Mission #5: The Sword

            Because games allow players to explore virtual environments, they can convey information about characters by methods through which other media cannot. Games do not just tell the audience about a character; they can let the audience discover who a character is, even when the audience may never read or hear a word. Such an example of game’s unique characterization process is in “The Sword”, the mission in the original Thief in which players learn of Lord Constantine, a central character of Thief.

            Garrett has been recruited by a woman named Victoria to steal a valuable sword from the nobleman Lord Constantine. None of Garrett’s contacts know much about Constantine, other than the fact that he’s a new arrival in town and a recluse. The player will learn plenty about Constantine as they navigate the maze-like, surreal and oftentimes bizarre corridors of his manor.

            Constantine’s manor starts out simple enough. The player expects this is just another “Bafford” mission. Break into a manor house, steal a nobleman’s priceless trinket, leave quietly… etc., etc. But as soon as the player steps into Constantine’s manor, they know that this won’t be just another mansion to rob. From the first floor, the player sees that Constantine has a unique taste in art. A gigantic torch sits in the middle of his entry room, carvings of hedonistic partying line the bottom of his walls, and the first floor opens up, without doors, directly into a huge garden area.

            Then there’s the second floor. The player knows something’s up when they notice they’re walking on the ceiling—or, at least, what looks like the ceiling. The second floor is flipped like a mirror. And the master bedroom is fixed up like the garden outside—it might as well be outside, with all the plants and greenery in it. One door opens up to nothing but a large carving of a face. Other large carvings of strange looking faces shoot small orbs of energy (likely magical) at Garrett if he crosses ‘trip wires’ (or, glyph symbols on the wall). Another room has a raging fire; another, a swarm of hornets; one room has a door, in the floor, that would drop one onto the dining room table below.

            But it gets weirder. Leaving the second floor the player can enter a large, maze-like nature area, with odd giggling and growling coming from the distance. A certain waterway will lead the player up into the drain of a gigantic sink, which is part of a gigantic room, filled with gigantic furniture. Appropriately, there’s a proportionally-sized mouse trap; a skeleton indicates that some other poor human already triggered it. There’s also an area that appears to be floating in space, hallways that twist around from top to bottom…and so on.

The sword itself that Garrett has been tasked to steal is floating in the air above a strange structure, a creepy humming noise emitting from it. Once Garrett grabs it, he says what every player is likely thinking: “Time to take my new sword and get out of this crazy place.”

So Constantine is a strange guy. There’s more to him than just being a recluse. The large garden and nature areas, the surreal architecture, and the clear use of magic or some equivalent illusion all clearly indicate Constantine is a nobleman with strange powers and tastes. And the player learned about him without reading any text or watching any film. All they did was explore the man’s home. In real life, exploring someone’s home would perhaps be the best way to learn of their character, and games allow audience to experience this. “The Sword” is great not just because of its design as a game level, but also because it is a memorable portrait of an eccentric character.

Mission # 8: Undercover

            After Garrett steals Constantine's sword, he's taken by Victoria to meet her client. Her client, as it turns out, is Lord Constantine himself, who recruited Garrett to steal his own sword, as a test. The test was to see if Garrett could do Constantine's real job: steal a gemstone known as "the Eye." The gemstone lies within a long-abandoned and very haunted Hammerite Cathedral in an area of the City known as the "walled-off section." It's an area of the City that was walled off after a catastrophe befell it. Whatever the catastrophe was has become a part of the City's urban mythology; all that matters now is that no one goes to the walled-off section, and it's haunted. This is the lead-in for the mission after "The Sword" called "The Haunted Cathedral."

           

            "The Haunted Cathedral" is a great mission, though I don't cover it here. Garrett makes his way through the walled-off section's ruins to the haunted cathedral, only to discover that it's been sealed off by four talismans. The Keepers did this to keep a great evil force held within. Garrett, though, only cares about nabbing the gemstone; so it's off to find the four talismans! The final talisman, the talisman of air, is locked away in a Hammer Temple (a non-haunted one). This is the basis for the mission I'm covering here: "Undercover."

