Loool

Almost got me at the same spot. :D

He clearly paused in order to not say “down”.

Lol.

He was about to call out his boy for having a breakdown lmao

Plus it pushes the Dark Engine's technical achievements (variable dynamic lighting,) to the forefront by integrating them into the gameplay.

Obviously this is a response to a 3+year old comment, but I'd honestly take this 'not very realistic' mechanic over the literally unrealistic mechanic way too many games these days have, where enemies have no peripheral view and we see things in third person. All too often I find most games these days are about trying to work out where the flaws in the AI are and exploiting around it, rather than establishing the mechanics and using them to your advantage.

I always justified it in my head as being much darker than it appears to the player (being mostly preindustrial and all) and Garrett just has extremely good vision.

Exactly. Irl you wouldn't know exactly how well hidden you were from others but in a game that kind of feedback is necessary to make it fun.

@@drkissinger1 well the default gamma settings certainly are dark enough that it'd be plausible for you to be invisible when you can barely see the game on modern displays. So when you crank it up and lose the high contrast with a brightened image it's easier to forget.

Haha, I haven't worked in the games industry but my brain also autocompleted this to "breakdown" =D

It sounds like game development may not have been such an inhumane human-mill back then as it is now. These days, that spark of life could probably only be found in indie games.

@@PhirePhlame the guy literally described Tom putting HIM SELF thru crunch.

He was going to say breakdown but stopped and corrected it before it came out. Working 14 hour days for weeks would make me kill myself.

Angmor Dagnithil one of the looking glass employees took a vacation in Europe and took a bunch of pictures of old cathedrals and archways. I think that's where the concept art got it's general structure

You are not alone. Would love to see more of these interviews and videos on the old Thief games. I can easily say that Thief is some of my best gaming experiences

Exactly my thoughts on it. The games have a pricelessly great atmosphere. Truly unique.

Agreed. That really is the secret sauce that makes this experience so visceral. Thief was magical.

Same here. It's one of my all time favorite

Thief (2014) ensured that, for now, the Thief franchise is dead. Why did they reboot something that still works? Hubris.

They tried to adapt an old game to the mainstream market, in the process losing the original fans mostly. Another victim of people who joined the videogame industry for profit and don't really understand the market

lakie92 another victim of misinterpretation and don't really understand the new game

This is somewhat off topic, but I was running through Crysis the other day and that game (aside from its rather stupid AI) feels like it came out yesterday. We really haven't gotten past Ultima Underworld, Crysis, and Thief in many areas. That's pretty sad.

+lakie92 Yeah they "tried" to adapt the mainstream marked but what they really did was turn away from it. Modern slow paced stealth gameplay with the same five or six guards walking in a circle for every 'stealth-puzzle room' you enter is really boring and was never taken well by the mainstream anyway. Even good games like Deus Ex Human Revolution or Dishonored suffer from tedious stealth gameplay despite being good at delivering the stealth fantasy thematically and through action. Thief 4 would have had a much better chance with the mainstream if they used the more fluid "explore while tiptoeing around guards" gameplay of the classic thief's.

The problem is the culture of gaming. You have fans you have developers, and you have a middle ground. Games like this come out from the middle ground. That barely exists anymore since most studios that produce passion projects get swallowed by publishers who then shut them down after they fail to do it again with deadlines and constraints that didn't exist before. Games like this sacrificed little environmental and cinematic things that aren't necessary for the overall experience without sacrificing gameplay and story.. Modern games focus on the experience and cinematics of the game and sacrifice the gameplay. Thief 2014 is a perfect example. You can't jump, fall from a ledge or do almost anything without a context cue. That, to me, made me feel like I was tremendously limited. Thief 1 is full control. Thief 2014 made me feel like I was watching the game more than playing it.

