Fan Mission: Volta III - Gemcutter [15th Anniversary Contest]

[MirceaKitsune]

Congrats on the release: Another amazing and quality FM I was very happy to play through!

Spoiler

Found 6/8 secrets, 1535/2260 loot. Achieved the optional objectives I could discover, including the doll.

I liked the disguise system. For a moment I thought you might have used the disguise mod I made a while back, it's more dynamic but the simple approach worked well here too. It doesn't get you too far unfortunately... it's also often hard to tell when someone will attack or not, had cases where a guard tells me "hello" then immediately draws their sword to attack.

Happy to see more new assets: I could immediately tell some character clothes heads and even walk animations were unique. As always I hope they'll be making their way into vanilla TMD, the jester outfit is particularly lovely!

[NeonsStyle]

As usual, your missions are always top quality, and original. Love this one. Really a well
made mission as usual. Love all the original new assets, and textures. I really love your
style of maps. 

Thanks again.

Edited October 23 by NeonsStyle

[wesp5]

A wonderful mission but something weird happened to me which I just have to report. I bribed to get the master key, but forgot to actually pick it up and only remembered when I already had opened the normal Orchid entrance door. Was this supposed to be unlocked without the key?

Edited October 23 by wesp5

[Marbrien]

45 minutes ago, NeonsStyle said:

As usual, your missions are always top quality, and original. Love this one. However I"m stuck in the gambling hall. I'm in there but there's two tables with 2 guys each n nothing seems to trigger the objective. Spoiler it for me please. 

You need to

Spoiler

go upstairs in the gambling hall, as high as you can.

 

[chakkman]

2 hours ago, NeonsStyle said:

As usual, your missions are always top quality, and original. Love this one. Really a well
made mission as usual. Love all the original new assets, and textures. I really love your
style of maps. 

I have to admit that they always remind me of Dishonored. That's not a bad thing though.  Just saying that the visual style and settings are more reminiscent of Dishonored than of Thief.

[Bergante]

@kingsal
so this is also a Sequel to Hazard-Pay ?

 

Spoiler

Gordiff got out - rescued - by the Builders ?
made Career  -  with the benefits of the Builders ? --- to ensure his silence of what happend there ?
Oh God - I´m happy he never new i´ve been there - and escaped without him knowing of me ----
but with all the loot thats possibly been there ! 
so the Builders must have payed him from other resources --- i didn´t left a gem behind !

My question to you ?
what happened to the other guy on the platform ?
is he still alive ? - or did the rescue party had a look in an other direction ! 
I gave him all the food available , the healing potion , the mine and flash-bombs 
sorry for i have been to busy to also bring him a Bow - and this one apple i took for the road !

if Gordiff or the Builders did him some harm ? - let me know ! - i´ll take revenge in you next Mission 
or maybe do gemcutter again in a different way 

 

[kingsal]

16 minutes ago, Bergante said:

so this is also a Sequel to Hazard-Pay ?

It's certainly not a direct sequel. I'll leave it up to you how much the two are tied together, but there are some things you can do in Hazard Pay that would create an "alternate path" for our man Gordiff 



 

[lowenz]

2 hours ago, chakkman said:

I have to admit that they always remind me of Dishonored. That's not a bad thing though.  Just saying that the visual style and settings are more reminiscent of Dishonored than of Thief.

And its retail quality. I mean, Kingsal can work in Arkane studios just like Digital Nightfall - a well known TTLG user - did (does?). The required AAA quality level is perfectly achieved.

Edited October 23 by lowenz

[datiswous]

On 10/20/2024 at 8:19 PM, kingsal said:

A heads up, the briefing doesn't have subtitles yet, I'll do that in a future update. I just ran out of time.
The OP has the briefing scripts written out along with an FAQ as chakkman mentioned. 

I just made subtitles for the briefing. You can use them, or make your own later.

I noticed that the gemcutter.subs file has only inline declarations, while some of the voice files are quite long, and therefore can't fit inline.

gemcutter_briefing_subs.pk4

[hightide]

this was a very impressive mission! lots to see and do, fun hidden objectives, and very well built.

I found all the secrets!

but somehow, I missed the code for the wine shop storage. where should I look for that?

[chakkman]

15 minutes ago, hightide said:

but somehow, I missed the code for the wine shop storage. where should I look for that?

Spoiler

You can enter another way...

I don't think the code can be found in the mission anyway. The only code you need is for the first storage.

 

Edited October 26 by chakkman

[tapewolf]

On 10/21/2024 at 7:09 PM, waxhead said:

One minor thing / bugreport(?): It was possible to throw a vase inside a display case. I was hoping to break the glass with it , but instead the glass cracked more and more as I kept throwing, and the extra geometry consumed a lot of CPU or GPU power slowing the game down to 2-3 fps. Once the glass was broken (using the blackjack) it was not a problem anymore. Perhaps it is possible to set a limit for how much the glass can crack.

I also discovered this.  Carefully dropping a coconut on one of the display cases in the Terrarium caused it to keep fracturing indefinitely.  I forgot about it and came back 10 minutes later to find the display case looking like the Demon Core and the RX7700XT rendering at 0.5 fps.

Later on I did this deliberately, lighting up all four display cases and turning the Terrarrium into an impromptu nuclear research lab.  That caused the savegame to grow to 150MB and the rendering engine to start dropping objects, such as rendering one of the ladies present without her head.  Or rendering just her head, or a floating purse.

Anyway, I've had a ridiculous amount of fun with this mission.  I found all but one of the secrets, and all four

Spoiler

snails.  This missing secret was the one above the orrey, which I only missed because it was the same colour as the surroundings, a mean trick.

