Thief Gold Campaign: The Black Parade

[nbohr1more]

Our friend Skacky ( and his team "Feuillade Industries" ) has released a full sized Thief expansion \ campaign "The Black Parade":

https://www.moddb.com/mods/thief-the-black-parade

t is finally here! After 7-ish years of development, The Black Parade is finally released. So, what awaits you in this campaign?

- 10 huge, open-ended and meticulously crafted missions with varied themes packed with content.
- A brand new protagonist thrown into a dark, intricately woven story of crime and conspiracies.
- 4 new tools happily supplied by the undermarket, at a price.
- Many tweaks to the AI to make the game a bit more challenging but still fair.
- A brand new "banter" system where AIs greet each other during their rounds and nightly life.
- 28 voiced characters totaling roughly 1,800 new lines of dialogue.
- 30 minutes of gorgeous hand-drawn briefings and cutscenes.
- Brand new AI motions making the denizens of The City look more alive.
- Full English subtitles.

In The Black Parade you play the character of Hume, a hardened criminal who was sent into exile as a punishment for his crimes. The year is 833, you are now back in The City, a sprawling metropolis of soot-caked brick, greasy fumes and noisy machinery, with many a sinister conspiracy whispered behind closed doors. Lost and without a penny to your name, you are back to your life of thievery and must find your old associate Dahlquist. Shadows and silence are your allies. Light is your enemy. Stealth and cunning are your tools. And the riches of others are yours for the taking.

The Black Parade aims at being a love letter to Thief: The Dark Project, and we hope we succeeded! It is recommended to have played through Thief: The Dark Project and/or Thief 2: The Metal Age at least once beforehand, since these missions are overall tougher than the base game.

The Black Parade also comes with a few tweaks to the classic Thief gameplay formula:

- Hume is not a Keeper and thus never received Garrett’s training: AIs will now notice you if they bump into you or vice versa, sometimes even in a perfect shadow. Be careful!
- Hume can move banners aside instead of having to slash them.
- Hume has additional footstep sounds for chains and pipes; these are metal sounds that aren’t as noisy as regular metal (about as noisy as stone/wood).
- Water arrows can now be used to expand moss patches.
- Servants will re-light extinguished torches on higher difficulty levels.
- Servants may clean moss on the floor if they notice it on higher difficulty levels.
- Zombies now smash wooden doors open instead of simply opening them.
- Electric lanterns carried by guards can be turned off.
- A few guards in the campaign are outfitted with heavy armor and helms so they cannot be knocked out using the Blackjack.
- Hume can pick up small creature corpses such as spiders or sweels.

DOWNLOAD (912 MB)
MIRROR 1
MIRROR 2

Here is a very handy guide by nicked on how to set up Thief Gold for Fan Missions.

!!!IMPORTANT NOTES!!!
The Black Parade requires NewDark 1.26 or above! Make sure you use the latest version of TFix/TFix Lite before playing!
The Black Parade should be launched with FMSel, NewDarkLoader or AngelLoader. It is not recommended to launch this campaign with DarkLoader or GarrettLoader. Note that mods such as Thief Gold HD Mod, NecroAge or Enhancement Pack are not compatible with this campaign. Remember that this is a campaign for THIEF GOLD, not Thief 2!

Known issues:
- Due to the complexity of the missions, there can be cases where some NPCs might get stuck walking against walls. There is unfortunately not much that can be done about this.
 

Happy 25th anniversary to Thief: The Dark Project, and have fun taffers!

[jaxa]

Now that we're deep into the NewDark era, is there any actual difference between installing over TDP/TG or TMA?

[nbohr1more]

43 minutes ago, jaxa said:

Now that we're deep into the NewDark era, is there any actual difference between installing over TDP/TG or TMA?

Just assets. If you add TG assets to TDP or TMA you should be able to run this mission.

[datiswous]

Why did they use Thief Gold as a base instead of Thief 2?

[nbohr1more]

Just now, datiswous said:

Why did they use Thief Gold as a base instead of Thief 2?

Skacky prefers the darker look of Thief Gold to TMA and wanted all the TG assets available when building the mission.

[irg]

 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.

[AluminumHaste]

Lots of neat stuff in this. Just finished playing the first mission, and it's very Skacky. Lots of crazy verticals.

Pretty impressive effort.

[chakkman]

I just found out that this is by the guy who did level design for Dishonored (for the Flooded District levels, I think?), which raised my interest level from low to very high.  Never really played FMs on Thief Gold or Thief 2, so, I'll have to check out how it works again...

[TheUnbeholden]

1 hour ago, chakkman said:

I just found out that this is by the guy who did level design for Dishonored (for the Flooded District levels, I think?), which raised my interest level from low to very high.  Never really played FMs on Thief Gold or Thief 2, so, I'll have to check out how it works again...

What about Dishonored 2? Or did he leave before then?

[esme]

Thank you so much for this

[marbleman]

6 hours ago, chakkman said:

I just found out that this is by the guy who did level design for Dishonored (for the Flooded District levels, I think?), which raised my interest level from low to very high.  Never really played FMs on Thief Gold or Thief 2, so, I'll have to check out how it works again...

