Dark download project thief

He made his living by stealing money from bags and was a pickpocket. Once he tried to get into the pocket of an unknown person, but he managed to grab him. It turned out that the wanderer was a member of the Secret Order of the Guardians and his name was Artemus. He saw in the boy a talented thief, since the standard mind would never have noticed the Guardian among the people..

The central character begins to learn skills and adopts the knowledge of the Guardians. After training, for his own reasons, he decided to leave the Order and become an independent thief.

The sound effect is so realistic that you not only can hear where the guards are but also know if they are moving, how fast they are moving, and so on. Even the difference between stone walls and open spaces can be heard.

The game environment is very dark. Although the manual suggests that you should play the game in a brightly lit room, the light source should be far enough away to not bring on any disturbing reflection on screen. The feeling of the game is destroyed if you have to turn up the brightness. After all, as a thief who hides in the shadows you cannot expect to see every loose brick in the wall!

Garrett's movement is controlled using the keyboard which can be remapped, while his view is controlled using the mouse. The ranges of movements include forward, backward, sidestep, leaning, turning, crouching, sneaking, swimming, and jumping. This sounds complicated at first, but the interface is very intuitive.

Handling the inventory and interacting with the environment are very easy. You have a relative large hotspot in the middle of your screen. If you can take or use anything, such as open a door or press a button, the object is automatically highlighted. So, searching for that special book that opens the secret passage behind the bookcase simply requires a quick look over the stack of books and the secret should reveal itself.

The most unique weaponry in this game is the bow, with which you use your arrows. As a thief, your archery skill is excellent. By holding the mouse button longer before the shot, you can concentrate and zoom in on your target.

Garrett is also equipped with special arrows to douse torches, to create a carpet of moss for silent stepping, or to knock out foes whom you cannot sneak behind their backs. There are 7 types of arrows broadhead, water, fire, moss, gas, rope, noisemaker available.

Garrett also carries a sword and a blackjack. The latter only allows an overhead swing to knock out the enemies. Lockpicks, bombs, and mines are other items in Garrett's arsenal. Thus, choosing the right weaponry is among the most interesting parts of this game. There are 12 missions in total. The Al of the NPCs. As a consequence, both Thief and its sequel, The Metal Age. The sophistication of the mods is a testament to how good and flexible the Dark Engine scripting system and object system were, not to mention the creativity of the fans.

But although Thief performed well and received some rapturous reviews, Randy claims that players didn't really warm to some of the horror and combat elements in the game: "They found it a little schizophrenic. Instead, the sequel opted for steam-powered robots that chugged up and down corridors with sad, cranky voices and could be incapacitated with a well-placed water arrow.

Fortunately, they've been dropped for the third game. The levels also became more domestic, with far more of the game based on creeping around large buildings and city streets. This enabled the team to concentrate more heavily on the stealth aspects of Thief and dull down the combat, which became very much a last resort for the player.

For Randy, the new focus of Thief II was very much a double-edged sword: "In some ways, the new angle was really successful, but in other ways we took it a bit too far and for many players the game lost some of its lustre, depth and unpredictability. Needless to say, fans of the series are hugely excited about the prospect of a third Thief episode.

Though Looking Glass Studios is long since defunct, several of the original team have been gathered together at Ion Storm, under the watchful eye of Warren 'Deus Ex' Spector.

The new game. Thief: Deadly Shadows , was put on the back burner while Deus Ex: Invisible War was completed, but the team at Ion Storm is now working day and night to get it finished. What we've seen so far is very promising, and suggests the developers have stuck to what made the original so great, focusing on creating an immersive, interactive world, with the focus on softly, softly, rather than wading in with a big sword. We're off to Ion Storm to play the game next issue, so stay tuned for a full preview soon.

But regardless of the success or otherwise of the new sequel, it's the original game that will always be remembered as the pioneering classic, the one that proved the viability of an entirely new style of gameplay.

In the words of designer Randy Smith: "It's really flattering when we see games that have stealth models that are clearly based on Thief. Many games have stealth elements these days, but Thief seems to have defined a point on one side of the spectrum. If you want to make a comprehensible game that's truly first and foremost about stealth, you need to look to Thief as your starting point.

Games developers are always banging on about realism. They're obsessed. Picture the scene: It's an average afternoon at Dennis Publishing. Everyone in the building is busy forging ahead with an exciting career in the cut-'n'-thrust, cut-'n'-paste world of magazine production. Every desk is an epicentre of efficiency, every floor a hive of industry. Except for the basement, that is, where the feckless slackers on PC ZONE are lounging in chairs, eating pies and having a new game demonstrated to them.

