Thief: The Dark Project Remastered by Nightdive

[chakkman]

That's the thing with the remasters of cult games like Thief: Everyone will grab the microscope, and look for those tiny little differences, and find the fly in the ointment.

[AluminumHaste]

8 hours ago, I.C.H.I. said:

Nerfed railgun and other weapon changes, enemies rebalanced. Barrels now don't explode instantly when you shoot them, there is a pointless delay. A lot of AI changes but the maps weren't designed for it. Lighting was redone entirely, often it significantly changes the atmosphere for the worse, because it's much brighter now. Some maps were altered just for the sake of it, the rest were left intact which only creates visual inconsistency.

OLD MODS ARE NOT SUPPORTED! More to that, you can't just recompile the old source code, you need to adapt it, but that is if you still have it somewhere. And who would care to port the old mods anyway?

On top of all of this, they awkwardly tried to merge Q1 and Q2 universes in the newly added campaign but it feels so out of place and just cringeworty.

You will always have all the source ports for quake and quake 2.

The new campaigns are awesome, the lore was always fucking trash anyways, so complaining about it being cringeworthy.....the original lore was incredibly cringeworthy.

I get you don't like the changes, fine. It's not like the old game is gone now. It's not like all the mods and source ports are gone now. They're still being worked on.

Also, the new Quake 1 episodes are awesome. I really don't get the hate. 

[revelator]

damn newer played that much Q2 but the railgun was allways my favorite quake weapon.

seems they tried to get the game to appeal to a bigger audience which while understandable just does not fit with it.

[revelator]

huh i.c.h.i's post just dissapeared  wtf ?.

[revelator]

7 hours ago, AluminumHaste said:

the original lore was incredibly cringeworthy

guess you newer played nehahra  it sorta delves into the lore off Q1 but with a humerous twist.

originally developed by mindcrime lord havoc (or lady havoc as it turned out ) and a few others from the old quake community. theres even a live demo that plays as a video as a prelude to the game (warning it is very long).

it is not 100% cannon but close enough . it can be a bit nasty to get the demo based story running on modern ports. the original nehquake.exe used a lot of hacks to allow playing demo captures as videos. the game itself does run ok with darkplaces just dont turn on  realtime ligthing as it fucks up the game because of missing support files for it.

Q2 lore was... well a bit out there. idtech was most famous for its engines not exactly for game lore.

[chakkman]

6 hours ago, revelator said:

damn newer played that much Q2

It's a great game. You should catch up on that.  

I like the lore too. It's trash, but, so trash that it's good.

Edited July 6 by chakkman

[chakkman]

14 hours ago, AluminumHaste said:

The new campaigns are awesome

The Machine Games one is a bit... hysteric. In terms of enemy frequency. Less is more would have been great.

The level design is great though.

[revelator]

hehe yeah i did play it to the end but it newer really appealed that much to me.

Q1 was my goto back in those days but probably mostly because i played deathmatches with my friends .

Q2 is not horrible but the replay value was obviously not for me.

i did play some mods created by the community for a good while on it.

[chakkman]

One thing that is definitely better in Quake 1 is the soundtrack. But, I like the gameplay of Quake 2 better.

Shame that they made Quake 3 multiplayer only.  Would have loved to see a campaign for that. Even though we had a great time playing Q3 on LAN "parties", back in the days. If my dope distorted memories of that time don't fool me.

[revelator]

well atleast the idtech 3 engine was used for many great games  but yeah a single player story would have been nice.

hmm dunno about the gameplay being better but it was definatly more open world in Q2 where as Q1 mostly ran like a corridor shooter.  The nehahra mod sorta put a plug in that by having some huge outdooor maps atleast opposed to what we were used to most of the time.

in retrospect Q1 got popular because of its modding community not so much for its campaign.

Q2 also had a somewhat large modding community but by no means as large as that of Q1.

around Q3 it started going downhill in the modding community, there was still a few around who worked on it but it was mostly on the engine code, and only a few games or mods were made by the community.

if i had to guess i would say Q1 got popular by modders because it was easy to work with and did not require a large team to make a game with (you could pretty much do it by yourself).

atleast idtech 4 has had a good number of mods but as far as i know the dark mod is the only total conversion project and i guess you guys know better than anyone how much work had to be done before it got to this point 

 

[jaxa]

Got this in an email from GOG.

I think the remaster team will at least use NewDark as a starting point, but hopefully will also take a collaborative approach and help increment it to 1.29 for all versions of the game.

