Neat music idea

[Bridge]

Sounds great to me, especially for horror missions (Amnesia anyone?). When the tense music should stop? When the AI go back to a lower alert state.

 

If you want to try this out I can help out, ask in the dark radiant newbie question thread too.

 

Amnesia's style of horror is perfectly valid but I am not personally a huge fan of it. It's scary for sure, but it's more a fear of the mechanics and the game's underlying structure than the story and atmosphere. Knowing that no matter what you do, a scripted event will occur at such and such is a depressing thought. For Thief it makes even less sense because the goal is to remain undetected. If you make it so players will be detected no matter what, you take a massive amount of control away from the player and subsequently the immersion will be broken. One of the many things I love about the old Thief games is how with some very grand exceptions, there are no scripted events. This keeps you in the game at all times, and especially in the horror missions the atmosphere is left alone to build and build and the player is left to simmer in this state of constant tension and all of the encounters he has with the enemies will be totally organic. It's much more conducive to immersion and I personally like this emergent style of gameplay more than a string of scripted events. You lose the ability to control the pacing and provide a more focused gameplay experience sure, but in return you get an experience that is much more believable (although I guess the scripted experience could be perfectly believable if you can somehow manage to look past the underlying design - even so it will only be truly believable on the first playthrough). Levels like The Shalebridge Cradle from Thief: Deadly Shadows really showcase how effective this design philosophy can be when it goes hand in hand with amazing sound design, creepy visuals/art design and a great story.