Dark Project: The Master Thief

Dark Project: The Master Thief
Original title	Thief: The Dark Project
Studio	Looking Glass Studios
Publisher	Eidos Interactive
Senior Developer	Greg LoPiccolo
Erstveröffent- lichung	November 30, 1998
platform	Windows
Game engine	Dark engine
genre	Stealth action , action adventure
Game mode	Single player
control	Mouse , keyboard
medium	CD-ROM , download
language	English German
Current version	1.33 (original), 1.37 (gold) TFix 1.23 ( community patch , 2015)
Age rating	USK

Dark Project: Der Meisterdieb , also known under the original title Thief: The Dark Project , is a computer game and the first part of the Thief series. It is one of the first genre representatives of the stealth shooter , programmed by Looking Glass for Microsoft Windows and published by Eidos Interactive in 1998 .

action

Backstory

In this game, the player takes on the role of the master thief Garrett, who goes on a thief tour in an unspecified city. He has considerable thieving skills, from opening locks to the almost unnatural ability to remain undetected in any kind of shadow . His talent is due to the cause since he as in youth his maintenance pickpocket dispute had until he makes the acquaintance of a secret organization calling itself the guardian (in the original: The Keepers ) call, see Garrett's abilities and take him to training . The game begins when Garrett decides to leave the secret society and embark on a new thief adventure, setting more things in motion than he ever intended.

Course of action

After Garrett decided to begin a life of thieves separately from his former trainers, a secret society who call themselves “keepers”, his path leads him to a certain Constantine because of his high reputation as a “master thief”. He hires Garrett to get him an artifact called The Eye from a crumbling cathedral of the Hammerites, a kind of fundamentalist church order. When Garrett locates the cathedral, however, he finds that his one-time patrons, the Guardians, sealed the cathedral a long time ago. He goes in search of the four talismans of the elements. The search leads him to the "forgotten city" and the urban temple of the Hammerites. With the talismans, Garrett is now able to break the centuries-old seal on the doors of the cathedral and take the "eye" for himself. With the help of the ghost of old brother Murus, Garrett manages to leave the cathedral alive. When he wants to hand over the artifact to his client, Constantine, he reveals himself to be the "swindler", a long-forgotten pagan deity. Garrett loses an eye and is left to die by Constantine; but the Guardians appear and free Garrett. As Garrett escapes through the Catacombs of Constantine, he realizes the true extent of the trickster's plans: to plunge the world into eternal darkness. In his desperate situation, Garrett tries to turn to the Hammerites, but finds that their temple has been overrun by the swindler's creatures. Nevertheless, Garrett finds survivors who equip him with a false "eye" and send into the abyss of chaos, the empire of Constantine. Garrett finally manages to outsmart the swindler. In the dead of winter, Garrett roams the streets after his adventure and meets the Guardian Artemus, Garrett's instructor at the Guardians. He speaks of the fulfillment of the prophecies and tells Garrett that he cannot rejoin the order. As Garrett leaves, Artemus warns of the dawn of the metal age.

Characters

• Garrett: Garrett, a master thief, was trained by the Guardians at a young age, but later decided to part with them and use what he had learned to live as a thief. He is the protagonist of the game, an antihero and a loner . Although he only wanted to earn a living from the thief tours, everything turned out differently than he thought. While starting out as a petty thief, towards the end of the game he is forced to steal from a god himself.
• Constantine: Garrett's mysterious client is a wealthy eccentric who hires Garrett to buy an artifact called The Eye for a million . When Garrett wants to deliver the said artifact, however, the real nature of Constantine is revealed. He reveals himself as Der Schwindler (occasionally also Waldfürst , in the original Trickster ), an old pagan deity who pursues the plan to build a portal between their world and ours in order to plunge the world into chaos and eternal darkness .
• Victoria: She hires Garrett to steal a magical sword from a certain Constantine's mansion . It later emerges that this was just a test of Garrett's mastery, as Viktoria and Constantine appear to be working together. Together with Constantine, her real nature is revealed, she is a demon and follower of the swindler and it is she who tears out Garrett's eye . In the further course of the story it no longer plays a role, but it takes an important place in the second part of the Thief trilogy.
• Cutty: Garrett's fence, who converts valuables into cash for him and occasionally also gives orders. He is arrested by the Hammerites and dies in one of the cells just as Garrett comes to rescue him.

Gameplay

→ Main article : For the game principle, also compare the series article

Each Thief mission takes place in a completed level. In contrast to most other games at the time of publication, however, the goal is not to fight your way through the level to the next exit and then start the next level from there (typical play style in first-person shooters to this day). A level usually consists in that the character is placed in an individual environment or has to penetrate there, is supposed to fulfill a number of tasks (which partly change during the mission) and finally has to find a way out.

Before the mission begins, the player is introduced to the level using pre-rendered cutscenes. These cutscenes are animated artworks in the style of written papyrus , which are explained by Garrett (spoken by Andreas Brucker in the German version ).

The player is then shown the exact goals of each mission, with a choice of three levels of difficulty: normal, hard or expert. A change in the level of difficulty has an influence on the mission objectives, but also on the level itself, e.g. B. the number of enemy guards or new sections to explore. In addition, as an expert , it is usually forbidden to kill human opponents.

Afterwards, the player can use the inventory to influence Garrett's equipment in the following mission, because valuables found in the previous mission can be traded in for more weapons or equipment. Money that is not spent cannot be carried over to the next mission and is therefore lost.

The actual story is told through the briefings , cutscenes and the missions themselves. Quotes from the three major factions in Thief are given at the start of each mission . A great deal of additional information about the world and history in which Garrett lives can be learned directly from Garrett himself during the missions in the form of conversations, books and scrolls or brief interjections.

development

English-language logo with characteristic lettering

The use of Looking Glass’s specially programmed game engine, Dark Engine , made Thief very different in design from other contemporary computer games.