            The missions to obtain the Four Talismans are all brilliant, but “Undercover” has a neat twist. The Hammerite Temple Garrett must infiltrate is too well-guarded and well-lit for the standard thieving approach. So Garrett goes in, undercover, as a Hammerite squire. (He has the underworld connections to get him both the necessary garb and credentials.) This allows the players to walk about freely, but there are forbidden areas, and once the player decides to start nabbing loot it won’t be long before the real Hammerites discover that the newcomer is causing trouble.

            The item Garrett’s after here is the “Talisman of Air.” To get it, Garrett must press five switches, hidden through the Hammer Temple, within five minutes. (The player learns of this from reading a scroll describing the process.) Once you start pressing switches and running around to hit all of them, the Hammers are likely to smell something fishy. So, as soon as Garrett hits the first switch, it’s only a matter of time before Hammerites become alert and start chasing him down.

            It’s a fun process, finding the switches, planning out a path, hitting them all in tandem, and claiming the Talisman of Air. Everything in this ‘run’ must be planned ahead of time. I plan out my exact route each playthrough before executing this portion.

            “Undercover” gives the player a different approach to a mission as they do not need to sneak, and the goal is to plan out the little ‘running game’ described above. It’s a slight change of pace and makes for a very well done mission.

Mission #9: Return to the Cathedral

            “Return to the Cathedral” is the penultimate mission in Thief: The Dark Project and one of the game’s best. It’s a large mission with several different buildings to explore and smacks of open-world role-playing game design. There are even several fetch quests that pop up in the second part of the mission—a ‘love or hate it’ facet of open-world RPGs. The mission’s first part, tightly cloistered, is like the intro portion of an open-world game. The mission is a triumph of fundamentally sound design.

            Garrett’s come back to the haunted Hammerite cathedral, and with the Four Talismans, he can unlock the entrance. The ominous whispering of the Eye greets the player as they first walk into the cathedral. The first part, the main cathedral building, or sanctuary, is relatively small. The Eye sits atop the altar at the end of the sanctuary. Zombies, and a new AI, “Hammer Haunts”, or restless, undead Hammerites more goulish and cunning than a typical zombie, walk the halls. But there aren’t many of them, and the task is to grab the Eye and get out. This first part, then, is very small, direct, and simple. The level will open up much wider in its second part, though.

            Once Garrett nabs the eye, the ‘spirits become restless’—or, more zombies and haunts appear, and a few ghosts start roaming around. But it’s a short distance to the front doors, and then the player should be able to escape. Easy? Well, it could’ve been. But the front doors are locked tight. The Eye sealed them again (it’s a very powerful gemstone). The stone thought it would be too easy for Garett to just stroll back out the front door. Indeed.

           So the player now heads out to the cloister area, at the back of the cathedral, in search of another way out. Here, they meet the ghost of the Hammerite ‘Brother Murus’. Brother Murus’ ghost is the ‘quest giver’, if I continue to use the open-world RPG simile for this mission. Murus gives Garrett task after task, all with the promise that Garrett’s reward will be a way out of the cathedral grounds. This is classic open-world RPG design. And the cloister area of this mission is very much like an open-world. There are five buildings: a living quarters, a workshop, an observatory, a library, and a bath. There’s also a graveyard, though it’s locked at first. Murus’ tasklist will have the player explore all about these buildings and the greater cloister area.

            The first tasks involve giving Brother Murus a proper burial. His body is buried in the graveyard, true—but it wasn’t correctly blessed. Garret must gather items to do this. I referenced earlier that ‘fetch-quest’ stuff like this, whereby the player is given a list of explicit chores to go and do, is a love-it-or-hate-it gameplay design. I think it works well as a foundation to encourage the player to explore a given area. Here, searching and finding all the items Brother Murus’ needs gives the player license to explore the haunted cathedral grounds as they wish. I love it.

