This whole campaign is unbelievable, game of the year for me. Some later missions go in way harder than the first one, I mean there were tons of good fan missions, but this 10 level experience is something else. Only the Thief fans could pull out something so tasteful.
I just finished it today, and it took me 16 hours of playtime (not including reloading). So yeah, it's pretty long! I played all missions on NORMAL, which I found enough challenge for me! It was tons of fun, and really reminded me why I LOVE THIEF SO MUCH! Such a great engine (tweaked here by being NewDark, which does have some great improvements). But boy, just playing Thief again is so pleasurable. The AI is such fun to play with. The Sound Propagation is just fantastic (and no-one seems to bother with it in modern games). The sound mixing and effects are just amazing. (I believe it was Chris Carollo who focussed on those audio features?). The main "issue" I had with gameplay was (the perhaps inevitable) confusion and back-tracking and running-in-circles for that one room I needed to find, in a few places (I remember this in Level 2 and 4 especially). It can be a bit immersion-breaking, because I get to the point of just trying to figure out the designer's thinking. The cutscenes and story were really good, and they manage to weave in lots of really good references to the other Thief games, that make sense, and help make The Black Parade feel like a true part of the broader Thief story and context. If you're enjoying it, but feeling frustrated in places (such as missions 2 and 4), I would urge you to persevere, as I think overall, the missions are very coherent and cool.
I'll throw another one on the pile: Thank you for your work on such a seminal piece of gaming art like Thief. Even now, so far out, games just don't quite get there in the stealth genre, not like Thief did!
I still vividly remember playing Thief on my then brand new 450 MHz box, it was an awesome experience (thanks MAHK et al.) I really did hate spiders, though.
The little talk about "incompetent play" is interesting. I think games like Thief are more interesting when you actually suck at them. Beginners/bad players are likelier to create interesting, emergent scenarios where you have to improvise really quickly. Of course, you have to assume that these players don't savescum.
It definatly carries the flame of the first two Thief games. Great design principles and dripping in atmosphere. A matrue approach to game design and story telling. Well worth giving a go.