The aim of the game is to remain undetected as much as possible and to avoid direct combat. The light and sound backdrop used at the time, as well as the AI , was hardly offered in any other game - the specially developed sound component by Eric Brosius provided a deep, sometimes suggestive, atmospheric backdrop. The NPCs in the game could perceive the player both visually and acoustically and react differently depending on the situation, from simply following the noise source to attacking and running for help. In order to avoid being discovered, the player had to switch from shadow to shadow, always stay out of sight of the opponent and, if necessary, extinguish torches or other light sources to create hiding places. But attention also had to be paid to the surface: walking too fast on a loud metal floor could unexpectedly lead to discovery. Further advances in the game area were large, complex levels with a multitude of interactable objects that were subject to game physics. Also unusual for Garrett at this time were the variety of exercise options: In addition to walking, running and jumping, he was able to swim, climb higher ledges, climb ropes and lean around corners.

After the end of official support, the game's fan community tried to maintain support for new hardware and operating systems themselves via binary fan patches . In 2010, due to a bug in the distribution of a developer SDK, the Dreamcast source code for the Dark Engine became unintentionally publicly available. In September 2012 a major update of the dark engine for Thief 2 became available which retrofitted missing support for modern graphics and sound hardware and operating systems, probably based on the leaked Dreamcast source code . A back porting of this variant for Thief 1 was possible and with further texture and mission fixes of the community this engine patch was bundled to a community patch called TFix .

reception

reviews publication Rating GameStar 86% PC action 90% PC Games 94% PC joker 83% PC player 91% Power play 93% Meta-ratings Metacritic 92%

Dark Project: The master thief was received mostly positively by the critics. Many praised the innovative gameplay of Thief , as was previously found in the form of very little. Garrett's character and the mystical plot were the main reasons for the good ratings. Even if it wasn't mainly Thief's intention , the eerie locations, paired with supernatural monsters and perfect soundscape ( Thief was one of the first games to support spatial sound and EAX ), created an atmosphere of fear, and quite a few players look at it first part of the Thief series as one of the best games that can provide good moments of shock.

Within two years, the game sold around 500,000 copies and generated profits for both developer Looking Glass and publisher Eidos. Eidos signed a development contract with Looking Glass for four more games.

Web links

• Dark Project: The Master Thief at MobyGames (English)
• Website with active Thief community ( Memento from April 28, 2012 in the Internet Archive ) (English)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b} voodoo47: TFix: unofficial patch for Thief1 / Gold ( English ) www.ttlg.com. October 29, 2012. Retrieved November 10, 2012: “ TFix now uses NewDark (v1.19), the brand new update of the dark engine. TFix 1.12 (110 MB) "
2. ↑ Tom Leonard: Thief: The Dark Project - Postmortem ( English ) Gamasutra . July 9, 1999. Retrieved November 12, 2012.
3. ↑ Sean Barrett: The 3D Software Rendering Technology of 1998's Thief: The Dark Project . September 19, 2011. Archived from the original on July 13, 2012. Retrieved on September 21, 2011.
4. ↑ Timeslip: ddfix - A patch for running Dark Engine games on modern hardware ( English ) timeslip.users.sourceforge.net. May 6, 2008. Retrieved January 16, 2012.
5. ↑ Quintin Smith: Dark Engine Source Code Found In A Bag ( English ) Rock, Paper, Shotgun. December 14, 2010. Retrieved April 15, 2011: “ As of this weekend, Christmas has come early for the Through the Looking Glass community. A CD's been discovered containing the source code for the Dark Engine, aka the engine used by Thief, Thief II and System Shock 2 (not to mention Irrational and Looking Glass' canceled cold war spy game Deep Cover). "
6. ^ "Le Corbeau": Thief 2 V1.19 & System Shock 2 V2.4 ( English ) www.ttlg.com. September 25, 2012. Retrieved November 10, 2012: “ This is an unofficial patch for Thief II: The Metal Age (T2) which updates the game from v1.18 to v1.19, providing improved support for modern hardware and correcting many known bugs. "
7. ↑ Dark Project: The Master Thief. In: GameStar. Retrieved July 12, 2019 . 
8. ↑ Harald Fränkel: Dark Project: The master thief - night shift . In: PC Action . No. 1/99 . Computec Media GmbH , January 1999, p. 72–80 ( archive.org [accessed July 12, 2019]).
9. ↑ Andreas Sauerland: The Dark Project: The Master Thief - On quiet feet . In: PC Games . No. 2/99 . Computec Media GmbH , February 1999, p. 92–101 ( pcgames.de [accessed July 12, 2019]).
10. ↑ Richard Löwenstein: Genre Mix: Dark Project - The Master Thief . In: PC Joker . No. 2/99 . Joker-Verlag, February 1999, p. 68-69 ( kultboy.com [accessed July 12, 2019]).
11. ↑ Udo Hoffmann: Action-Adventure for advanced and professionals: Dark Project - Der Meisterdieb . In: PC Player . No. 2/99 . Future Verlag , February 1999, p. 72–76 ( pcplayer.de [PDF; 9.2 MB ; accessed on July 12, 2019]).
12. ^ Stephan Freundorfer: Dark Project - The master thief . In: Power Play . No. 2/99 . Future Verlag , February 1999, p. 46-49 ( kultboy.com [accessed July 12, 2019]).
13. ^ Thief: The Dark Project for PC Reviews. In: Metacritic. Retrieved July 12, 2019 . 
14. ^ Ahead of its time: The history of Looking Glass