Jump to content
The Dark Mod Forums

Should I play Thief: Deadly Shadows?


BloodShot

Recommended Posts

I started playing the game a while back but the game kind of felt clunky while playing and that put me off quite a bit compared to the first two so I stopped (forget what I was doing, maybe a mission in a cathedral?), but I hear the shalebridge cradle is supposed to be one of the most atmospheric, scariest and well made levels in a video game that tops even the scariest horror games.

 

I love scary and atmospheric things (the latter is hard to find done right in my experience, very few games nail it), my question is should I play through T3 just to play the cradle, or should I just watch a video of it and dim the lights, turn up the sound?

 

Also, I haven't actually beat Thief TDP yet, and RTTC is supposed to rival the cradle according to certain people, which is better in atmosphere and scare factor?

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Should I play Thief: Deadly Shadows?

 

 

No, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines

"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man." -- George Bernard Shaw (1856 - 1950)

 

"Remember: If the game lets you do it, it's not cheating." -- Xarax

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Huh? RTTC = return to the city? It has nothing to do with the shalebridge cradle in theme.

 

If you can see Thief deadly shadows sold cheap somewhere, and you like the sneaking genre... Sure, why not? There were some decent missions there and some of them, like the cradle, had very nice atmosphere. Watching a video never compares to the playing experience.

Clipper

-The mapper's best friend.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I pulled T3 out of the mothballs last month specifically so I could play Shalebridge Cradle on a giant TV on Halloween night and show it off to my fiance. I fell behind in playing the game up to that point, but was able to find an archived savegame online that allowed me to skip right to it. The Cradle reminds me a lot of the remake of House on Haunted Hill.

 

 

Garrett finds himself trapped inside a building that has served as both an orphanage and insane asylum. The ghost of a young girl guides him towards a series of objects that are keeping her trapped as a restless spirit. Oh but getting to those objects is not an easy task due to the shambling monstrosities that roam the halls. Imagine a person in a white jumpsuit with a metal cage over his head and hands. They twitch like the Silent Hill nurses and give off the sound of electric buzzing. The lights start to flicker when they are around. And you have some difficult locks to pick where you feel completely exposed on a heavily used patrol path. Finally, you will be interacting with the Cradle in two different time periods as you enter the memories of some of the patients.

 

Taurus philosophy:

Give me a hammer and tell me I have 6 hours to break up a 2 inch thick layer of ice. As soon as you walk away I'm going to use some hot water and salt so I can take a nap for the remaining 5 and a half hours. Taureans hate wasting energy and if there's a more efficient way to do something they will find it.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

The Shalebridge Cradle is a great mission, but Return to the Cathedral blows it out of the water. Really, this is the issue here: Thief 3 is very good on its own, but if you compare it to the gameplay and story construction of the originals, it comes out lacking. If you play it, you should download and install John P.'s Collective Texture Pack, which replaces many of the low-resolution originals with crisp, high-quality upgrades. There is also the Minimalist Project, created by our very own New Horizon, which reduces interface clutter and tries to bring T3 closer to the older games. Note that this also makes the game significantly harder, which may not be a good thing considering that someone who likes the earlier Thief games or TDM will be struggling with the horrid player movement.

 

I replayed T3 about two years ago with the high res pack, and have basically forgiven it - it's pretty fun when you approach it without other experiences clouding your mind. But if you have a choice between T3 and Thief Gold... go for the latter.

Come the time of peril, did the ground gape, and did the dead rest unquiet 'gainst us. Our bands of iron and hammers of stone prevailed not, and some did doubt the Builder's plan. But the seals held strong, and the few did triumph, and the doubters were lain into the foundations of the new sanctum. -- Collected letters of the Smith-in-Exile, Civitas Approved

Link to comment
Share on other sites

So much depends on expectations. I thought cradle was very good but I was surprised at just how much it was revered by others. I've known FMs probably felt more scary to me personally.

 

RTTC was special. TDP was my first real 3D game apart from ancient freebies like Wolfenstein and earlier. But when I first played it, the max brightness setting (on my system) left dark areas total black. I played half the game like that without knowing! I had nothing to compare it with so thought that was normal. So feeling my way through RTTC was erm... tense to say the least. Imagination plays tricks. :D Later I found I could manually alter the config file to raise the brightness above the max setting in-game. I'm sure if I played RTTC now with good brightness and the admittedly clunky AI (compared to TDM) it would not have so much affect on me.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I thought cradle was very good but I was surprised at just how much it was revered by others. I've known FMs probably felt more scary to me personally.

