Thief I Fan-Mission: "Calendra's Cistern", by "Purah" and "Team Calendra"

(Additional note on the authors: "Team Calendra" is the already-noted "Purah", who was the main designer of this mission, and also: "Totality", "Thumper", "Loanstar", and "Deep Qantas".)

            Some missions are great for their level design, others for their ingenuity, but then there are some that shine for their production value. For any fan content, production value can be measured by how much custom or new content there is, or by how much the author ‘remixes’ the default content of the original games.

Fan-mission author Purah is perhaps the best at this. Though the three categories listed in my opening sentence here are certainly not mutually exclusive—all Thief fan missions have some amount of great level design, ingenuity, or production value—Purah’s production outshines just about any other author’s, and this is especially the case given the time period he released his missions in. Released in August of 2000, “Calendra’s Cistern” had advanced features not discoverable in other FMs. For one, near the starting point is a shop the player can go into and buy items from. Programming this into the mission was a very tough feat: though all Thief missions open up with a “shop”, it’s just a menu that precedes the start of the actual mission. Here, the shop is a full-fledged building that is part of the actual mission.

            “Cistern” also has something no other Thief mission at this point had had—an AI partner for Garrett. Now, this AI partner does not accompany Garrett throughout the mission. She, a thief named Mercedes, just shows up and chats with Garrett a few times, and at the end of the mission walks with Garrett down a city street. The AI is fully-voiced, and not just with stock audio files from Thief’s original voice files, but by one of the mission’s developers.

            On the topic of audio, Purah does string together some interesting conversation and AI chatter from the game’s vanilla voice files. And there are some other new audio sounds as well. In all, the production value is very slick. Purah did have a team behind him to work on this mission, but in all it was just five authors, and Purah did most of the work (user “Totality” programmed the in-game shop, though).

            My focus here has been on new features and production, but I also want to note the level design itself. The level is divided into three main segments: the city area, which is where the player starts out in; the temple area, which is the ‘main building’ in the mission; and the underground areas, which include a sewer system, some ruins, and a large shrine. Throughout the mission each of these areas connects with the others, doing what so many Thief missions do so well: interweaving each area of the mission multiple times.