I was just reminded that 1.28 was "unofficial", which is probably why they advertise NewDark 1.27 here.

Edited July 17 by jaxa

[chakkman]

The preservation project and the remaster don't have anything to do with each other though, as far as I'm aware.

And, why GOG of all the games people asked for preservation chose one that is so well preserved by the community already will probably always remain a mystery to me.

Edited July 17 by chakkman

[jaxa]

4 hours ago, chakkman said:

The preservation project and the remaster don't have anything to do with each other though, as far as I'm aware.

And, why GOG of all the games people asked for preservation chose one that is so well preserved by the community already will probably always remain a mystery to me.

Here's one way in which they have something to do with each other: if the remaster is considered a stinkbomb, GOG is unlikely to pull the original version off the "shelf". Which has happened in the case of some remasters IIRC.

Obviously, the community is obsessed and the games are well preserved. I see this as another aspect of that. I may have even voted for Thief Gold (don't remember).

I think GOG has attempted to make bug fixes to games in the Preservation Program, but probably not to a great extent whatsoever if they can only afford a couple of programmers and often don't have the source code. In this case they will just defer to NewDark. I think not having to install NewDark is a potential benefit for GOG users, but it was probably already the case, idk.

[Arcturus]

GOG added weapon wheel mod:

There's Thief RTX remix (first attempts look bad):

Someone's working on VR support:

[chakkman]

The lighting in the RTX remix is beyond horrible. Already seen screenshots of it before, and thought the same. 

That weapon wheel is nice, but, rather a gimmick. I had no issues with weapon choosing. What would be very helpful would be a reworked inventory. It can get very messy in bigger missions.

Edited July 26 by chakkman

[revelator]

some older engines are just not a good fit for raytracing i reckon. even in quake we struggled with just doing old style real time ligting due to the massive ammounts of indirect lights tanking performance, it also looked dreadfull. darkplaces hacked around this by providing code and a set of scripts to place static light sources (rtlight files) and turned off the old ligting code when rtlight was enabled. this helped immensly as you can guess. if you want to know just how fugly it was just try enabling real time lighting without rtlight scripts and see what i mean. it can still calculate realtime lighting without the scripts (the old ligthing code is only disabled if it picks up rtlight scripts for the map) but due to the massive ammount of them it becomes a slideshow and looks like crap.

 

[Arcturus]

There's a bad looking normal map that doesn't fit the style of the original texture in one screenshot, textures with smooth specular reflections that look off in another. I'm sure you can make it look nice with enough work.

[Arcturus]

[jaxa]

Got another email from GOG, linking to this video on their secondary channel:

 

[thebigh]

That's encouraging. You can tell the GOG people understand what makes Thief special, which makes me confident that they'll be responsible with it.

[Arcturus]

[AluminumHaste]

On 7/7/2026 at 1:10 PM, chakkman said:

One thing that is definitely better in Quake 1 is the soundtrack. But, I like the gameplay of Quake 2 better.

Shame that they made Quake 3 multiplayer only.  Would have loved to see a campaign for that. Even though we had a great time playing Q3 on LAN "parties", back in the days. If my dope distorted memories of that time don't fool me.

Quake 1 has a sound track? You mean those noises and ambient sounds that Trent Reznor jizzed all over a microphone and called music? Yeah it can be weird and creepy like Quake 1 was back in the day.
Quake 2's Sonic Mayhem soundtrack is kickass, I remember burning that shit to CD for car rides with friends.
I absolutely agree that Quake 3 was fantastic and I really really wanted a Single player campaign. 

Quake 3 Arena lives on in Quake Live, we play every night come and join us in Clan Arena!!!

[jaxa]

Btw the National Recording Registry (Library of Congress) inducted Bobby Prince's Doom soundtrack this year.

https://www.engadget.com/2173357/the-original-doom-soundtrack-is-officially-in-the-library-of-congress/

https://newsroom.loc.gov/news/national-recording-registry-inducts-sounds-of-taylor-swift--beyonc---the-go-go-s--vince-gill--weezer/s/bc258688-e655-4ffb-9f91-f32b94956f36

[chakkman]

2 hours ago, AluminumHaste said:

Quake 1 has a sound track? You mean those noises and ambient sounds that Trent Reznor jizzed all over a microphone and called music? 

Yeah. Love it.

[revelator]

Nine inch nails ftw .

Quakes goto band