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just remembered to mention if you liked the looks of Midsummer's Night Heist, it's heavily inspired by an older mission from an inactive author, Mystic Gems: Heart of Bohn. it's a shame it never got its third entry but still well worth for just how good it looks for pre-NewDark

skacky was hired by Arkane Lyon the past year. prior to that he also worked on Wrath under 3D Realms, surely channelling his Quake roots. Digital Nightfall however has been working under Arkane for some time longer and confirmed to do level design for Dishonoured 2 minimum. she was a pretty major figurehead in the earliest days of Thief mapping. not at all involved in Black Parade or anything else in a long time though.

any by skacky and a lot of the team members behind The Black Parade are worthwhile. they're often all part of the same fan-made continuity as TBP. for some different multi-mission series of various size i'd also recommend Godbreaker and Death's Cold Embrace. the authors of those are working on their own full length campaign for Thief 2, The Broken Goddess. There's also Feast of Pilgrims which won the T2 anniversary contest and was made between team members of both fan expansions.

there's some real impressive scripting and custom animation on display. they definitely took cues trying to push NPC behaviour closer to TDM. i've seen several areas where guards would stop and sit down for a moment then get back up and resume patrol, or a man is digging in the streets, a priest picks up and starts drinking a wine bottle, etc etc. first mission even has a fully new animal walking around. to say nothing of the quality and scope of the levels themselves thus far too. the second one already managed to really wow me in a way that recaptures a particular famous map of the base game.

slight hyperbole here but this feels like a real blow to future game preservation and remaster prospects. the current Atari are the ones sitting on the Blood IP that had been uncooperative with Night Dive's remaster.

i dont think it's common enough to warrant but i appreciate the response. i think the only other mission it's ever really halted me on was Air Pocket

i think this may likely just be me but nonetheless a heads up for anyone else out there with a phobia of fish if you get far enough in this.

i'm hoping/expecting a repeat of a few years ago where the big barely month-old release sweeps a lot of categories but loses out to the Fromsoft title that had a solid half year or more to settle. i havent even played or care much for any souls games but especially with Elden Ring and how much my friends were having fun with it, i respect it enough. also it seems to actually respect the player a good deal more than than i've heard about the new God of War i dont think i've played any new commercial game releases this year. at most i may get around to Cultic the next couple weeks.

i'd just be content to have the rights to distribution of the old trilogy in the hands of someone with the care and capability to tweak things up better for a general audience and modern machines. This has mostly been done already with NewDark, but T3 still needs some work. Any digital copies besides GOG are also super out of date with patches.

congrats to the winner Wellingtoncrab. I know you'd been working away at Iris for quite some time and i'm glad it got some elevated recognition on release. I really think it's one of the best missions i've played across TDM and Thief, likely even just stealth games in general. Thanks to the efforts of all the authors and community as a whole for this contest. I enjoyed my time start to finish with all entrants and am really excited with how much the bar has already risen going into 2.10. I love TDM so much.

i had put this mission on pause for a week and it seems there may have been some important info in a conversation that i certainly would not remember now,

was on another YMO kick the past couple of weeks.

the beginning instrumental of this has been my ringtone for pretty much as long as the song has existed and i still have no intention of ever changing it

you sure seem to be far more offended than the person who just wanted to know how the Ignore function works.

Sad to hear, wishing his family and friends all the best. The William Steele series was definitely one of my favourites in all of Dark Mod's offerings and the next two missions had genuinely been some of my most anticipated releases across any game. I'm grateful for all the amazing work he had put in.

played this for the first time today, but after a search through other people's playthroughs it seems there may be a new bug introduced with the update?

i often spoil myself on game stories, not always intentionally either, so one game that's 90% story i'd like to go through fresh again is VA-11 Hall-A. i still get a lot of enjoyment and emotion out of it on replays for sure, but it would be nice to not have known the slight turns it takes further in. some other game stories i'd wanna redo unspoiled would be NieR and the Trails in the Sky trilogy. for gameplay, Call of Juarez Gunslinger comes to mind. i had picked it up on a whim from pure curiosity and was incredibly pleased by it. very fun and quick shooter that still has a simple skill tree for some sense of progression. one time i had actually tried started a clean new game only to find it still saved all the secrets i had found, which gave me a dozen or so skill points to immediately spend anyway. i'd really love to have the proper first experience again, especially if i had played it after the other CoJ games this time. it's such a step up. another would be Blood, or rather, the Death Wish mod. while i think having experience with the base game was vital for my amazing time with it, i'd overall still put it higher than my first time with Blood itself. there's a lot more fun exploration and secrets that don't feel too obtuse, especially getting to the hidden levels. It was incredibly satisfying to have found every secret exit on my own in one go. enemy balance was also less punishing for a first time, with a greater focus on the spectacle of exploding dozens of undead at once, etc. Can't wait for the fourth episode for something wholly new from it.

I was really looking forward to Hitman 3 but was rather inattentive and only yesterday learned that it was out this month, and more importantly an Epic exclusive for a solid year on PC. it still looked largely like just more of Hitman 2 right down to the UI, so i guess that helps me to hold off til a discount next year. i can almost never find a reason to ever get a game first thing on launch for the full 79.99 CDN anyhow. well, I say that, but I am also looking forward to the PC port of Ys IX Monstrum Nox some time this year which will likely use that exact price point. fingers crossed they brought on the individual(s?) that fixed up the PC version of Ys VIII for a much more solid launch of this one. some smaller commercial titles on the edge of my thoughts would be Gloomwood and the next episode of Hedon. I think ultimately though, the possibility of some further Thief/TDM releases are at my most anticipated yet again.