It's the loss of the middle ground I suppose. You have indie developers, but by virtue of how that works, and the budgets (and later sales figures for most projects), such games are restricted to what can reasonably be created by 1-2 people, or at most a team of under 10 if it's a particularly successful indie studio. Add onto this that many of these games are projects that have dev periods of 3 months or less. (quite a few much longer as well, but that's a different situation usually), and the results are quite creative, but very limited in scope. Then at the other extreme you have the large publishers and the AAA development teams with budgets in the 100 million plus range, and teams of 300-1000 people... Great, but the funding model of such games demands sales figures in the tens of millions, and the publishers, as a result are very risk averse and push a lot of 'focus group' crap onto devs, or otherwise force them to tack on stuff just because the publisher thinks it is a bullet point on the marketing slides that could improve sales. What we've largely lost in the modern world is the middle ground. The game that isn't some independent dev's passion project, and isn't some huge high budget craziness, but has a team of say 30-40 people working on it and a budget more in the range of 10-15 million. Granted, the nature of modern technical expectations hasn't helped either. Wing Commander 3 and 4 both set records for being the most expensive games ever made in 1994 and 1996 respectively. How much did these games cost? $5 million and $7 million. And most of this was caused by lots of live action video with B and C list celebrities, which don't come cheap. (in that light, the actual budgets are surprisingly low) Sure, we have to take into account inflation, and a rough ballpark estimate for that is you can more or less triple the budget, but that's still only into the 15-20 million range. And remember these aren't low or mid budget titles - for the time period these are THE MOST EXPENSIVE GAMES EVER MADE. A more typical game budget for a high profile game through most of the 90's can be said to be about 350,000 british pounds. (apologies for mixing units, but this is going off old magazines that I had access to, and those come from a variety of countries.) roughly converting to US dollars gives about $700,000, and inflation pushes that up to the equivalent of about $2 million in modern terms. That's your AAA budget for the 90's. Your extreme high profile 'expensive' games. You can sort of see what's happened here from that alone - the cost of working with modern technologies has been somewhat crippling, and of course, standards are higher. Once upon a time having voice acting at all was considered a crazy and rare feature. (and frequently those voice 'actors' were just the devs themselves messing around.) Yet nowadays a modern game is generally expected to have voice acting as a matter of course, and not just cheap, amateur voice acting, no, professional voice acting, with all the costs associated with that. So, the workload just for keeping up with technology has gotten heavier, the expectations are a lot higher for what is considered a 'standard' feature... And thus the costs have gone way up. What happens when things get more expensive? The people funding things get more risk averse. And of course, it makes the middle ground much harder - because the indie developers can get away with all kinds of 'primitive' things that would probably get laughed at in other contexts - we've given them that leeway because we know they have next to no resources. The AAA devs are expected to throw everything they can at a game, with costs associated with doing so... But we don't really have the leeway for the middle ground - if some developers were to try it, they'd find themselves compared to AAA stuff, and of course, that likely doesn't look too favourable. It's too polished and high end to get the consideration that indie developers get, yet there isn't enough money or development manpower to compete with the AAA development teams... We really need to find some way of getting our medium sized developers back... Those are the ones that can balance taking a risk vs creating something of a fairly decent scope... The large devs can't take risks, and the small ones lack the resources to do anything ambitious. But... It's hard to see how we can recover that middle ground that's been lost.

One of my favourite things about the original Thief was the maps. Hand-drawn, incomplete, hard to navigate by, and amazingly immersive.

John Anon I never was any good at any sort of level design. Hammer editor is beyond me lol

The original Thief on pc was way ahead of its time!

Well i personally preferred Hitman Codename 47

casperado666 that’s more sandbox

@@casperado666 Hitman Codename 47 is extremely rough around the edges. Thief is a classic for a reason, whereas the Hitman franchise, beloved as it is, the original game (codename 47) is mostly forgotten. My top stealth games are definitely Thief 2 and Blood Money, though. Can't count the hours I've poured into those 2

Better than splinter cell?

i prefer mgs and hitman. Nowadays even dishonored. Don't get me wrong, though. Thief games were absolutely amazing.

hope you played thief 2 the metal age afterwards. imo improves on everything Thief 1 was good at plus A super good story with a super badass and unique antagonist

not enough thiefery and too much crazy fuckery in my opinion. but still a very good game I agree on that @Lord Bafford

@Lord Bafford Yeah Cathedral was really great and you could cut through the atmosphere thats true. Still like Karras as an antagonist more. the narcissistic genious/madman with a plan to destroy all organ life. really loved the way they told his story. never really showing him (until the end at the chamber) but still managing to make you fear that guy was a stroke of genious if you ask me :). like I said, im not really disagreeing on you that Thief 1 was great. just a taste thing I guess

@Lord Bafford bought it but never really liked the new graphic style of the game. watched a lets play to enjoy the story which was still very good.

Extra maps and community mods are also good.

Tom Leonard, he also worked on HL2 and Portal.

@@Trandul credentials of a legend!

OtherSide Entertainment you guys are my fav and ive grown up with your games and its a dream to see the old looking glass people together again! Btw otherside sounds very much like looking glass reincarnate ;)

OtherSide Entertainment please make a legit another stealth game like Thief!! Noting else comes close to the immersion and art style of the originals.

For your Thief cravings, check out the Dishonored games, they are superb stealth-based titles. They aren't as good as Thief as pure stealth games - partly because you become powerful enough that being found isn't near as scary as in Thief, but they are still superb games. Prey also has some pretty good stealthy gameplay, but is more of a spiritual System Shock successor.

