Boxsmith

No worries, man. That wasn't directed at you at all (or anyone in this thread so far, for that matter). You've been very civil and I appreciate that. You can impose artificial constraints upon yourself, sure. After 13-ish years with Thief I find myself doing that too; I change, but the game doesn't, so I kind of have to make my own challenges. I've conceded that knockouts are satisfying in their own way already. What I'm saying, though, is that designing missions without a blackjack can lead do something a lot more fun, dynamic and faithful to what makes the Thief formula good (I'm pretty sure we actually agree on what that is). Thief gives you the freedom to engage it your way, and not necessarily the precise way the designer intended. I think as it stands, the blackjack is an unfortunate indicator to the contrary. It doesn't tell a newbie that "this is a game about solving problems your way," it says that "this is a game about clubbing heads" because it's such a one size fits all solution. Ironically, removing an option actually opened me up to a lot more.

Yeah, I know. I'm just voicing my thoughts on the matter. Worst case scenario, a constructive discussion takes place that makes me re-evaluate my conclusion and refines my critical faculties everyone froths at the mouth and categorically rejects my opinion because this is the internet. Best case scenario, people hear me out, give it a shot and it turns out to be pretty damn fun.

I think you're vastly overstating the difficulty of using the blackjack, but that's neither here nor there. The bulk of my argument isn't about difficulty, exactly. It's about what's more fun and serves the fantasy thief is built around (although difficulty definitely plays into this, not so much in its intensity but more in its distribution). Thief was made under a really contrarian mindset. It was designed as the opposite of the shooter, which is all about direct engagement with the enemy. Thief is about concealment and indirection, but I think the blackjack stands in stark contrast to that principle because it is a tool for directly attacking the enemy. If your game is about avoiding guards, confrontation should be something the player resorts to, not his usual MO. Unlimited knockouts are immediately risky, but they drastically reduce risk in the long term by removing a major threat without long-term cost. This suggests to the player that blackjacking left and right should be his default setting. Not only does that undermine the game's verisimilitude (you know you've built more than one body pile in your time) and eliminate a lot of strategy from knockouts, it's really not the most fun you can have with the game. You remember this guy in Bafford's basement? There's no way to squeeze by him through the doorway, and even if you could, the area around him is really well-illuminated, so you'd likely be noticed. Faced with this setup, and seeing no way to sneak by, I'm guessing your first instinct is to go for that satisfying thunk across the back of his skull. It feels pretty sneaky, and there's a pleasing element of catharsis to it. This being the first level, we can forgive how easy it is. How do we get around the gormless mook if we take away the blackjack, though? Clearly we have to make him move out of the way somehow without anyone getting hurt. We look around the room and find that there are shelves of stuff we can throw around. While the flooring is mostly soft and quiet, there's a stretch of metal plating within earshot of the guard. A pesky torch is mounted on a nearby column, making the room a little too bright for comfort. Putting that together, we've got a potential distraction. So we douse the torch, which lets us position ourselves to make a safer and faster escape, grab a shovel lying around (for optimal noise), then toss the thing. CLANG. The guard gets kinda spooked and decides to check it out, leaving the doorway. You get an opening, and moving carefully so as not to attract attention in your direction, proceed upstairs. By getting rid of the blackjack in that scenario, we've introduced tension (a suspicious, moving guard), problem solving, greater engagement with the environment, and thiefy trickery to a very simple enemy encounter. It's not that much harder in practice, but it is a lot more fun than the formulaic creep & thwack. You can totally get around this stuff with competent level design, yeah. I'm not denying that. I just think the blackjack is pretty out of place and not very fun. The reason I hate shooters is that my primary means of interaction with the environment is the business end of a rifle, and I can seldom use that to do anything meaningful. All I can do is shoot dudes to keep moving. Thief and TDM are different, though. They build a really elaborate simulation and some very versatile yet concise mechanisms through which I can engage that simulation. The extent to which I can exercise agency in Thief is rarely found in games, but everything about the blackjack directs the player to the narrow conclusion that KOs are his go-to solution. It's not a far cry from taking cover behind a waist-high crate to get a headshot, and I don't think it does justice to the game's strengths. If you have to make it "almost unusable" to have fun, why is it in the game?

