Thief: The Black Parade

[Lander]

Thief: The Black Parade is a high-profile megamod for Looking Glass' seminal sneak-em-up Thief: The Dark Project.
(a.k.a. Original Thief, Thief: Gold, or The One With All The Monster Levels.)



It's been in development for about 7ish years by a team of veteran Thief modders, and finally released a few weeks ago.

Release Trailer

I've been slowly playing through it, and as a staunch fan of Thief 1 (and 2, and 3's good bits), can say it's a tour de force of classic Thief design. The missions are massive, varied, staggeringly detailed, and packed with all the atmosphere and little touches of polish you'd expect from a golden age mainline entry, but bigger and more on account of running on modern hardware.



The original games took a little while to work up to the really killer missions; The Sword, Song of the Caverns, First City Bank and Trust, The Cradle, etc. Here, it's pedal to metal from moment one; a sprawling, winding city district to navigate through en route to an old contact, complete with rich mansions, poor tenements, guardhouses and gang lairs to pick through.



I'm playing on Normal for the sake of replay value, and being pretty meticulous about it, but still routinely leaving stages with thousands in gold still unpilfered. We're talking entire well-realized sub-areas that are both optional and missable; I'm pretty sure I walked past a whole theater during mission 2, and still spent a solid hour exploring before making good my escape.

It even has a full suite of voiced and animated mission briefings styled after the original games. Rather than try to ape Stephen Russell's iconic Garrett performance, it's framed as a prequel with the player cast as Hume: a decidedly less scrupulous ex-con with no ties to the Keepers, fresh off a lengthy prison term, and looking to get back in the game. He's pretty good; rougher edged and less charismatic, but on-theme and convincing, much like the art and sound design.

So, if you like really good stealth games and this wasn't on your radar already, it should be! All you need is a copy of Thief and the TFix Lite patch (or regular TFix, with the default mods dummied out in the CFG), and you're good to go.

If you want to see more, Mandalore put out a highlight video that sells it well without going too heavy on spoilers.

[Sima Tuna]

I love stealth games. I was tempted to make a big stealth thread. Maybe I'll do it later. I've been watching a lot of videos of Thief lately. Black Parade is looking really good.

Shame that stealth as a genre is basically dead, outside of the odd indie or fan/community project.

[Lander]

Yeah, it's a good genre, but oh so difficult to get right. Mostly consigned to the bottom of the Play It Your Way pile underneath the Talk It Out and Go Loud options for big games these days. Weaving together the necessary tension, intrigue, and player freedom is something of a lost art.

You can almost chart its fall via the Thief series, with the early proto-imsim stuff being golden age, Thi3f getting the consolization treatment for greater appeal (and oh so much added jank), and Thi4f scrubbing it clean of interesting elements to really put the PS360-era hat on things.

I guess Metal Gear kept trucking in the meantime, but that series' trajectory is a study in and of itself

And then there's Dark Mod, which might be the best use of the Doom 3 engine around, and has a few really cracking campaigns, but finding them requires digging through a lot of rubbish ones that don't understand the design language.

[Sima Tuna]

Yeah, it's a good genre, but oh so difficult to get right. Mostly consigned to the bottom of the Play It Your Way pile underneath the Talk It Out and Go Loud options for big games these days. Weaving together the necessary tension, intrigue, and player freedom is something of a lost art.

You can almost chart its fall via the Thief series, with the early proto-imsim stuff being golden age, Thi3f getting the consolization treatment for greater appeal (and oh so much added jank), and Thi4f scrubbing it clean of interesting elements to really put the PS360-era hat on things.

I guess Metal Gear kept trucking in the meantime, but that series' trajectory is a study in and of itself

And then there's Dark Mod, which might be the best use of the Doom 3 engine around, and has a few really cracking campaigns, but finding them requires digging through a lot of rubbish ones that don't understand the design language.

My biggest problem with Stealth is when they go fully flaccid with it. I love Hitman: Blood Money, but most stealth games should not be that forgiving. Hitman is almost more of a puzzle murder sim than an actual stealth game, since being "undetected" includes allowing enemies to see you openly.

A PROPA SNEAKIN' TOIME is all about pure skill and demonstration of mastery. The feeling of going full Ghost through a level, never touching a soul and yet achieving all your objectives can't be matched by another genre. I guess maybe it's kinda like no-missing or no-damaging in a normal game? Except in stealth games, you don't even have to attack enemies.

I divide most stealth games into old vs new camp. Old camp are the early titles where freedom and remaining undetected were the primary pillars. Tenchu, Thief, maybe Hitman 2/Contracts (since disguises don't block detection in those games.) Then you have the new-school stealth, of games like Sniper Elite 4 (good game,) Dishonored, newer Hitman games, etc where being undetected is only mildly encouraged (your character is really good at killing people in combat) and you are outright pushed towards fully lethal play.

Like you said, MGS is somewhere in its own island. My big problem with MGS is all the boss fights that automatically break stealth and force you to remain seen for the duration of the fight. There are a ton of those, even in MGS games that I love. I feel like all the bosses would be better if stealth were an option. The best boss fights in MGS are the ones where you start in stealth and can remain there for the duration of the fight, like The End. MGSV had good moment-to-moment gameplay, but its level design was a big pile of wank and the story was an unfinished mess due to Konami canning Kojima.

There have been some good new stealth games that adhere more fully to the "stay undetected, dummy" ethos. Shadow Tactics: Blades of the Shogun punishes you harshly for being seen. Your characters are very deadly when attacking from stealth, but weak in a fair fight. Invisible Inc likewise dramatically increases the rate of alert generation (which spawns very difficult enemies) if you spend multiple turns in plain view. You CAN kill enemies without stealth in those games, but it's really hard. However, both of those games are strategy-stealth titles, rather than pure single-character stealth. I've heard good things about Filcher. Other than that, I truly don't know. I own basically every stealth game ever made since the ps2 era. : ... I think. Much as I enjoy every stealth game to some extent (because I love being a sneaky fuck,) the newer ones encourage the more forgiving style of play that I'm not as interested in personally.

[sunnshiner]

The original's only 69p on GOG at the minute if anyone's interested (2 is as well. 3's 79p)

[Marc]

I'd disagree with that take on Dishonored. The entire narrative almost pushes you down the stealth route, and you're certainly given the tools to complete entire swathes completely unseen.

I always meant to go back for lethal plats on both, bit the pile of shame prevents it.