope, too bad, now the city is swarming with undead and the blackjack you went all the way across town to retrieve is useless. Haha, sucks to be you, taffer!

Basically, my experience of Murkbell was "Ooh, this is a nicely designed city mission, I'm really looking forward to exploring it!" and the game basically said "Nope. Nope, you can't, you have to do this arbitrary task first." all the time. This is cockblocking taken to a professional level.

 

[JarlFrank]

btw, new work in progress screenshot of the amateurish piece of shit I'm creating:

 

[skacky]

Unkillable Cat you can access the pawnshop through a window in the street. A Winter's Eve is my favorite mission in CL because, unlike you, I don't think it suffers from questionable design (with one or two exceptions, that is, in addition to the questionable stuff present in all 3 missions) and is actually very entertaining, especially Darkwatch.