<Username> on 21/6/2023 at 12:26

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Thief's Rising: Gold Edition is impressive: a campaign with ten quality missions created by a single author. I think the Thief Fan Missions community on TTLG is largely unaware of Adsk1's huge accomplishment. It deserves wider recognition.

Of the bonus level triggers, I found the first three, but did not know how to activate the third one. I don't think I will replay the whole campaign to see the bonus area, but it is a nice touch it is included for the most dedicated of players. For me personally, completing all missions on Expert was enough.

fortuni's excellent walkthrough was helpful whenever I got stuck. Thank you, fortuni!

General impressions

Elements I liked:
* A full campaign for T3 with a cohesive plot.
* The missions are all built with care: detailed architecture and decorations, good guard placement and lighting, well-written journals, varied objectives, few glitches or bugs.
* Complex and/or changing sets of mission objectives. There are even some innovative objective types which had not been used in T3 fan missions before, like exploring a certain percentage of the map or producing an item by combining several parts using machines in a factory.
* The writing in the journals is captivating. These are some of the best texts in T3 fan missions I have read. The journals often provide clues on how to solve puzzles, reducing the likelihood of players getting stuck.
* Early on, you get a map of Bale Island, the campaign's main location. In each new mission, you explore a new area of the map.
* Subsequent missions add additional equipment and challenges.
Could be improved:
* Since this campaign features a new character, it really needed a custom character model. Why does Reuben look exactly like Garrett, with the same mechanical eye?
* The voice acting and the recording quality for Reuben are rather weak. Why not ask someone from the TTLG community to record his lines?
* I often leaned through all of the locked doors to check if they lead anywhere. I would have preferred doors that can't be interacted with if the player can safely ignore them.
* The missions in the campaign more frequently crashed to the desktop than other T3 fan missions.
* The high difficulty requires frequent saving and reloading. Play styles like ironman or ghosting don't appear viable.
* I needed at least one hint to finish 8 of the 10 missions. Maybe I am just not that good or patient of a player, but I feel it is rather easy to get stuck in this campaign if you fail to see a small object or don't happen to trigger an NPC to appear by doing something which is not one of the objectives.

Mission 1: Practice makes Perfect

Stats:
* Expert difficulty
* 52 minutes
* 100% loot
* 1 hint needed
A first in T3 fan missions:
* The player is tasked with exploring a certain percentage of the map.
Elements I liked:
* The architecture of the buildings in the streets of Bale Island is great.
* The fog gives the streets an extra moody look.
Could be improved:
* The stories of The Dark Project, The Metal Age, and Deadly Shadows are reported on by the Bale Island Daily. This undermines the importance and mystery of these event. It is also not believable the newspaper would get so many details on what happened. I did not like the creative choice to include these newspapers.
* The "Auction House" sign looks garish and does not fit in with the rest of the environment.
Hint needed:
* Got only 96% loot and used the walkthrough to find the last two pieces of loot: a purse beneath a table in the house south of the market and a purse up on a balcony west of a building with a red sign.

Mission 2: Ripe for the Plucking

Stats:
* Expert difficulty
* 55 minutes
* 97% loot
* 0 hints needed
Elements I liked:
* The guard helping himself to the wine in the basement is a nice touch.
* The layout of the mansion on the ground floor works well because I had to watch multiple entrances in most rooms and there were plenty of patrolling guards. This kept the tension high.
* The diary of the son sets up an intriguing mystery and the diary of the father provides a satisfying explanation.
* The escape of the Kurshok was the best scripted sequence I have seen in T3 fan missions.
Could be improved:
* This mansion heist feels run-off-the-mill: guards on the perimeter, find one of several possible ways in, wine racks in the basement, a note by the lord about the quality of the food prepared by the servants, rooms for guest and more valuable loot on the upper floors, a room containing a dark secret. I have played this exact same scenario in Thief fan missions many, many times. The guestrooms on the second floor felt crushingly repetitive.