Very, very well done.

[CountMorillonite]

What's with the snails. Am I confusing them with slugs, who slime along the ground. I think people eat them so I'm looking all over the kitchen. Haven't found one yet. Not sure what I'm looking for. Can they crawl up walls? My bet is that they are with the spiders, and I'm not going in there.

[irisx]

A very nice-looking mission, IMHO up there with the best in terms of visuals. I particularly enjoyed exploring the atmospheric indoor/semi-outdoor spaces around the port and the interior of the ship. Some touches of "decadent luxury" were also well made and added to the character of the mission. The custom assets really look magnificent, and I also liked the additional characters and outfits. In terms of gameplay, I think it hits the right mix of linearity with enough side goals, potential for exploration and secrets to keep the interest and provide some replay value. The verticality was also excellent. I would personally prefer a difficulty setting that would actively prevent me from indulging in serial blackjacking, but that's just my lack of discipline there...

On a technical note, I was also hit by the progressive stuttering that was mentioned by others --not uniformly reduced fps, just alternating periods of smoothness and short freezes. Sometimes it gets better after quickloading, but it tends to come back again. I also got consistent hard crashes during

Spoiler

the archery game

and had to reload from a proper save.

[Keruah]

Great mission. I think, Volta series are my favs so far. This mission reminded me of Leutenant Foreign Affairs (just a bit, outside the ship) and I got some Dishonored vibes here and there. Maybe, you got an inspiration from the latter? Overall, it's a one great mission. Congrats on the release  

[tapewolf]

On 11/4/2024 at 12:53 AM, CountMorillonite said:

What's with the snails. Am I confusing them with slugs, who slime along the ground. I think people eat them so I'm looking all over the kitchen. Haven't found one yet. Not sure what I'm looking for. Can they crawl up walls? My bet is that they are with the spiders, and I'm not going in there.

Rough locations of the snails:
 

Spoiler

1. In the Terrarrium on the ship, there is a hut you can't get into through the door.  But there is another way inside.

2. On shore, in one of the warehouses.  You might have to break some glass.

3. On shore, in the marketplace, follow the pipes and look for a tree.

4. On the ship, the lift by the bar.  On the top floor, there's a snail on a ledge near the ceiling.

If you frob the snail and use it, you'll get a reaction from the player and the snail will become unfrobbable.

 

[chakkman]

Spoiler

Never even saw a snail in my playthrough. Gotta pay more attention.

 

[MirceaKitsune]

I might want to play this one again since it sounds like I missed a lot of things. Might even give the other difficulty levels a try. I remember being left with one question I never asked...

Spoiler

Is there a way to get the codes for the other two lockers in the warehouse? You only get the code for the rightmost one containing the disguise if you choose to buy the bribe at the beginning. But what about the other two of the three?

 

[chakkman]

Spoiler

You get the combination to the leftmost one, up in the office of the warehouse owner, if I recall correctly.

 

[CountMorillonite]

18 hours ago, tapewolf said:

Rough locations of the snails:
 

  Hide contents

1. In the Terrarrium on the ship, there is a hut you can't get into through the door.  But there is another way inside.

2. On shore, in one of the warehouses.  You might have to break some glass.

3. On shore, in the marketplace, follow the pipes and look for a tree.

4. On the ship, the lift by the bar.  On the top floor, there's a snail on a ledge near the ceiling.

If you frob the snail and use it, you'll get a reaction from the player and the snail will become unfrobbable.

 

Thanks Tapewolf. Your descriptions were great. I had no problems. But I can't see the relevance of the snails to the mission. You would think after you stumble upon the first, a new objective would pop up instead of the Bonus Objective AFTER you've got 4.

[chakkman]

It unlocks the achievement "Snail hunter".

[Melchior]

What a wonderful, fun and visually striking map!

It has a BUNCH of 1st's for TDM:

Spoiler

Working water closets...for instance.

And a neat mechanical parlour target shooting game with working score system and prizes!

 

I hope there are 7 more Voltas' in the works. IMHO: it IS the TDM campaign.

[MirceaKitsune]

4 hours ago, Melchior said:

IMHO: it IS the TDM campaign.

I really wish this and other FM series were turned into actual campaigns, or rather given separate versions in this form without breaking their existing parts. The multi-level system was barely ever used, I believe only one or two actual campaigns were ever released. I think those tend to have more continuity than separately releasing each FM in parts, especially with things like returning between levels to find what changed and do new things.

[chakkman]

The problem I always saw with any kind of campaign is the lack of uniformity.

Let's say that someone say that this is THE TDM campaign. I beg to differ, as these missions (and everything else kingsal did) are quite different to the missions included in the base game, and a lot of former TDM missions. They rather have their own style, aesthetically, as well as (partly) gameplay wise. Which is perfectly fine, and, I love to play them too, but, are they particularcly middle age original Thief like missions? I think they're pretty different, and rather remind me of Dishonored, to be honest. Yes, Volta II had quite a bit of the Lost City missions, and, Volta I was at least partly a classic mansion Thief mission, but, I think this is quite different, as was Hazard Pay.

I don't think something like an "official" TDM campaign is even possible. There's nothing "official" about fan mission authors. Most do their own thing. The closest thing I could imagine was the Crucible of Omens mission, which was really what I consider a "classic" TDM mission, as it had many of the properties I would relate to the mod. Some missions even outright alienate me (sometimes in a good, sometimes in bad way), as they're so different to anything Thief represents for me.

Edited November 10 by chakkman

[grodenglaive]

Thanks for another great mission. It was an enjoyable 4 hours on expert. Very original looking, with nice touches like "fishing" and riding the gantry