            After getting these items—a rosary, a holy symbol, a candle, and a prayer book—Murus has some other tasks for Garrett. He asks Garrett to find and bury the bodies of a couple of his colleagues, which are both back in the main cathedral building. Lastly, Murus asks Garrett to kill all of the Hammer haunts. This last request I don’t like—seeking out and killing the Hammer haunts breaks the immersion, because an important part of the horror atmosphere is that the haunts are tough, creepy, and to be avoided. Having to confront them, or kill them stealthily from behind, breaks that. This is also the only mission in the first two Thief games that requires the player to kill.

            Brother Murus rewards Garrett by giving him a key to the attic in the Cathedral. In this attic, Garrett finds a “sunburst” device—basically a huge land mine—that he can use to blow up the giant gateway into the cloister and escape the cathedral grounds.

            “Return to the Cathedral” is not only a great horror mission but a great open-world mission. Its tight beginning, ‘opened-up’ second section, and series of quests, combined with a thick horror atmosphere, make it a prime example of great game design.

'Thief I' in Review

-Thief I, in review

Below I include quotes from the Gamespot and IGN reviews of Thief: The Dark Project. The segments I selected are the parts that echo moreso the points I’ve made in this project.

-from the Gamespot review, by Greg Kasavin

“But if it looks good, Thief sounds incredible. Because you're always trying to stay silent, you'll find yourself cringing at just how conspicuously audible your footsteps are. At the same time, you'll smile from the shadows as you hear some lonely guard shuffling nearer as he hums some tune or mutters to himself. Each floor surface makes a different noise as you walk upon it, and all of your actions, from using lockpicks to quaffing healing potions, are complemented by vivid sound effects. Since listening to the environment is so important, and because the game sounds so good, you'll find yourself turning the volume much higher than you're used to while playing Thief.

First-rate voice acting brings the game to life. The cynical Garrett is never at a loss for smart remarks, but he knows to keep his mouth shut most of the time so that he can listen to guards bantering, religious fanatics whistling hymns, and more. Of further note, Garrett's subhuman foes, including all manner of undead and man-beast hybrids, sound positively terrifying. Thief also takes full advantage of 3D positional audio if you have the right hardware, which makes the game even more dramatic. There's no music during the missions themselves, but the pounding industrial soundtrack during the beautiful, stylized animated cutscenes perfectly suits the game's dark magic-and-machinery setting.”

[…]

“You'll guide Thief's charismatic protagonist through a dozen missions, over the course of which a serious, surprising story will develop. Although there aren't many missions, most of them are huge, and more rewarding at higher difficulty levels because you'll have many more objectives to accomplish. There's further cause to want to try a mission more than once if only because the nature of the game is such that you can accomplish your task in many different ways, but in the end, you'll still wish the game was longer. You'll have a few complaints with Thief - the game isn't perfectly stable, and sometimes your foes won't act as intelligently as you'll expect them to. But between its novel premise, its artistic production, and its superb design and implementation, you'll find that those rare concerns fade from sight even faster than Garrett.”

-from the IGN review, by Trent C. Ward

"For years now, long before everyone else realized that people were eventually going to get tired of running around and killing monsters over and over, Looking Glass has been looking for new ways to take the first person shooter genre forward. In Ultima Underworld, a game that foreshadowed titles like Trespasser, Arena and Everquest , the company took a remarkably smooth 3D fighting engine and added complex (for the time) elements of conversation trees and magic. In System Shock, the company once again created a first person engine designed to add an element of realism to the era's severely limited shooters. The end result was phenomenal and is widely recognized as one of the best games of its time. Now the company finally has the tools and the technology to realize one of its long-term development dreams. In Thief: The Dark Project, you get a glimpse of what the future of gaming is really all about ¿ the exploration and manipulation of a believable virtual world."

[…]

"Other than some pretty serious video card compatibility problems (three out of the four machines we had in the office would never run the game no matter which patches we downloaded) Thief is nearly flawless in its execution. The game's AI, its brilliant look and feel, and its challenging levels all work together to make a play experience that every thinking gamer will enjoy."

Subtle Darkness

            Not everything’s as it seems in Thief.