Correction: skacky did not work on Dishonored or Dishonored 2.

Edited December 4, 2023 by marbleman

[chakkman]

Sorry, I confused the TTLG users then.

I'm about 2/3 of the first mission of this campaign. It's great, fantastic level design. Difficulty is nice, not too hard. Haven't encountered any bugs thus far, although the ability to roll back banners seem a bit glitchy. I guess you have to approach them from a specific angle (to the right of the banner).

Overall, really impressive. I have only ever played 2 or 3 Thief 2 fan missions, and, they weren't nearly on this level.

[Apache Fiero]

I can't get it to work

Can anyone help?

I followed Easymodes install tutorial https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xpmmlBY7TRs&t=416s

But everytime I click on Thief I get this error

I downloaded and installed 7zip but it hasn't made any difference.

 

ISSUE SOLVED

I reinstalled Thief Gold this time purchasing an actual legit copy from GOG instead of trying to use the copy of the game I downloaded off some website, anyway that fixed the issue and it works great.

Edited December 11, 2023 by Apache Fiero

[chakkman]

Is that Thief Gold or Thief 2?

Make sure you do the following: Install Thief Gold. Start Thief Gold one time, if you have it on Steam, so that it creates/updates the install.cfg. Install TFix (preferrably the Lite version, as, obviously, some mods don't play well with the full TFix with mods). Set up Thief after that, resolution, control scheme etc. Then open the cam_mod.ini in the Thief Gold root directory, and remove the ";" before "fm" in the "always start the FM Selector (if one is present)" section. Next time you start Thief Gold, it should show you the FMsel loader (and, hopefully that error message is gone), which lets you load the FM.

Edited December 9, 2023 by chakkman

[madtaffer]

This is for Thief Gold.

[snatcher]

If I were to choose a single difference between Thief and The Dark Mod is that the former feels cold and humid whereas the latter feels cozy and warm. Different beasts.

[Dave the Taffer]

On 12/4/2023 at 7:15 PM, marbleman said:

Correction: skacky did not work on Dishonored or Dishonored 2.

I don't know him personally, but he has a quite long history in Quake mapping, too. I played various Quake custom maps by him, and they were excellent.

I didn't know he is a level designer at Arkane now. Wow.

[chakkman]

If I understood @marbleman correctly, he doesn't work for Arkane though?

[irg]

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.

 

Edited December 11, 2023 by irg

[AluminumHaste]

There's a few areas in Wrath Aeon of Ruin that felt Skacky to me. Like his influence if not outright level making was present.

I wish him all the best in anything he does.

[datiswous]

On 12/9/2023 at 8:56 PM, snatcher said:

If I were to choose a single difference between Thief and The Dark Mod is that the former feels cold and humid whereas the latter feels cozy and warm. Different beasts.

I thought it depends on the fm designer?

[chakkman]

One thing is for sure: The originals are, in general, a lot darker, and more creepy. 

Sure, also depends on the FM, but, the style of the core assets and the models is surely different.

[JackFarmer]

Very impressive work, and I can't even imagine the workload to be done (readables, dialogs, monologs, briefings, new idle animations, etc.) apart from the not exactly easy mapping with DromEd (or however that's spelled).

If someone had told me that they had been working just on Mission 2 for seven years, I would have believed it immediately. You can tell that the convoluted design of the original game was used as a reference, and  I personally find it even more complex. It took me almost three hours to complete mission 2 on Expert.

I'm now in mission 3 and everything is quite bright there...thankfully the Thief AI isn't that demanding...in the Dark Mod such an enlightened mission would be very "challenging" (to say the least) and would cause quite a few nervous breakdowns!

[chakkman]

14 minutes ago, JackFarmer said:

Very impressive work, and I can't even imagine the workload to be done (readables, dialogs, monologs, briefings, new idle animations, etc.) apart from the not exactly easy mapping with DromEd (or however that's spelled).

If someone had told me that they had been working just on Mission 2 for seven years, I would have believed it immediately. You can tell that the convoluted design of the original game was used as a reference, and  I personally find it even more complex. It took me almost three hours to complete mission 2 on Expert.

It totally is more complex than the original missions. Actually, a bit too complex to my liking... it's manageable, but, if every mission is that gigantic, it kinda defeats the focused gameplay, and breaks the rhythm a bit.

You also have to remember a hundred things if the missions are that large. I've recently started to use the Steam in-game notes taking function.

Edited January 1 by chakkman

[grodenglaive]

I haven't played any Thief mods before or even looked at the game since probably 2000. Going back to the old Thief graphics was a bit of a turnoff at first, but the gameplay more than makes up for it.

Wow, this mod is massive. I'm over 20 hours in and just started The Jaws of Darkness (mission 8 of 10). Really enjoyable so far, great maps. It can get pretty intense at times, but in a good way. I ran into a couple of frustrating places where I couldn't find the objective and resorted to google (that sprawling mansion early on was easy to get lost in). Overall, very fun though.