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paweldudatoday at 4:28 PM3 repliesview on HN

Whaat, I started replaying the game literally a few days ago, and now I see this on HN! The graphics and obviously didn't age well, although there are some higher res texture packs, which help when you play it in 4k. The Steam version worked for me almost out of the box, after patching it with TFix

The gameplay is okay-ish, probably due to nostalgia, but the AI is not the smartest, which creates a lot of fun situations - two guards trying to hit a giant spider inside a locked prison cell with swords, hitting only the cell door, instead of pressing a button next to them to open it, while calling the spider by name of the protagonist. But I remember that it was one of the scariest games for me as a kid, when it suddenly turned into dark fantasy horror from "just a thief game". I really had to push myself to walk past some of the undead and absolutely needed to make sure I cleaned the level thoroughly to be able to walk around comfortably.

The world building, sound design (especially the ambient sound loops) and the aesthetics/general visual style is something really unique that keeps drawing me to this game and it's really telling by how well I remember some of the places, despite having not played the game for 10 years or so.

Really a shame they gutted the franchise with the 2014 game and the very recent VR one.


Replies

tannhaeusertoday at 4:57 PM

Thief pretty much defined the stealth game genre, at least it did for me, where it's game over basically if you try to go all out on enemies. I may be wrong but I don't believe cleaning a level of enemies is the way forward in later levels.

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chroma_zonetoday at 6:41 PM

TFix is very nice but unfortunately removes the software renderer described in this article. It's very difficult to get the original exe working on modern systems.

TFix also brings back the spatial audio / EAX support that was broken by Vista, which is a huge part of the experience IMO. Highly recommend installing and configuring OpenAL Soft for this game.

nylonstrungtoday at 5:53 PM

Try the Dark Parade mod campaign. It's so much better than the vanilla missions. Some of the best modding I've ever seen

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