Kangra on 30/11/2022 at 19:16

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3. Framed

TKO: X
Loot: 1378
Secrets: 8/9
Pickpockets: 2/3
Locks Picked: 5
Time taken: 1:03:34

Nothing to say here... it's a non-mission since no KO is allowed. I still completed it to ensure that I would have the right loot total for the next mission. This is one where I tend to forget to pick up loot, so I had to sneak back into some places to get it all (in particular the purse on the corpse in the morgue). I think the secret I missed was the return from Records Storage, or maybe one of the other secret passages that I came in from the 'wrong' way (I believe you only get credit when opening them from a certain direction).

Kangra on 6/12/2022 at 14:42

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4. Ambushed!
TKO: - Difficulty: ***
KO: 51
Loot: 1970 (includes from Mission 3)
Secrets: 0/0
Pickpockets: 8/8
Locks Picked: 1
Time taken: 0:56:03

We go from having nothing to do right into having a lot of enemies to deal with. Of course, they don't expect Garrett to be knocking out half the city in order to get home. To make it harder, well impossible to properly TKO even, there are no less than four guards with blackjack-proof helmets, and some of them are set up right next to softer-headed guards. It seems impossible, but I managed to get everyone but those four guards out, only one torch unlit, and only one L2 alert (of two guards at once) needed. Never did a bust feel so close to a success.

Since I had already done Thief 2 in this playstyle before, I had a pretty good idea of what to expect in the mission. The key to getting it all cleanly is finding the right order of actions. Patrols often overlap, triggered conversations can put characters onto new routes, and the openness of the map itself make it a bit hard to sort out the best time or place to knock out someone. There were some slight changes to the way I completed it this time that were likely a result of TFix, which I will note as I go.

The starting area around the pub is an especially thorny puzzle, since two of the four non-KO guards are posted there. It does have the advantage of being isolated, for the most part. While most of the city is connected by streets, this region of the map can only be accessed by guards either through a locked door (in the tower), or through the gate in the southeast (openable but only if the player does so). That affects the possible search pattern of guards if they need to be triggered, but as always it's best not to attract more attention. The area by that southeast gate has a troublesome concentration of enemies, with two guards facing west and in view of an archer outside the 'front' entrance to the pub. Standing on the other side of the gate is a non-KO guard (a Benny), and he's looking right at the first two; all of them save Benny are well-lit by both torches and streetlights.

To even start to work on them, I had to clear the possible patrols first. I started off the mission by hopping up and around to the dark northeast side of the building, to trigger the conversation of the two civilian women there. I let them finish and then hit them before they got nearer to anyone else, since I didn't want to have to deal with them moving along with the other guards. In TFix it's a bit harder to get close to them during their talk without alarming them, but all that means is I had to act a little faster to get the one that was farther from me when they parted. With those two out, I next took down the two guards that patrol near the stairs at the starting position; I waited for the right phase of their patrols since they are slightly different.

I mentioned that there were two non-KO guards here; besides the Benny at the gate, there is a non-KO east of the pub. He's in front of a see-through but not openable grate and standing next to another guard. It's actually possible to sneak in behind and knock out the un-helmeted one (on the left by their facing), as he's positioned just a bit behind. Fortunately his body always slips just out of view of the other, and is not spotted either by the guards that patrol the street behind him.

That took care of most of the pub area. To get the pair of guards down on the southeast corner, I had to come from the other side. I hopped up to the wall and dropped off the eastern side, and then entered the tower so I'd be behind them. Obviously I couldn't knock those guards out where they stand -- even if the torches were doused, Benny'd still see the bodies by the streetlight. The only feasible solution was to draw them off and knock them out elsewhere. Here I had to pick the lock (although this tower can in theory be accessed without picking the lock, it's effectively impossible since those guards stand right in front of the only other entrance). I could draw at least two of them into the tower, but it took some work to figure out the right way to go about it. Despite the nice dark patch at the bottom of the stairs, and one in the adjoining passage (next to the door that had been locked), if the guards are drawn there while you're hiding, they will search forever in TFix. There isn't enough space for them to not keep alerting each other. I started the alert by jumping on the floor at the bottom, and then making noise higher up in the stairwell (on the first landing or above), before sneaking away quietly through the doorway. From there I could observe them when they stopped searching. I thought it might be a requirement to douse this torch and re-light it later (which risks triggering a search from the non-KO Benny), but I was able to get the timing just right to not need it. There's randomness involved, though, since they need to both give up hunting at almost the same time, and I had to move very quick to hit them both without being seen or generating more sound.