I'm surprised I haven't heard of this studio until now, I've been a big fan of the original Thief series of games (The Dark Project and The Metal Age, Thief 3 was alright but that was Ion Storm). Can't wait for System Shock 3 :D

dishonored comes *close* but doesn't make the grade quite :)

Ever played some of the fan missions? There are literally a thousand of them around and a lot of them are really, really good!

I tried a handful back in the day but i guess i picked the wrong ones and didn't enjoy them much. Are there any essential ones people recommend?

Some of the most well-liked ones are: The Seven Sisters by Lady Rowena - pretty much one of the best FMs ever made, must play Ominous Bequest and Broken Triad by Eshaktaar (BT is a sequen to OB, they're both great) Godbreaker, a recent-ish campaign (about a year old now) by Random Taffer with an amazing swamp level, and a really cool city level after that anything made by skacky, this guy makes great classic Thief 1 style city missions, except much larger. Very atmospheric. Endless Rain is his best. In the same vein as skacky's missions are those made by Melan. Try his mission Disorientation, it's amazing - very vertical level design.

We thieves hang out here. www.ttlg.com/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=100 That's the Fan Mission forum addy. Check the stickies for all the info you need to get started. In short you'll need to make sure your Thief install(s) are patched and current. Then you'll need to install one of the Fan Mission loaders. Then you'll just have to grab a few missions. A search should yield many many threads of people discussing favorite missions. It's very easy, free and there's many of us around if you've got a question. I personally would start with a nice gem of a mission..."Ominous Bequest."

Thanks man. I really appreciate it :)

Yeah they do, go check out TTLG.com. Thief fans hangout.

BrokenArts Not all Thief fans know about those forums, and not all people on those forums know about the difficulty of this game's development. Probably 90% of people who played the original Thief, if not more, have no idea about the development of the game. By the way, Stealth Docs, love your channel.

Correct, not all no. But the die hard Thief fans, that I'm thinking of at TTLG, that have been there since the beginning, including myself. They do know. It was ground breaking. You're talking 20 years. Mind blown. Videos, any information on Thief, its been picked apart by many.

BrokenArts A "Thief fan" is not necessarily equal to a "die-hard Thief fan." That's like someone saying "not a lot of Halo fans know this obscure fact from the novels" and then responding with "yeah they do." I get what you're saying, but you were so adamant about countering his comment completely that you spoke falsely.

Chaos Theory, MGS V and the new Hitman trilogy come to mind, but I would love to see a new light and sound stealth game with modern tech, it's a real dead genre unfortunately :(

@@SoFarSoGoodSoWhat14 Alien Isolation, where the AI alien can track you down via your breathing into a microphone.

That is so autistic to say it blows my mind

@@marlboroml2894 because your mind is very small.

I got molested as a ten year old. Wonder how I can make a game about that.

​@@Krystalmyth Degrees of Lewdity

Really interesting concept... thanks for sharing

Just got abs. addicted to these war stories myself. Whan an awesome find!

Ditto. Some of the titles tho border on clickbait, or at best, miss the creator’s underlying stories

I'm really happy for you, and Imma let you finish, but Splinter Cell is the best stealth game of all time !

Heresy. Chaos Theory and Thief 2 are brothers.

And imma let you finish but dishonored do

Actually market research hacks were the first to suggest making a stealth game like that. kzfaq.info/get/bejne/b9uBeKWEzMzDk4k.htmlm53s

@KenTWOu Thanks

@@KenTWOu thanks for sharing!

@Wish Master still not made by them now so point doesnt stand at all

Csősz Máté they are really not This talk of dont of elect them in the first place is complete nonsense and absolutely impractical. Individually we have zero say for anything that happens systemically and they will happen whether i like it or not. I dislike shlooters, never bought one, never played one, but they are the market trend today and will continue to happen until people in general get tired of them, independently of what i do.

Sound modelling of modern games is actually really good. The issue is they don't use it. In terms of just presenting the sounds to the speakers modern games do quite well, but they very rarely use that same data they've got going for them in actual game-play, it's just cosmetic. Kind of like how in non-stealth games they have pretty lighting but it has no effect on actual gameplay, it just there to look nice. This poses a bit of problem when there should be overlap because the most advanced lighting and sound stuff is generally locked up in graphical software packages that are specifically designed for visuals, so it's difficult to get at the raw data to use for other stuff. Basically it's a bit of a common issue and oversight in the modular method of game design in modern times. All the development into this sort of tech went into how to make it look and sound right to the player, and the actual mechanical side for use by AIs generally gets reinvented every game, with varying levels of success.

One of the many problems that has arised from the culture of splitting the graphics and game designers into different categories.

There's a term for it, Binaural-something. There's a piece of windows software that can enable it in some games, and it's *bonkers*. Thief did a very good job of it way back in the day.