 

I know, right? I remember playing and thinking "this is a pretty creepy mission. nice." I totally did not see all the praise it got later coming. Not that it doesn't deserve, you see, but I had experiences more baffling before that didn't get the same love from the rest of the world :P

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I think you should play it because it's part of our collective knowledge as a community. People sometimes make allusions to things in it in FMs, so it's good to have played it to catch them. Things like that. Also it's still a medieval stealth game. It's what we're all about.

What do you see when you turn out the light? I can't tell you but I know that it's mine.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

If you like scary atmospheres, then yes, play it. I'd say it's the atmosphere that was the scariest thing about it for me - the AI that AngelWolf refers to are pretty freaky but truth is, they aren't that hard to avoid/defeat. It was the constant drip-feed of discovering what an awful place it was that did my head in. TBH, I can admire the work that went into it but it was too genuinely unpleasant for me (I'm not a big horror games fan) and I never enjoyed it as a Thief mission.

it's a lot of scripted boo tactics.

Is it? The only scripted boo tactics I can remember are

the banging in the attic

, and maybe

turning on the generator

. Otherwise, the scripted stuff I remember was more to do with making you feel increasingly trapped and powerless.

 

Happy to be corrected though as I haven't played it for years. :P

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Well, I guess I'll try to get past the "clunky" feel. I did install it a while back with the texture pack and I thought it was pretty cool but it just felt wrong how clunky it was, considering how good the previous games controlled.

 

Plus it is Thief, and I've always found the thief series in general to be some of the most interesting games I've played, gameplay and story wise.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

It's a fantastic game, and I think Ion Storm Austin did a fantastic job. I shudder to think what could have happened if another Eidos developer took a crack at it during that period of time. Personally, I think it tells the best story in the Thief series, much better than the Metal Age with it's Elmer Fudd-like antagonist Karras, and is pretty great game all around despite a few niggles here and there. It wraps up the series in such a perfect way.

 

Dark Project will always be my favourite, and Metal Age has some really fantastic levels and obviously all the amazing fan missions, but Deadly Shadows is still a must play. It's the worst of an amazing series, but is a very successful game in it's own right. Once you're a couple of missions in you forget about the loading zones, exploitable A.I., etc you can tell the team really cared and wanted to make a great game. I think you would be missing out if you passed on it, but different strokes for different folks, right?

Edited by Mr. Tibbs
Link to comment
Share on other sites

most of the missions in TDS are really good

 

their are only two things that makes this part of the game series worse than the first two parts made by looking glass:

 

1. there were no "don't kill anyone" objective on the highest difficulty level (doesn't matter for shalebridge, of course) and difficulty was much lower in general

2. the levels where split into two parts, what's bad for replaying it 'cause you only think of, "OK, how can I manage this level without seeing the loading screen too often"

( and 3. there were no synchronization)

 

but beside these two things TDS is a very good game really worth playing it

 

btw.: my favorite mission in this part was the one where you sneek into a museum, that comes after shalebridge IIRC, so best things lie before you ;)

 

@ Mr. Tibbs: his name is Karras :rolleyes: , and the second part is my favorite although I've heard that this one isn't liked by most of the players due to the Machinists, well I guess it's a matter of taste

 

Deadly Shadows is still a must play

 

as we seem to live in the age of Call of f***ing scripted Duty +1 :P

Edited by Obsttorte

FM's: Builder Roads, Old Habits, Old Habits Rebuild

Mapping and Scripting: Apples and Peaches

Sculptris Models and Tutorials: Obsttortes Models

My wiki articles: Obstipedia

Texture Blending in DR: DR ASE Blend Exporter

Link to comment
Share on other sites

@ Obsttorte

 

Whoops, sorry about that.