Mission 3: Night at the Auction House

Stats:
* Expert difficulty
* 65 minutes
* 90% loot
* 1 hint needed
Elements I liked:
* I like that this mission starts at a place we're familiar with from mission 1, but then lets the player explore areas that were previously blocked.
* Very good use of light and shadow at the secure storage.
* All items in the showroom have their own description.
* The quantity of guards around the show room provided an enjoyable challenge.
* Books provide hints for the secret switches in the mission.
* A plot twist occurs and your last two objectives are replaced by a new objective. I like when something like this happens. It makes the mission feel more dynamic.
Could be improved:
* The framerate was generally low in this mission. In the show room, it dropped into the single digits. I play on a semi-recent laptop. Maybe my experience would have been better on a full gaming PC. Interestingly, the framerate improved after I knocked out the auctioneer.
* I happened to find the secret location of the auctioneers gavel by blind-frobbing. The first button is invisible. I would be fine with a hard-to-see button, but an invisible button is unfair to players.
Bug:
* The man in the purchasing office appears to be able see you through the wall. I had several failed mission messages when he saw me in the corridor while the door to his office was still locked.
Hint needed:
* Missed the door to the auctioneer's office. I had knocked out a guard nearby and dropped him in front of the door. I think only the guard's body lit up when I got near it, not the door, so I incorrectly assumed this was a fake door.

Mission 4: A Bit of Burglary

Stats:
* Expert difficulty
* 104 minutes
* 1 hint needed
Elements I liked:
* The City watch banging on the door of Reuben's room has clear voice audio.
* Similar to mission 1, I like the use of fog to make the streets a bit more interesting.
* Functional gallows? Nice touch!
* In the second part of the streets, you can pick the locks of a chains several gates. If you are successful, it audibly falls to the ground. I think this a new effect. I don't recall it from the original game or other fan missions.
* Picking the locks of those gates with guards patrolling within eyesight of me was tense.
* A mission without loot in the campaign was interesting change of pace.
Could be improved:
* The City watch banging on the door of your small room is an overused cliché in Thief fan missions.
* Why would Reuben stop to read all the newspapers lying in the street? This mandatory objective is not motivated by anything in the game's plot. At the end of the mission, the player still has no idea why they were made to read all those newspaper articles and will likely be confused.
* The first streets area has loud background noises, despite being relatively empty. The background ambient track does not fit.
* There are invisible walls around the bridge, probably to prevent the player from falling and drowning. I would have preferred being able to drown here instead of invisible walls as immersion breakers. This is a very minor point and highly subjective.
* The rich district has several areas that look similar to each other and usually contain one house and either: nothing else, one item of interest (gas bomb, flash bomb, newspaper), one or two guards. These areas felt like a copy & paste of each other. Exploring them felt repetitive and boring.
* I don't think it is good design that the lever near the gate to the Upper Quarter does not open the gate to the gate to the Upper Quarter, but rather a secret door in the wall of a garden nearby. If the player missed the hint in the letter stuck under a door in another area of the mission, they will have no idea the secret door is even there. I initially thought something must have gone wrong with the scripting when the gate to the Upper Quarter did not open after pulling the lever. Then I leaned through the gate and saw there is nothing behind it. I concluded the lever must have opened something somewhere else on the map. Then I went searching, even back to the starting location. I eventually found the secret door that had opened, but it took me about 20-30 minutes. There are so many areas to search, it is likely some players will just give up should they not get lucky and stumble upon the hint about the secret door or upon the secret door directly.
Hint needed:
* When I reached the fence's abode with one newspaper still unread and realized I had to search the whole map yet again[I7], I felt frustrated. I searched for another 30 minutes or so, then I felt this was a waste of time and looked up the location of the last newspaper in a walkthrough. It turns out I had been at the location of the last newspaper twice before, but a bug caused it to be invisible.
Bug:
* The newspaper "Gervaisius Mask Stolen" in front of the "Jerusalem" door is invisible.