My beef with the blackjack is that it's something you can use to knock anyone out, at any time, for no resource cost and with little consequence. In a game about non-confrontation that's one hell of a mechanical aberration. There are a ton of other (far more interesting) tools you can use to bypass or eliminate a guard, but they're limited in quantity and many are risky for the user. If you stay away from the blackjack, every time you think about eliminating a guard you have to make a calculated decision. Is it economical? Is it too risky? Do my present surroundings accommodate the item's particular quirks? Would another item work better? That kind of resource management can be really engaging. Otherwise, one quickly tends to forget about anything other than rope arrows and ol' clubby because unlimited free KOs are the path of least resistance. Frankly, it's kind of boring. Meanwhile the mansion gradually gets emptier and bizarrely, no-one seems to notice. There's a lot of stuff you could do to mitigate that on a per-map basis without ditching the blackjack, but unless it's readily, physically observable to the player (I think serpentine made this point earlier), it just results in an inconsistent experience for the player. TDM's missions can be a hell of a hodge-podge, and while that has many virtues, it can also make the whole thing feel rougher around the edges than it ought to be. So uh, yeah. What zergrush said, sorta. My humble request to mappers is more FMs sans blackjack, but more tools. Unless you're playing on easy, in which case you probably need the safety net.

I hope I'm not totally out of line in resurrecting this thread. I just got around to playing this mission and I felt I should offer some words of encouragement, because this was probably the most enjoyable TDM mission I've played since Patently Dangerous. The platforming was pretty rough around the edges and made me feel like I was playing it wrong, but aside from that the gameplay was solid, and I loved having only broadheads and environmental junk to work with (though admittedly, I found myself itching for a rope arrow more than a few times). All the neat subtext you had going on was great, as were the visuals. Clever use of very sparse artificial light against moonlight; it's one of many environmental features in this mission that help carry across that sense of almost oppressive, dreary realism so well. Other FM authors could learn a lot from your stuff. An improvement would be more consistent interactivity. For instance, having one climbable pipe out of a number of unclimbable ones is a pretty bad call, because you're setting people up for a pattern that you later break. Done right, breaking established patterns can be used to your advantage, but in this case it just makes the ways in which I can traverse the map kind of confusing and not as obvious as they ought to be. It sets people up for frustration. Another example of this is all the neat-looking buildings I never got to enter. This isn't just a problem because exploration is a big part of what makes the Thief formula so good. Because up until the barn/courtyard section the map is pretty linear and very restrictive about where I could go, at first I found myself stumped because it didn't seem like I was meant to cross the collapsed building or enter the apartment window. I got to the bottomless pit and thought, "I guess I wasn't meant to see this." Lastly, it bothered me to get hit with an invisible wall right at the start of the mission. Invisible walls really mess with immersion, I think -- they're the heavy hand of the designer showing itself -- and I'd stay away from them as much as possible if I were you. It's true that the alternative is usually inexplicable dead ends and locked gates, but I find those a lot easier to swallow than weird immaterial barriers that only seem to apply to me. All in all I think a lot of the issues with this mission would be solved by introducing the sorts of gameplay patterns the player can expect early and in a way that would be hard to miss. Every FM has its problems, though, and there's definitely not enough stuff like this for TDM. Don't give up! (Please.)

Sweet mission, but I wish it didn't include that in-game cutscene. Cutscenes and non-interactive scripted sequences in general have no business in games anymore IMO, much less a thief clone such as TDM.

Beautiful FM. The cave portion was especially freaky -- it's been a while since I had that "oh f*** what's down there nonononononono" reaction to anything.