You even get to poke around a Mechanist-run train station at one point. The thirteen missions touch on every Thief standard, from haunted ruins (now featuring zombies you can decapitate and disarm, although still not kill outright) to Hammerite temples.
The mod crew nailed it all, right down to imitating Thief 2's style of cutscenes and mission briefings. She's no Garrett, but who is? Beyond that, this feels like the kind of campaign that Looking Glass would have made if they'd done one more set of levels a year after Thief 2. The actress voicing the new player character, Zaya, doesn't quite nail the tonal range the character really calls for. It's not terrible, but it's very much from an era before people just casually picked up Blue Yeti microphones. There's only one real complaint I can level against T2X, and it's the voice acting. Being an older mod, the T2X team were limited by how many polygons they could cram on-screen or into a single map, but did amazing things anyway. Just download it straight to your mission archives directory and away you go.
While you can still get the original version here, the HD version is packed up for easy use in the Thief 2 fan-mission selector. T2X: Shadows Of The Metal Age HD by The Dark Engineering Guild with HD mod by BentraxxĪlthough I'm mostly focusing on more recent releases, the enormous fan-made expansion T2X: Shadows Of The Metal Age deserves a shout-out, especially as it got a high-def remastering of its own not too long ago.
Garrett may be master of the shadows, but unless you manually adjust brightness, you can end up blind as a bat, especially on good modern monitors with their darker blacks. Second, I'd recommend binding the controls for adjusting brightness to the mouse-wheel. Peeking your head around corners helps, but you can also lean your ears against closed doors and hear what's going on beyond - a huge advantage considering that sound is heavily muffled by doors ordinarily. First, make sure you've got your 'lean left/right' buttons bound.
Both have easy-to-use installers, but do require TFix or Tafferpatcher installed.Īs for playing, here's two tips for beginners. If you do decide to higher your def, you'll need the Thief 1 HD Mod for the first game and the Thief 2 HD Mod for the second. Either stance is understandable: Thief's muddy dark corners are integral to how you play the game, but its textures were a bit blurry even by 90s standards, and in a game where you spend much of your time hugging walls, ideally you'd want them to look decent.
Some don't like mucking around with a game's original art direction, but these mods seem to have been adopted by much of the Thief fanbase. Once you've got those installed, you have everything you need to run fan-made levels and campaigns - see a short guide to the Fan Mission Selector (FMSel) here.Ī little more contentious are the HD Texture mods. Grab TFix for the first game and Tafferpatcher for the second.
You can find Thief 1 Gold here on Steam/ GOG, and Thief 2 on Steam/ GOG - I recommend both. Before you start, you'll want the fan-made all-in-one upgrades, both including the NewDark patch that lifted many of the old barriers modders bumped up against. While you could dust off an old CD copy, I'd recommend using a modern re-pack of either game for your base, just for consistency's sake. Here's a choice handful of mods to get you playing Thief Gold and Thief 2: The Metal Age polished up, and padded out with some big new sneaky adventures. Think of it as a metaphorical vault of riches to nab, except the riches are mods and the owner wants you to have them.
While later games in the series were a bit ropey, the first two Looking Glass-developed ones are still actively supported by the Through The Looking Glass forum community. Huge levels packed with treasure and secrets, and no radars or sensors to help - just your senses, intuition, and maybe a badly drawn map. Thief: The Dark Project still stands out as one of the most compelling stealth games twenty years after release. Every other Monday, Dominic gives you a reason to dust off one of your old games and dive into its mods with Modder Superior.