Mission 5: A Mountain to Climb

Stats:
* Expert difficulty
* 95 minutes
* 100% loot
* 1 hint needed
A first in T3 fan missions:
* If I remember correctly, this is the first mission with Puppets as enemies.
Elements I liked:
* The setting in the mountain castle, the story, and all the journals are great.
* I love the atmospheric start to the mission on the windswept bridge leading to the dark mountain peak looming in front of you.
* I received quite the jolt when I heard the magician unlock the door and come in behind my after I read the journal entry about the location of the vault.
* I like all the new objectives that pop up as you read more about the history of the Mountain Castle. It makes the mission feel dynamic.
* There is a fetch quest around a ritual to bless your blackjack. The instructions are clear in the journal entry with the instructions. Additionally, you get onscreen prompts at each step of the ritual. I appreciated the effort that went into making sure players would not get stuck during this puzzle.
* Just after I read the journal about how the siblings cursed the rock of the mountain itself and each destroyed rock monster will be replaced by a new one, I heard the steps and grunts of a rock monster outside the door. That was great!
* I watched the sister from the shadows in the laboratory: She seems to be working, switching between the workbench, the furnace, and what looks like an anvil. Nice detail.
* The view from the upper floors of the mountain castle is great.
* I felt a nice sense of accomplishment that I found 100% of the loot without needing hints.
Could be improved:
* The doors that close after ten seconds were annoying. I would have preferred doors that stay open. I had to continually reopen doors while waiting in side rooms for chances to dash out into corridors unseen by patrolling undead. What made it worse, the undead noticed I kept reopening the doors. There were long stretches where I had no chances to leave a room because undead were either in the wrong spots or had been aggroed by an open door yet again. Very frustrating.
* One of the many chairs in the banquet hall upstairs is half buried in the floor. Small mistake.
* From the southwest balcony on the floor of the sister's quarters where you can read about the fallen lab key, a piece of City skybox texture is visible through between the mountains. This should not be visible because that means you are looking through under the mountain. Small mistake.
* I repeatedly got stuck while perched atop the ledges of the southeast and southwest balconies of the sister's bedroom and had to reload.
Hint needed:
* Missed the laboratory key. I had read the journal, but it was misleading. The journal says the key fell down from one of the bedroom balconies and audibly hit the rocks below. I searched both the balconies on the bedroom level as well as the four balconies on the two accessible levels below. I even jumped off some of the balconies and tried to find the key in the rock crevices of the mountain. That took a long time. Turns out, the key did not fall from the balcony at all. It was on one of the bedroom level balconies, on the floor, with the frob distance set to low and loot glint turned off.
Bug:
* When I first woke the puppets in the basement, all the torches went out. I quicksaved. When I had to reload from this quicksave, the torches were on again. This made escaping the puppets harder, because now I had to use water arrows to create shadows where I could hide.

Mission 6: Out on the Town

Stats:
* Expert difficulty
* 131 minutes
* 92% loot
* 1 hint needed
A first in T3 fan missions:
* If I remember correctly, this is the first one released with Spectres as enemies.
Elements I liked:
* The objectives changing from simply stealing a bottle of wine to creating a fake bottle of wine made the mission more interesting.
* The mutant hidden in crate 6 in the warehouse was a surprise.
* The paddle steamer is impressive.
* The haunted factory is highly atmospheric, especially with the great story about the owner.
* In the haunted factory, I got chased by a Spectre to the yard outside. The Spectre stopped at the door, unable to cross the threshold. This is consistent with the Spectres being confined to the place of their haunting.
Could be improved:
* This mission feels like filler. Reuben just went on a dangerous quest to retrieve an artifact from a mysterious mountain castle. Now, instead of finally tracking the person who framed him, he first has to get another McGuffin from some warehouse. Just as the story was getting interesting, it slams on the brakes.
* Similar to the first part of mission 4, the background ambient track in the docks was very loud, despite the place being almost empty at night. It doesn't fit.
* The framerate in the yard with the boxes next to the factory was very low.
* If I remember correctly, the door to the room with the instructions for the machines is locked until you read the factor owner's journal about them being dangerous. It is not clear why the door becomes unlocked after you read his journal.
* The haunted factory is insanely difficult. The Spectres' patrol routes are tight and there are few corners where you are safe. I had to reload more than one hundred times.
* The mission's title, "Out on the Town", feels a little uninspired. They key features of this mission are the docks, the warehouse, and wine. Something with those words would have fit.
* There is a note with some flavor text on the floor of the crate that contains the mutant. Maybe I am wrong, but I don't think players can ever read it without abusing the glitch where they lean through a wall.
* The seawoman cleaning the floor on the steam paddler is glitchy: While cleaning, she kept teleporting a few inches up in the air and back down.
Hint needed:
* I found only 83% of the loot and used fortuni's walkthrough to reach 90%. There was only one piece of loot I needed: the gold pitcher in the cart yard. It is worth 175, 8% of the total loot. I had been in that yard before, but had missed the item.

Mission 7: All Ship Shape

Stats:
* Expert difficulty
* 118 minutes
* 95% loot
* 0 hints needed
A first in T3 fan missions:
* A mission on a moving ship.
Elements I liked:
* The ship looks like it is built to scale, with an impressive furnace room as well as details like pumps and water tanks.
* You can bang on the doors of patrons. Some open the door and come out, looking around, wondering what caused the noise. Later, you can find a way to lure them away.
* You can search the clothes in the patron stowage. Sometimes Reuben finds some coins.
Could be improved:
* Forced ghosting in the whole mission made the playthrough rather slow.
* Having to search all 24 guest rooms got tedious, especially because they look mostly identical.
* You can easily get stuck in the gaps the above the sun-loungers.

