Unsolicited Advice

I was generally happy with Thief 3 , but there was just one thing that made me twitch. Whoever did the script and/or script editing for the first two games had an ear for language. Whoever did the third game did not. Garrett speaks modern English, with an American accent. Sensible, since the game was developed by an American studio that had limited funds for the voice acting. The other factions speak various other flavors of English, which diverge from standard AmE in various ways. The City Guard are mostly something that vaguely approximates standard BrE; the Keepers speak AmE or BrE which retains a few archaic features and a lot of formality. Both are distinct from Garrett, but nothing you wouldn't hear on television, and you'd have to write fairly badly in standard English in order to write noticeably badly in this. The Hammerites speak what is very solidly a dialect of English which retains the T-V distinction -- for those of you who don't absorb languages at random...

One of the other things I always liked about Thief  is that there's surprisingly little separation between the story and the gameplay. In a lot of games, especially FPS-style games, the first-person HUD gets in the way of elaborate cutscenes. It's a very limited way to frame a scene, and while that's good for play, it's bad, or at least inconvenient, for art. Traditionally, plot is seen as an interruption to action gameplay and is confined to specifically-defined chunks of story, usually stuck between levels as a way to get the player from one place to the next. Thief  does use third-person cinematics between maps, but there's at least an equal chunk of the plot contained within the play space. The pace of gameplay is fluid, often slow, and huge amounts of exposition are given via documents and other media Garrett finds in the places he's bent on robbing. By pausing before you wonk people over the head, you can overhear conversations that range from important ...

HAHAHAHA. I have also got Moggie going through LPArchive.org  now, specifically the Let's Play entries for the Thief   series of games. I first ran into Thief: The Dark Project  while I was in college. I had a roommate who appeared to have survived to college age either by accident or manipulation -- she committed a lot of grievous roommate sins, like never cleaning anything, ever, and as far as I could tell, only leaving the tiny shared room for food and restroom breaks. One of these was playing computer games when I was trying to sleep and outright refusing  to use headphones. Which was especially puzzling, because one of them was Thief , whose engine uses stereolocation to tell you where the guards are walking, which should work even better when you're not using crap PC speakers. Still, at least I was being kept awake by a very pretty game. Thief: The Dark Project  (and the sequel, Thief: The Metal Age ) was the brainchild of Looking Glass Studios, also...