nickie on 3/1/2017 at 19:50

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I've recently discovered that the house spiders I've been turning my nose up at are actually great for killing the spiders I really don't like. I'm much more careful with my hooverthing now.

My apologies for lack of response and updating of OP but I've been away quite a lot over the last few weeks. I will get my act together soon. In the meantime, thanks to The Dark One for keeping up with the reviews - it's very much appreciated.

GUFF on 5/1/2017 at 13:16

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There are a little over 100 missions for TDM right now and quite a lot of them are short 20-40 minute deals, although a lot of those especially in recent years have ended up being pretty high quality. You can easily catch up or just hop in and play some of the greatest ones. Not many large campaigns or huge 4+ hour missions to be had. Even some of the greatest ones like Requiem, House of Locked Secrets, William Steele series, Penny Dreadful series, Thomas Porter, Ulysses and lots of others are 1-2 hours length max.

I say you shouldn't let the "off-branded generic" aspect of TDM bother you since a lot of Dark engine Thief missions are basically "Garrett's non-sequitur adventures" whereas these as "generic thief man or not-Garrett-with-a-name" although most of the better written ones don't play your character up as some kind of master of thievery at all. You can easily hop right in and enjoy it because it's familiar enough. There's a small learning curve of the mechanics because it actually is harder than Dark engine games unless you turn the AI difficulties down, but there's also some novel aspects like having a togglable lantern as standard equipment in most missions, limited amount of item physics manipulation, etc. You're missing out on a lot of good content.

I guess what would help a lot of people who haven't tried Dark Mod for whatever reason yet is probably a thread with recommendations of what people think are the greatest missions and/or best beginner missions. The Dark One is basically just trying a bunch of random missions out to review them, not really reviewing the best stuff but the average quality of Dark Mod missions IS better than Thief1/G/2 missions because they have a lot of community collusion to help out newer authors. Bikerdude does a lot of that kind of work it seems, with helping optimize and add detailing. There aren't very many newer (as in last few years) missions that are of low quality at all and few that you'll get completely stumped on what to do if you're paying attention, either. It's pretty nice.

GUFF on 6/1/2017 at 05:20

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A Keeper of the Prophecies

A Keeper of the Prophecies is a campaign for Thief 2, by frobber, released in 2005.

The setting is a period of time in between Thief 1 and 2. You open by being told that your new mechanical eye is being delivered to you tonight, and shortly after the first mission starts you find a murder happened outside of Garrett's apartment of the person carrying the eye. So obviously, you have to go retrieve it and get to the bottom of this mystery!

This is a "9 mission" (although this is deceiving) campaign, with a few very large missions.

Mission 1: The Enterprise

The first small mission is basically a story intro where you see the setup of the person bringing your eye to you is murdered and you figure out where the culprit went with it. It's only a few minutes long. You also get a story bit that builds on the next mission in the sad dead homeless family and note next to them near the exit gate of this mission.

The second mission is absolutely massive. Lots of hallways, lots of floors, lots of places to explore. Many, many guards. This mission is very visually mixed. Some areas look really awful while others are fairly good. The setting is that you're on the village's local mountain where some insane industrial company called Solustice Industries that does a lot of nefarious things operates, and that you're here to reclaim your stolen mechanical eye.

You'll probably spend 2-3 hours wandering around here looking for clues to find The Master's Key so you can open up all of the locked things and eventually finish the mission. Story-wise this is all great but the big issue I had with this mission is a lot of the areas are maze-like and not very distinct. The map isn't much help. It's an absolutely huge complex of buildings with few landmarks. I spent much of my time knocking out guards and hiding the bodies just so I could run around more freely.

Mission 2: Hallucinations

Carries on from the end of mission 1. You're back in the village, but poisoned! Keepers are involved and the plot from here on is trying to find a cure for this poisoning that has occurred.

This mission is during the winter time and has a lot of slippery ice and even ice cold water that will damage you. There is a time limit, in more than one way--as you will slowly take a point of damage here or there and healing potions are limited but also because if the clock reaches a certain point (there's a clocktower in town) you will fail. You're trying to get to the Hammerite cathedral near the village as part of the objective before the time reaches 10 o'clock, but actually the difficulty is based on the difficulty level and it's 65 minutes on Expert mode, 95 on Hard, and a little over 2 hours on Normal

Again, large mission but less of a chance of getting lost in this one unlike the previous one since areas are more distinct. This wasn't hard to navigate and find the objectives in unlike the first mission, and good thing too due to the time limit.

Mission 3: The Insurrection

Takes place directly after mission 2. You're at the huge Hammerite cathedral, and the objective is to reach a precursor time-travel device before the Hammerites destroy it. You have the same time limits as the previous mission depending on difficulty and you're still poisoned and will periodically take damage. This is a HUGE cathedral but luckily there's no forced loot objective and not a lot of real things to see. The backdrop is an actual battle going between Mechanists and Hammerites. In fact it begins as soon as the mission does. You have to find the device, find a way to power it, and then use it before it gets destroyed.

The sequence at the end of the mission was pretty cool. Everything about the mission was a step-up visually from the last two missions. Much more coherent. At the end you make a mad dash for the objective and the campaign continues in #4.

Mission 4: Oracle of the Prophets

This is a very odd mission. Apparently you're in some time between time with weird monsters all over the place, on an asteroid and the objective is to find a way out. Not much to say about this other than the surreal settings and monsters were a bit unique and although it wasn't executed very well it was a bit memorable. Story segments are in notes scattered all over the mission.

You're still poisoned and take damage, but the ultimate objective is to power up a way out of here and continue on. The only time limit here really is if you die because of taking too long and running out of healing potions.