Mission 8: On the Hunt

A first in T3 fan missions:
* The Docks area from the original campaign is reused.
Second time in T3 fan missions:
* The area around Fort Ironwood and the Shalebridge Cradle from the original campaign were first reused in (https://www.ttlg.com/forums/showthread.php?t=133878) Veil of Deceit.
Stats:
* Expert difficulty
* 94 minutes
* 98% loot
* 1 hint needed
Elements I liked:
* You get the objective to tear down wanted poster with your likeness. This makes sense in the story and is a fun objective type.
* You start in the docks area from the original campaign.
Could be improved:
* The guard positions in the docks are so tight I barely managed to take them out one by one, after reloading several times. This part was tough.
* I managed to climb to the roof above the closed gate to Fort Ironwood, where the two barrels are. From there, you can see (and fall) out of bounds. You can also jump to where the entrance to Fort Ironwood was in the original campaign. This area is closed off now, with no way out.
* I experienced frequent, non-reproducible crashes to the desktop in this mission.
* Small typo in the mission briefing: "With the Seafare ship docked I was able to swiftly disembarked".
Hint needed:
* Had one poster left to destroy when I arrived at the cemetery gate. I had no idea it opens only after you found all 10 posters and that the last one was in an area I had already searched. So I wasted about 1 hour trying to find a way to climb to the cemetery via the roofs. It is not logical the gate opens after you destroyed all 10 posters. The one I had missed was the one near the Old Quarter gate, under an electric light.

Mission 9: Strange Bedfellows

Stats:
* Expert difficulty
* 90 minutes
* 1900 of 2000 loot
* 1 hint needed
A first in T3 fan missions:
* A mission in a forest.
* Rat-beasts as enemies.
Elements I liked:
* After stepping into the portal in the previous mission, starting in a strange new place felt exciting.
* Equipment from the previous mission carried over.
* The soundscape in the forest was fitting. I liked the occasional rustling in the bushes, as if something is moving close to you.
* The village ruins were an interesting location and something that had not been done in T3 fan missions up until this one.
* I liked how the church looked inside. It was not the usual Gothic architecture.
* Killed were-rats turn back into humans. Nice effect.
* The ritual chamber is very reminiscent of the final area in The Dark Project. The way you prevent the ritual from completing is executed well. I felt lucky I had saved up seven water arrows, otherwise it would have been very difficult to avoid both the adversary and the stone gargoyle.
Could be improved:
* This mission has the same title as an original mission from The Dark Project. I would prefer titles that don't duplicate existing missions.
* I was less than thrilled about the maze-like layout of the map. The usual strategy of just hugging one side of the wall does not work because you end up going in circles. I spent some time walking through the mostly empty forest, taking notes of landmarks and directions.
* The time for which the magical barrier around the dagger gets deactivated is very short. Retrieving it required many attempts and reloads.
* Defeating the were-rats is bloody difficult. You rarely get the drop on them because they only make short stops between running. Even when I managed to get behind one, the back-stab frequently wasn't triggered. In a direct fight, I had no chance. They attack fast and their range appears to be longer than their claws.
* Getting the piece of loot worth 150 in a branch of the fallen tree was difficult. I could not do it without falling off and taking some damage.
Hint needed:
* Missed the journal about the fate of Balthasar, Sara, and the villagers.

Mission 10: Home Coming

Stats:
* Expert difficulty
* 98 minutes
* 100% loot
* 1 hint needed
Elements I liked:
* I like the inclusion of a mission like this, where, even after the main bad guy has been defeated, you have to tie up loose ends like closing the bad guy's portal and taking out any beasts that escaped.
* The were-rats eating corpses in the streets, especially the sounds, was sickening.
* The lava room looks great. I fell off a couple of times, but still enjoyed the jumping puzzle.
* Dispatching the were-rats with fire arrows felt satisfying.
Could be improved:
* Similar to the previous mission, successfully sneaking around the were-rats required many, many reloads.
* The 100% loot goal on Expert is punishingly hard because some of the loot in this mission is shoved into random nooks and crannies.
* You can lean through the real estate agent's cabinet and steal both the deeds and the house key. That way, you can complete the "Find a new place to call Home" objective early. Thankfully, this does not break the mission.
* If you click on "Continue" after the mission debriefing, Garrett's introduction of the Blue Heron Inn mission plays, and then you are placed in a black, infinite void.
Hint needed:
* I really tried, but I was only able to find 90% of the loot. The pieces I missed were (1.) a purse hidden near the top of the stairs in the blackmailer's house, (2.) a gold nugget on the balcony east of the collapsed building in the docks, and (3.) a copper nugget on a porch southwest of the tavern.