Best of Stealth Games Got New Campaign for 25th Birthday

The day before yesterday, the iconic stealth game Thief: The Dark Project celebrated its 25th birthday. To mark the occasion, a group of fans gathered under the banner of Feuillade Industries released the impressive project called The Black Parade.

Related:Tomb Raider, Deus Ex and Thief Return to Crystal Dynamics and Eidos Montreal

The project serves as an unofficial expansion. It offers an extensive campaign with ten great missions. This time the main character is not Garrett. Here we play a new thief named Hume. After many years of exile, he returns to the City to resume his criminal career.

1. The Black Parade - download

The mod introduces a number of gameplay changes, giving it a fresher feel.

1. Hume did not receive training from the Brotherhood of Guardians and for this reason his skills are clearly inferior to Garrett's. As a result, the AI can spot us more easily, even when we are hiding in the shadows.
2. Water arrows can now be used to expand moss patches.
3. On higher difficulty levels, servant characters will re-light extinguished torches and remove moss from the floor.
4. Zombies now smash wooden doors instead of simply opening them.
5. Electric lanterns carried by guards can be turned off.
6. Several guards in the campaign are equipped with heavy armor and helmets, so they can't be easily stunned.

The mod is wonderfully crafted. The maps are stunning both in terms of gameplay and visuals, far surpassing what 1998's Thief offered. Also impressive is how cleverly the authors used game elements where circumventing limits was not possible. For example, the engine stores a limited number of animations. Therefore, the horse's movements were developed by combining a number of spiders into a new skeleton. It sounds terrible, but works surprisingly well.

I myself spent an extended part of the past weekend playing The Black Parade and I'm delighted. Despite being 25 years old the first two installments of Thief remain an unmatched benchmark for stealth games, and thanks to fans, both games are still alive and thriving.

Technical issues

The mod is designed for Thief Gold. For this you must have the latest version of NewDark - the easiest way is to simply install TFix (it includes NewDark, as well as many other improvements). Do this even if you have the GOG.com version of the game, because admittedly it has TFix, but in an outdated version. On the other hand, the edition from Steam doesn't have any fan-made improvements, so in its case you have to install TFix all the more.

Then, in the folder with the game, create some new folder for missions (e.g. "missions") and copy there the The Black Parade archive (do not extract it) there. Run !FMselect.exe, point the program to the "missions" folder and the mod file.

Thief

February 25, 2014

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