I should start out this post with a couple of corrections to yesterday’s post. The woman who hired me for this mission was called Viktoria and I’m going after a sword rather than a dagger owned by an eccentric noble called Constantine. The house is reputed to be something of a maze…
As ever the front entrance is guarded but there is a jauntily angled window at the side which I fire a rope arrow into.
This gets me in It’s more of a fun-house than a maze with strangely shaped rooms and corridors. There are a lot of rooms and a lot of guard. I start out with stealthy intentions, creeping into rooms and waiting for guards to go past.
As I explore, the rooms continue to get odder and odder, some are upside down, some sideways….
There is even a hedge tunnel I have to climb up to get to the top floor. All the time I’m on this top floor I can hear maniacal laughter in the background although I never find the owner of the laugh.
I do locate his sword. When Viktoria said it was on display, she wasn’t kidding.
A bit more hedge climbing and I climb out above the sword and jump out to grab it. I have to say that my attempts at stealth failed me completely on this level and I ended up hacking my way through all the guards. I gather that on expert level, I’d have to complete this entire mission without a single kill which would have been a real challenge. While I do like to crack on with the games in this blog as quick as possible so I can get through them quickly, I do feel that I’m missing out somewhat here and I’m going to purposely attempt to be more stealthy from here on out. Whether my willpower is up to this is questionable though as my natural tendency in these games is to kill everything that moves.
I can use the new sword as a weapon and it even seems a little more effective than the old one. I need to grab a set amount of loot to complete the mission and I’m a little short but some exploring on my way out gets me the gold in no time. Rather than mess about, I run as quick as I can straight out of the front door through the guards to escape and complete the mission. The way I played it this was a quick and straightforward mission and only took me about 30 minutes. The wacky level design was interesting but I don’t reckon that the engine was really up to doing it justice.
I’m sure there was supposed to be a cutscene at this point but if there was it glitched and I didn’t get to see it. I’ll head for youtube and see if I can find it on there before I go any further.
I had a glitch with one of the cut scenes on my play through the game this year but it wasn’t that one. You definitely should watch it on YouTube to get important plot info as it’s a bigger than average one. Every mission has a cutscene after it just so you know to look for them. You’ll definitely want to make sure you see the cutscene that plays after you finish “Return to the Cathedral” (you have a while before that one)….
The thing about Thief is it is meant to be played at a slow pace. It is nearly impossible to see everything when rushing through as the designers were clever about hiding secrets/locations/etc. For example, I doubt you saw the mini-village or giant room in the Sword. In Bonehoard did you find all the golden bones and drop them into the special sarcophagus for extra equipment? The richness of Thief is finding all of these “extras”, and on Expert some of these extras become required as objectives. It’s also fun to not simply be able to kill everyone and figure out other ways to deal with them. For example, did you know you can blackjack a burrick (the big lizards)? Your arsenal expands to the point that there are multiple ways to deal with people (or monsters/undead). Generally the way I play is to try to knock out/incapacitate every single enemy in the level that way I can run around and explore thoroughly (not that that’s a required way to play or anything and is nearly impossible in some missions).
You don’t have to start over to begin playing on Expert by the way, you can change difficulty at the start of each mission. As always I continue to really enjoy your thoughts on a series so beloved to me.
You are right about not finding any of that stuff. I did find a load of golden bones and was expecting them to be treasure but when I couldn’t seem to do anything with them I left them alone.
I’m not sure I like Thief enough to invest that sort of time in it but I’ll take your advice and take my time with the next level or two. Was there a hint somewhere about the bones? It wouldn’t have occured to me to even try anything like that. I didn’t know about being able to change difficulty level on the fly either. I’ll give it a go on expert next level also.
I think there is a hint at the sarcophagus you are supposed to dump the bones into.
I understand where you are coming from. I gave up on Thief the first time I tired it, because I found the undead/non-stealthy missions so hard to do before I learned how to play the game at the right pace and all the ways there are of dealing with the undead. When Thief 2 came out (which is on the surface much MUCH more stealth gameplay oriented than the first game) I liked it much more than the first game, but my appreciation for the original has increased over the years. There are ways to deal with those missions in stealthy way. Bonehoard isn’t a great example as once you get to all the catacombs it is often easier just to run from all the zombies, but there are still some areas in there where stealth makes things easier.
Anyway I look forward to reading more. (And I hope you found the cutscene you missed – it’s vital to knowing what you are doing for the next several missions.)