Whaat, I started replaying the game literally a few days ago, and now I see this on HN! The graphics and obviously didn't age well, although there are some higher res texture packs, which help when you play it in 4k. The Steam version worked for me almost out of the box, after patching it with TFix

The gameplay is okay-ish, probably due to nostalgia, but the AI is not the smartest, which creates a lot of fun situations - two guards trying to hit a giant spider inside a locked prison cell with swords, hitting only the cell door, instead of pressing a button next to them to open it, while calling the spider by name of the protagonist. But I remember that it was one of the scariest games for me as a kid, when it suddenly turned into dark fantasy horror from "just a thief game". I really had to push myself to walk past some of the undead and absolutely needed to make sure I cleaned the level thoroughly to be able to walk around comfortably.

The world building, sound design (especially the ambient sound loops) and the aesthetics/general visual style is something really unique that keeps drawing me to this game and it's really telling by how well I remember some of the places, despite having not played the game for 10 years or so.

Really a shame they gutted the franchise with the 2014 game and the very recent VR one.

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chroma_zone 24 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

TFix is very nice but unfortunately removes the software renderer described in this article. It's very difficult to get the original exe working on modern systems.

TFix also brings back the spatial audio / EAX support that was broken by Vista, which is a huge part of the experience IMO. Highly recommend installing and configuring OpenAL Soft for this game.

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tannhaeuser 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Thief pretty much defined the stealth game genre, at least it did for me, where it's game over basically if you try to go all out on enemies. I may be wrong but I don't believe cleaning a level of enemies is the way forward in later levels.

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pawelduda 2 hours ago | parent [-]

You can get rid of all human enemies by knocking them unconscious (I play expert mostly so killing is forbidden anyway). But right, if you go rambo even on lower difficulty levels, you'll most likely get overwhelmed

For the rest, you're limited by supplies you buy or find but I believe it's possible to clear mostly everything if you don't miss. I know because I found myself running around the entire map to find the remaining 1% of the loot goal

	▲	rimunroe 15 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		> You can get rid of all human enemies by knocking them unconscious (I play expert mostly so killing is forbidden anyway). But right, if you go rambo even on lower difficulty levels, you'll most likely get overwhelmed I can't recall if they're in Thief 1, but in Thief 2 at least there are guards with helmets which are immune to the blackjack, but afaik none of them are immune to gas arrows/mines.

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nylonstrung an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

Try the Dark Parade mod campaign. It's so much better than the vanilla missions. Some of the best modding I've ever seen

	▲	shahar2k an hour ago \| parent \| next [-]
		I found out about that one through mortismal games and loved it, i actually played through that campaign almost entirely on a stream deck! I don't know though if it would be as good to someone who's played it first before the main game(s)
	▲	pawelduda an hour ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		Looks like I'm in for a treat. Enjoying TDP quite a lot already :)
	▲	ronjouch 23 minutes ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		> the Dark Parade You probably meant The Black Parade (a mod for Thief I), not to be confused with The Dark Mod (a standalone thief-inspired game based on the Doom3 engine)