 

I absolutely love Thief 2, Life of the Party, First City Bank, Ambush are some of the best missions ever. I just found the total move away from the supernatural to be a bit of a let down, although many players loved this choice. The voice direction on Karras is so unusual every time Stephen Russell talked it disturbed the experience a little for me. Still that's a very minor blemish on one of the best games ever.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I'm sorry I didn't use spoilers but I figured I was talking about some of the features without giving away plot details, kinda like a movie trailer. I've been telling a lot of non gamers about it over Halloween and I had this crazy idea to tell the story as a first person narrative in the style of a radio play. I cut out the TDS elements and made it stand alone as the story of a thief who got chased into a dead end.

With a garrison of city watch approaching, he sees a doorway that wasn't there before and goes through it without thinking. And finds a building he thought was just a childhood ghost story. People who died in the surrounding neighborhood all mysteriously vanish and haunt the grounds as the undead. He is chased through the bulkhead by the zombies and the gate crashes down sealing him in. From there, I plan on expanding on the storyline by removing all prior knowledge of the asylum part and going with the idea that the orphanage was a functional cover story. It makes it far scarier for the audience to find out that the asylums existence was covered up so that the patients could be experimented on by a mad doctor with political influence. Rather than reading clues about the patients with their toys, the thief actually gets to see apparitions of them, and must set them all free before he can destroy the doctor and the curse his experimenting caused. It might actually make for a decent Dark Mod FM remake too. I would probably change the layout a bit to support the idea of a secret asylum. It always made me kinda sad that one of the scariest missions was hidden in the middle of a game none of my friends had ever played. [\spoiler]

Taurus philosophy:

Give me a hammer and tell me I have 6 hours to break up a 2 inch thick layer of ice. As soon as you walk away I'm going to use some hot water and salt so I can take a nap for the remaining 5 and a half hours. Taureans hate wasting energy and if there's a more efficient way to do something they will find it.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

thief deadly shadows was made to run on the xbox, so it has that clunky console feeling, and low textures, and you get the option of playing as an assassin instead of a thief, which was apparently feedback from xbox forums as what they wanted in thief 3.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

That clunky movement feeling in TDS is not that much of an issue. You get used to it. At least you should be by the time you get to the Cradle.

 

(The reason for the movement -- a topic which i think has been discussed on TTLG a hundred times -- is however not console-related. It's a design issue: they wanted 3rd person and a fully featured and animated player model. First person is achieved by plugging a camera in the model's face. At least that's how it felt to me. I could live with that part, no problem.

Big spoilers for me were: no swimmable water, no rope arrows, two AIs doing random idle animations in perfect sync and blue fog, of course. To name a few.)

 

When I played it, I found the Cradle mission to be quite impressive. I showed it to a friend who wasn't into stealth, but into horror gaming. I just let him play the mission. He found it to be nice, but not overwhelming.

The trick is, it only reaches it's potential when you experience it in the game's context, where it contrasts with the rest of the missions. The dramatic effect may already be spoiled when you approach it with propably too high expectations.

 

:)

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Very few games have actually done Full-Body Awareness right. I think Dark Messiah was the only game that had a FBA system that made you feel like you were looking through a head instead of the camera, but it retained the tight controls of a normal FPS game where you are a floating camera.

 

And I've been playing and getting used to it. I actually kind of like the flatten on walls mechanic as well.

Edited by BloodShot
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Join the conversation

You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.

Guest
Reply to this topic...

×   Pasted as rich text.   Paste as plain text instead

  Only 75 emoji are allowed.

×   Your link has been automatically embedded.   Display as a link instead

×   Your previous content has been restored.   Clear editor

×   You cannot paste images directly. Upload or insert images from URL.

  • Recent Status Updates

    • Petike the Taffer

      I've finally managed to log in to The Dark Mod Wiki. I'm back in the saddle and before the holidays start in full, I'll be adding a few new FM articles and doing other updates. Written in Stone is already done.
      · 4 replies
    • nbohr1more

      TDM 15th Anniversary Contest is now active! Please declare your participation: https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/22413-the-dark-mod-15th-anniversary-contest-entry-thread/
       
      · 0 replies
    • JackFarmer

      @TheUnbeholden
      You cannot receive PMs. Could you please be so kind and check your mailbox if it is full (or maybe you switched off the function)?
      · 1 reply
    • OrbWeaver

      I like the new frob highlight but it would nice if it was less "flickery" while moving over objects (especially barred metal doors).
      · 4 replies
    • nbohr1more

      Please vote in the 15th Anniversary Contest Theme Poll
       
      · 0 replies
×
×
  • Create New...