Thief: Deadly Shadows

[KLSymph]

The Thief series are my favorite games, and I've just finished Thief: Deadly Shadows, the third and last of that venerable line that established stealth as a powerful mechanic in games today. My impression: not as good as the rest.

Thief is a game where you, Garrett the thief extraordinare, go around robbing people blind while people you don't like drag you into problems that you don't want, but have to deal with.  Deadly Shadows, made by Ion Storm Austin of Deus Ex: Invisible War fame, is another game on that premise.  To be honest, the game is fairly good.  It delivers the Thief experience, and I can't fault it for that.

No, I can fault it for a bunch of other things.

In previous games, missions (i.e. levels) were sprawling affairs.  Huge.  When the setting was "The City", you had the impression you were really in a grand, dark city.  In this game, despite the fact that the City was the hub between every mission and exploration of it was hyped as a crowning achievement for Deadly Shadows, the entire five-or-six map area (with load zones in between), can't match the space of a single City level (no load zones) in Thief II.  And by "can't match the space" I mean "can't match half the space" (or a third, probably).  In addition to a scale that is simply far smaller and more cramped than previous games, Deadly Shadows notably lacked what I will describe as "awe-inspiring height". In a series where the rooftops are known as the Thieves' Highway, where a tree in the pagan world can be as tall as a skyscraper, where a grand church actually was a skyscraper, Deadly Shadow's squat little two-story buildings don't satisfy.  Only the Keeper Libraries and the Shalebridge Cradle had anything resembling impressive height.  Not even the Clocktower (which is an entirely vertical level) has it except for one area you had to climb down.

Searching out a fence for your illicit goods is not an aspect of a thief's job I care to reenact frequently.  Neither is finding an arms dealer.  Especially when each elemental arrow is sold at one arms dealer in the entire load-zone ridden City.

Three "special" unspecified loot that you must discover in the mission but can't leave without is a heavy-handed, unintuitive concept.

Loot glint is used to make loot stand out from similar-looking regular objects.  This execution replaces making loot look different from similar-looking regular objects.  Wait, what?  This problem is worsened in the case of loot that look the same as regular objects and should glint, but don't.  Because they hate you.  That was a fun extra fifteen minutes of Pagan Sanctuary, as you might imagine.

Climbing gloves suck.  The game space is not designed for their clever use.  Replacing rope arrows with them is almost insulting, but the game isn't any more designed for the rope arrows.  The inability to jump away from a wall you're climbing defies reason.

Floor noises have been deemphasized.  Moss arrows are now even more useless.

Body awareness, meaning the body's necessary turn and shift before you can move in a new direction, is not a bad idea.  The game's magical ability to have the body fall off small edges or get stuck in cracks because of those body movements, in ways that defy common sense, is a horrible idea.  Narrow ledges and unevenly spaced boards are not your friends.  Be warned you can't jump out of being stuck between two boards (?!).

The various grenade-type bombs and holy water are lobbed underhand like Garrett is tossing a softball to his girlfriend, rather than what I want him to do: hurl that thing in front of that running zombie before it tears off his face.  Sure, he wasn't much of an arm in the previous games, despite being able to throw iron boilers the size of TVs across the room with no trouble, but at least he didn't pause.  Or strike low intervening walls to his left.

All enemies are humanoid.  Exotic non-humanoid enemies like burricks and spiders are all gone.  Humanoid enemies act predictably and escaping them, or even fighting them, is generally trivial even before you find out about the bug that lets you crouch and escape all their hits (for only some of them, thank goodness).

The classical undead lost their most defining sounds. Zombies: the angry moans when they find you and all the louder rasps. Hammer haunts: the whispers of "flames around you burning your flesh" and "JOIN US! JOIN US NOW!".  Except for the new Puppet undead, all undead are no longer even unpleasant.

While we're on the issue of sound, the bosses of the first two games had excellent dialogue that I would listen to and think, "I wish I could write dialogue like that."  The boss for this one, uh, no.

While we're on the issue of this boss, the final stage was way too easy.  I had a harder time remembering where to put the artifacts than avoiding the final boss while figuring it out and doing it.  And when the boss did find me, it couldn't even kill me before I went around a corner and came back from another entrance to the docks.  Are you kidding me?

There are plenty of other gripes I can make, but I'll leave this here, and go back to playing the old Thief games.  Maybe Deadly Shadows fan missions, some day.

[Dexie Oblivion]

.....

Moss arrows? O_o

[KLSymph]

Yes, moss arrows.  In Thief, there are four elemental arrows, basically arrows tipped with elemental crystals: water, fire, gas (air), and moss (earth).  When these hit something, the crystals break and splatter their contents.  Water arrows douse torches and clean up bloodstains.  Fire arrows explode for damage.  Gas arrows release knockout gas.  Moss arrows release patches of moss.  You'll notice that one of these things sounds neither awesome nor utilitarian.

The idea is that patches of ground with a thin layer of moss over them are completely quiet to walk over.  Setting aside the fact that this idea is stupid, Deadly Shadows doesn't have as much noisy terrain (marble tile and metal walkway) as previous games and already give you two other options for silent movement (crouched walking and creeping, neither of expends resources).

You could, if you want, shoot moss arrows at people's faces to choke them.  This sounds a lot more interesting than it is in practice, and it leaves unsightly moss patches all over the place.  Since all it does is stun a target for a bit, you're usually better off with a flashbomb or an oil flask, since you can use those while running.  I guess you can stun someone and then get into position for clubbing him, but I can't think of a situation where you couldn't do it with a little extra skill and without the moss.

And you can shoot pagan cornerstones to raise faction standing.  Which is... whatever.

[Dracos]

Wow, that sounds phenomenially mediocre.

Dracos

[KLSymph]

It also has, to my recollection, a Start-to-Crate time of practically nothing.