Yes, demonstrated. These days an increasing number of software houses aren't content to simply bung a pair of CDs in a jiffy bag and mail it our way. Oh no. They have to come in and personally test drive the game before our very eyes, as if we were children. Or simpletons. Or just too damn lazy to play it for ourselves. They know us too well. Occasionally the program under scrutiny is glaringly rubbish, and an embarrassing and awkward ceremony ensues wherein the games company PR droid asks uncomfortable W questions like What do w you think of it?

Better to bottle it up and let it all flow out in the finished V article. The droid can biro his lungs out on his own sodding time. Anyway, the only reason I a company sends in one of their glassy-eyed henchmen to demonstrate the code in the first place is so they can sit there and point out all the details. And this is where the obsession with realism starts to kick in.

Look at that flaming torch on the wall," they'll say, pointing at a clutch of pixels. Look, see - the shadows actually flicker. See how they flicker? Realism, realism, realism. Trouble is, while the visuals may be realistic, the action itself is absolute toon time; the authenticity fetish suddenly evaporates, and instead we're left with screenfuls of absurd gung-ho conflict, with severed arms and legs and heads and bullets and blood and laser rifles and hordes of slavering octopoid invaders from the planet Zaglon B.

But hey, those shadows flicker. What's this got to do with Thief? The makers of Thief are trying to create a 3D first-person perspective action-adventure game with realistic gameplay. Do they have a hope in hell? Probably not. But if anyone can pull it off, the guys from Looking Glass Studios can. While many developers are content to hurl the player into a 3D environment stuffed with bad guys, chainguns and ceaseless u mayhem, Looking Glass have always done things differently, concentrating instead on concentrating instead on storyline, atmospherics and pacing.

Thief carries on that tradition. The concept is simple: when all's said and done, it's a game in which you play a slippery little bastard. You take the role of Garrett, a seedy ne'er-do-well who makes a living offering his services in exchange for money. Our hero is well versed in the art of petty criminal I behaviour - sneaking around, skulking in the shadows, smacking people on the back of the head, pinching stuff then legging it - and therein lurks the bulk of the gameplay.

A typical level requires you to break into an opulent mansion and pilfer a precious artefact. When Leonard took over the position of lead programmer, he believed that the AI system was fixable; over several months, he learned that the pathfinding database—code that helps AI navigate a map—was unsalvageable. He completed the design—but not implementation—of a new system by November , using an estimated one-fifth of the original code. Several features were removed during development, among them multiplayer support, a complex inventory interface, and branching mission structures.

Leonard said they 'focused in on creating a single-player, linear, mission-based game centered exclusively around stealth. Several features have been brainstormed and rejected, including 'Spider-Man-esque' ability to climb on walls and ceilings and the shrinking and invisibility potions. These problems resulted in what Leonard later described as 'a game [that] could not be called fun. Work on the AI did not resume until March , and after 12 more weeks of constant work, it was ready for what Leonard called, 'real testing'.

Three months before the game's scheduled ship date, most problems had been resolved. The team began to believe, as Leonard described, that Thief 'did not stink, [and] might actually be fun. According to Leonard, 'A new energy revitalized the team. Long hours driven by passion and measured confidence marked the closing months of the project.

The design of Thief focused on stealth and evasion from a first-person perspective. Leonard said this idea challenged the standard first-person shooter concept: 'It is a game style that many observers were concerned might not appeal to players [ He explained: '[We try to] provide a range of player capability in [a] world [where] the player can choose their own goals, and their own approaches to an obstacle[ Thief was designed to be largely unscripted; events, instead of being pre-defined by designers, occur naturally.

The intent was to further increase the amount of 'player interaction and improvisation' over their previous games. Leonard later demonstrated that first-person shooters, like Half-Life , often utilize 'look and listen' AI systems, wherein NPCs become aggressive when the player is seen or heard. He explained that the Thief system defined a broader range of 'internal states' a NPC could feel, such as suspicion.

For example, a NPC who heard a suspicious noise would investigate rather than become immediately hostile. Designer Randy Smith said: 'In Thief the safe boundary is often between light and shadow [ He explained that players felt unsafe even when hidden, but learned to judge their level of safety as they improved.

The game's missions were designed to suit the story, rather than the story to fit the missions. This gave the game a high degree of replayability at a minimum development cost'. Writer and voice actress Terri Brosius said: 'We took pains to make sure all the missions could be won without killing any humans'.

Project director Greg LoPiccolo wanted Thief' s audio to both enrich the environment and enhance gameplay, and the game's design necessitated an advanced sound system.

The designers created a 'room database' for every mission; these provided a realistic representation of sound wave propagation. It was used to give the player aural clues about the NPCs' locations and internal states; to enhance this, vocals were recorded for NPCs.