In vanilla T2 making noise in the tower would very frequently draw in the third guard, the archer on the pub side, but it rarely happened in TFix. I think she may be positioned farther away, which actually makes this part easier, as her body isn't visible to ol' Benny at the gate. In vanilla T2 I think it often was, or at least I was worried that it was, so I would draw her around the corner first (that risked setting off the other non-KO guard back up the dark alley, however). I did have to wait until much later to score the knockout on her, though, since the only safe way back into the pub area after hopping over the wall is by stacking crates to climb back through the rooftop garden, and the closest crates are halfway across the map.

I knocked out a few more guards in pairs on the east side, and then started to head back to the old apartment. There are two men a short distance northwest of the pub who have a talk about Mechanists and war, and then split up. One of them headed south in the direction of a few knocked-out guards so I made sure to get him before he turned the corner. The other I let go; he eventually starts patrolling on nearly the same route as another guard (by the giant 'W'), and I took them both out later without too much difficulty. There's another helmeted non-KO guard down the street who often makes a comment as you pass by, but there's never a reason to get any closer to him.

Next I headed around to the north-south street east of the marketplace, in order to get to the back side of the guard on the bridge and the woman offering to keep him 'company'. To the north of the marketplace there is another tricky spot. There are two guards standing close by each other, and another gate where a patrolling guard on the other side passes in sight of them. That patrolling guard also passes in view of another set of patrollers at the far end of his route, over at the marked guard house on the map. I waited for the patrolling guard to leave, then I hopped in and got both standing guards when they faced away. I quickly rushed back and over the laddered wall to get to that street before the patrolling guard came back, and hit him just after he turned the corner and headed toward the gate.

Most of the rest of the guards are in spots where they are standing all alone, or move in pairs where they can be taken out quickly. I found it much better to hit moving guards as they are going up slopes, since the rearward body falls behind instead of forward. That makes it less likely for the second one to notice. There's a spot near Helena Way with a standing guard on a bridge who has two patrols pass by her from different sides; I took out the patrols on one side, then hit her, and then the last guard on patrol in smooth succession. There are also three guards on Whipple Street standing under torchlight. In vanilla T2, I was unable to come out via the door to get to them without a full alert, but in TFix coming out the door was possible, and it's an easier route than sneaking up the street on them. Either way, I still needed to take out at least one torch before knocking them out in succession, but it's a torch that can easily be re-lit later as no one else is nearby.

There is one final non-KO guard in the north, and a potentially tricky situation there as well. He stays in one spot, rotating around from time to time, and so does his partner standing a little ways away. It's not too much trouble to rush in and knock out the one while the non-KO is turned away. When I did this I checked for over a minute to see if he ever saw the body, and he did not while I was there. In vanilla T2 I could later hear him shouting about it, so it might be required to douse the torch and leave it doused (or it's something that only happened after loading a save; I'm not sure). I did something a little sneaky, in that I saved this knockout for last, and ran away to the end of the level as quickly as possible. The mission ended without him discovering it. So that might be pushing it, but technically it seems you can get away with leaving the torch lit on this one.

Outside the old apartment is the last really hard spot, and it gave me no end of trouble. There are three guards at the front of the house. There's moderate darkness at least on the west side, though one torch is burning by the door to give more light. It can easily be put out, and there shouldn't be anyone around to notice when it gets re-lit. Without TFix, opening the door from behind would always seem to trigger an alert; in TFix this almost never happens. If you do not come out via the door, it seems almost impossible to get the middle guard with the spacing and the slight turn inward that each guard has, but when doing this the first time, I was able to work from the eastmost guard and made a quick sequence of moves, and they all went down cleanly. With the torch out, and coming from behind (in TFix), I could even wait a little while after knocking out the middle guard. Coming this way I did find it easier to hit the one on the western side first instead of going the other way. So what was the difficulty? When finishing off this part of the map, I kept encountering a "body discovery" shortly after knocking out these guards. And then sometimes it didn't seem to happen, and other times it seemed to happen well after I had knocked them out.

Of course, part of the difficulty is even knowing that a body discovery had happened. The only way that I know of to detect 'quiet' body discoveries (the sort that can happen when someone is knocked out as they discover it, or those that occur in another part of the map) is to have a game over and check the stats. Indeed, I first found out about this when I though I'd nearly completed the mission, only to have the body discovery show up. Initially I restarted entirely to make sure I had not missed anything (and also to see if I could do it a bit more cleanly, as I'd doused more torches than I wanted to). At one point I thought that maybe entering your room and getting the new objective was causing it, since new objectives sometimes spawn new enemies, and the body discovery appeared to happen even before I knocked any of the front door guards out. Even though I was pretty sure no new guards get added, I thought a level design bug might have replaced an enemy with a model that disappears, or some other odd occurence that was triggering the discovery. I tried hiding every body I had already knocked out, and found no difference. I also tried doing the level by coming to the house right after getting out of the pub area. Nothing seemed to change, and I still noted inconsistent results.