Mission 5: The Other Side of Time

You're back at the Cathedral, except on the other side of time--in the past. This is actually a very short mission with no hostile enemies other than you can't be seen by a certain someone or you fail. The objective is to overhear a conversation and then follow the special person to the gates of the village and follow them there.

A few of the sections that were accessible before aren't now, and also there's a lack of damaged parts of the building as this is obviously before the Mechanist/Hammerite battle. You can also find a small scene with Karras here. It's got someone else trying to mimic his voice and wasn't done all that well, but it's still neat. Oh, by the way, you're still poisoned.

Mission 6: Reversing the Order

Surprise, still poisoned! You're back in the village, and it's expanded. The objective is to prevent Alicia from being murdered in this new altered timeline, and to kill her killer with a non-direct form of death either by getting her to fight him and kill him or as I did, crushing him under an elevator. The village's new accessible areas suffer from the mission 1 problem of not being very distinct and easy to get lost in.

Additionally, trying to prevent the one character from dying can be difficult and frustrating. She has very high health and can easily win 2-3-on-one fights, but there are a lot of enemies that will try to kill her so the best way to do this is simply to spend the early parts of the mission running around and knocking out everything you can except for the one target the objectives say you can't. This mission was probably the worst executed of all of them. There are a lot of gas arrows, some gas mines and other things you can find to aid you in doing this.

Mission 7: Moving Day

This is a short mission, modified off of Mission 1 Part 1. The gist is that you're not poisoned anymore, Alicia is not a dead person and ghost anymore and you need to make your way to The Enterprise again. Something's different this time, though, as you find notes strewn around town about a sort of peasant revolt against them using fire weapons. You can find some extra supplies about town even though you probably won't need them.

Mission 8: The Inheritance

Again, another modified map. It's the same map as mission 1 part 2. Not many guards about, though. The objective is to get into the more important part of the mission which requires you look for traps and use the not-very-oft-used mechanic of lockpick disarming landmines so you don't get blown up by them. You CAN find about 1000 loot about this map if you'd like to really explore but this is just a different version devoid of much of the content that was in mission 1 part 2 so there's not much to see here. Unlike the first mission you don't need to find a key to get into the objective areas.

Mission 9: Under the Raven Moon

This isn't actually a mission! It's just a bunch of Camvator segments set in Mission 2/6's village. It wraps the story up, and it's the end of the campaign.

...

In conclusion, I can see why a lot of people weren't so hot on this campaign. It had a lot of poorly executed ideas in terms of gameplay; Very ambitious but didn't quite pan out. The story was the strong part. It's not actually as long as you'd think as some of the missions "repeat" and of course in the "repeated" versions you don't have as many constraints or things you have to do, for the most part, so they're much shorter.

I think it was an alright experience, having played it for the first time just a few days ago but I can't say it's going to top any of my lists for best missions.

GUFF on 7/1/2017 at 07:17

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Ah, right, my bad. I was using Thiefmissions.com and clicked "show all missions by this author" and it was the only one. I forgot that the site hasn't had a mission update of uploading all of the new stuff for almost a couple years now and that the other mission was released maybe a year and a half ago.

I did play his other mission. I remember Heartcliff being a pretty good mission too, with some unique gimmicks such as that area with the floaty zombie ghost you need earplugs to survive, but highly confusing in how to proceed so it took many more hours to complete than you'd think it would.

GUFF on 7/1/2017 at 12:28

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Ulysses: Genesis

Mission is for The Dark Mod, and was by Sotha from 2014. It introduces you with a (voiced over) intro about the not-Garrett character you play as, an amnesiac who believes he's named Ulysses and seems to be a bit deranged in that he thinks demons and the builder speak to him. The setup to the story is that he's captured in some cell and being poked with needles periodically.

You start with no gear in your jail cell as is typical with this kind of mission beginning and have to work your way out and find some new gear. This mission introduces a dark mod version of servants, except of course these are guards unlike the base T2 mechanist creations. They're completely silent aside from the steam sounds they make while moving and have a sort of steampunk Star Trek Borg aesthetic, plus also tie into the overall mission story.

All of the visuals are about as good as you can expect from The Dark Mod. The mission is set in a multi-floor, multi-basement floor manor and your job is initially just to find out what the hell is going on with your captors, plus hoard some loot to donate to a builder church. You can find most types of the standard Dark Mod weapon arsenal and will need to use some form of lethal force to meet the objectives, although you can do it without any major alert if you use the proper tools and planning.

The patrols are a strong suit as well as the fact that the AI is setup to notice certain things in many cases i.e. missing items in some cases, many of the lights especially if electric ones with on/off switches--something that made one of Sotha's previous missions, the revenant(haunt)-filled Lich Queen's Demise quite a bit tougher since they'd relight virtually anything you put out--and lots of other touches that make a mission memorable including voiced conversation segments which tend to be Dark Mod's strength since the original cast of voiceover artists for the various NPC types can and has been used to do lines for various missions.

It's a medium-sized mission with medium-level difficulty that will probably take you upwards of one and a half hours if you're trying to "ghost" it as much as possible given the objectives. I remember the uniqueness of the setting, the not-servant creatures and peculiarity of the story and main character stood out to me when I first played it. It has one sequel mission so far which while not as good as this one built on the player character a bit more who probably has a very dark past. Maybe Sotha will continue the series someday. It's certainly good so far with two medium-sized missions where the objectives and story tend to be a bit different from the standard fare.



From comments in the threads. It wasn't that well liked in terms of how it was executed, it seems. It also did suffer from the problem that a lot of huge maps (the "Five Tigers" missions have this issue too) in that there's a lot of running around in virtually empty space with not a lot of interactivity. Which is why huge areas aren't always a plus and don't always make a mission longer or better, with for example the cubed contest mission Zealot's Hollow as an extreme example of space usage since you could play it for hours trying to find everything in that relatively small space.