            This is especially the case in Thief: The Dark Project. From the very beginnings of the game at Bafford’s manor, I knew there was more to this game’s story than being a thief. At face value, you’re just a thief going to steal some loot. But what a dark world! The Keepers lurk somewhere in the background; hints of ancient magics, past darkness, and the Pagans show in art and readables; AI converse about the “walled-off section of the City”; and so forth. Together it all works subtly to remind you, the player, that you are moving about in a world with its own history and culture. 

            There’s a sense of unease under everything. It seeps up through the cobblestones of the City streets and through the heavy stone of the nobility’s manors. It can’t be escaped. The technology of the City and the riches of its upper crust can’t contain the past which seeps through the darkness.

            In Thief II, this is not so much the case, though darkness can occasionally be seen with such examples as the catacombs in Eavesdropping, the mage’s home in Life of the Party, and the haunted library in Casing the Joint. But the Mechanist’s twisted technology takes the show.

            Thief III’s story, like the original Thief game's, is ultimately about an ancient evil lurching forth from the past. But even when the story does not explicitly thrust some long dormant monster into the modernized world of the City, there is the sense that something is wrong. There is some evil creeping about everywhere, at any point during most of the first and third Thief games.

Indeed, a major theme in the Thief games is that there is stuff going on in the background. You think this is just about a thief stealing loot? There are greater forces at work here. And poor Garrett always, unwittingly, gets caught up in them.

Everyone's Bad in the City, but Garrett Does Some Good

            There is a small point in irony to be made with the Thief story. Garrett, a thief, is bad. He’s an outlaw whom the City Watch will always chase down on sight. Yet, ironically, he seems to be the only figure in the City who does some good.

            First, Garrett doesn’t mess with anyone. He intentionally keeps a low profile. He doesn’t want anyone to know he’s been in their house, except for the fact of their missing valuables—he’s not out to make a mess or murder people.

            The Hammerites, the Pagans, the Mechanists, and the City Watch all have corruption and evil in their midst. They’ve all done some bad things. So what is Garrett compared to them? He may be the titular Thief, but he’s also the only thing close to a hero the seedy, corrupt City has. He’s like a Keeper. He wants to go unnoticed. He isn’t committed to any group. Detachment is key for the Keepers. Garrett thought he was leaving the Keepers and going his own way, and indeed he did for the most part, but he’s more like one of them than he realizes.

            Whenever Garrett does save the City, which he does in each Thief game, he never does it out of his own good will. He’s always drawn into it through his personal, selfish thieving enterprise. But he does save the City, nonetheless, and it’s the major groups—the supposed ‘law and order’ of this world—that seem time and again to be the ones trying to destroy it.

Technology vs. Magic

          “Hammer, anvil, forge and fire, chase away the hoofed liar; Roof and doorway, block and beam, keep the Trickster from our dreams.”

            So murmurs any given Hammerite guard as they patrol, Garrett listening from the shadows as he sneaks around. The Hammerites are more aware—indeed, it is central to their religious zeal—of what technology means for humanity than anyone else in the City.

            The Thief games hint at a dark past for humanity, when people ran around wild and scared, in the woods, worshipping strange, powerful, and evil gods, and fleeing from monsters. This past bleeds through in the game’s undead and monsters. In the same world as sword-toting guards there are giant spiders, lizard and bug beasts, zombies and ghosts. What do these things harken back to?

            Lord Constantine, or the Trickster, tried to bring back the dark past with his Dark Project. He wanted to blot out the light, have the world ruled by monsters again, and then have the people come to him and worship him as their god. In contrast, Thief II’s Mechanists wanted to bring even more technology to the City, and held an even more zealous hatred of the Pagans and of nature than did the Hammerites.

            Throughout the Thief games there is this dichotomy between the past, nature, and magic, on one side, and the future, civilization, and technology, on the other. It borrows, of course, much from our own world’s history, especially that of Western civilization.

“Vigilance is our shield, which protects us from our squalid past; Knowledge is our weapon, with which we carve a path unto an enlightened future.” 
This also Hammerite guards may say. They operate on a fear of regression into a primeval past. The pagans? They have no conception of progress or time, or at least they desire no progress and want time to stand still. Their world is one only of dances and monsters and darkness, and central within their world is awe shown towards arcane magic.