I also considered that the way I was getting game overs might have affected it. I would either have to head straight into a fight with a guard, jump in water and wait to drown, or shoot fire arrows at my feet (or jump repeatedly from a high place, effective but tedious on this map). I considered that maybe the noise from the fire arrows was triggering some other event, or being killed by a guard somehow caused them to 'discover' my body, or spot some faraway unconscious guard. It didn't seem to make much difference how I ended things, but the fact that sometimes it maybe did bothered me.

By the time I'd tried many alternatives, I finally remembered that I'd forgotten about one more knockout. The woman sleeping in the bed across from Garrett's building. She's so tucked away that I often forget that she is there in this mission. Perhaps, I thought, she had been waking up and spotting the bodies of the guards in front of the house? It seemed unlikely since she is on the second floor, behind a window, on the far side of a room with a closed door, and sound asleep. Nevertheless I made sure to get her first. Yet that, too, seemed to make no difference. It turned out there actually was one more enemy that I had failed to notice. Or truthfully, I had noticed them, but had discarded the possibility of it being a problem.

It was the rat. Near the front of Garrett's house, on the western side, a tiny rat sits, initially just sniffing the air. If you get to close to it, it will stay still for a bit, and then dash off toward the front of the house, before (usually) skittering southward. It's a neat bit of a visual metaphor if you trigger it, suggesting the way in which Garrett himself has to run off from his own home. Seemingly it just adds a bit of color to the city. But it nearly wrecked this mission for me. Rats are an almost invisible entity in the game; they don't really react to you other than to run away, and don't seem to alert any other entities. They also cannot be hit with melee weapons, and thus can only be knocked out with gas. Moreover, it's not clear if they even react in any visible way to body discoveries, since as far as I could tell the rat just moves past (and even through) the bodies without changing course. Only by repeated tests was I able to finally figure out that this rat was in fact the one finding the bodies of the knocked-out guards at the door.

There are a few possible ways of dealing with this rat. Killing it with fire is one choice, certainly, and I was all too happy to do that to confirm my suspicions when testing, but it's not an option for TKO. I tried blocking it from running (they can be blocked with crates or other objects) but this one literally paths through the wall when you first scare it away, so blocking it properly would be tough. If it's triggered to run just as you reach the house, the movement of the guards while conversing should also make it run, but that just sends it off into other places and makes a later body discovery possible (indeed one of the reasons I was getting body discoveries without knocking out the guards at the house was because the rat had run off to another place and found a body already). More object placement might have controlled its path, but it still seemed risky to me. In the end, I just did what I could to avoid it entirely. It had not triggered when I first went past it toward the house, and if I moved away slowly after knocking out the guards at the front door, it did not seem to start its run. This was also the reason I left one torch out -- I was too afraid that re-lighting it might set off the rat again.

The 'exit' section near Shalebridge was the final place where I needed to be careful. The sequence of knockouts can be important, since patrols pass by the stationary guards. I first took out the three who move together, then I worked back from the Shalebridge gate, since the guards are generally facing away from that direction and were easier to move through rapidly. None of the doors here need to be picked, since there's no needed loot inside. Finally I went and took out that one last guard near the non-KO on the north side, rushed back and opened the gate, leaving most of the city watch out cold behind me.

downwinder on 13/12/2022 at 23:14

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my fav weapon in thief is the blackjack, glad to see it respect it deserves

also i cant wait to see what you say about golden child in 2 of the missions he is in, life of the party and soul forge

here is a tip in life of the party once you get book and golden child appears, get the door key ready and run to door and lock him inside

now as for last mission omg from my memory he runs from you so not sure if you could lure him in to a room you can lock???, otherwise karras will take care of him once he activate the beacon :P

downwinder on 14/12/2022 at 20:52

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the room to the right of golden child in soul forge after that long hallway, he can run in there and alert the combo bots, i don't think there is any human guard in there


i await the results of those missions :)

downwinder on 17/12/2022 at 00:39

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i once got by golden child with out alert, by hugging i think the right side???/could have been left side and hid behind each piller on side to be blocked by his view repeated till i got to where i can go right and ran into room in dark waited a pinch and peeked back at him and he was still in same spot, leaving same thing, he might have made a sound or two but never got in patrol mode

but on life of party no way to have him not see you only saving grace is you got key to door to lock him in there so no problems there :)

i still think the golden child would make a great final revel for final boss for a thief 4 game