Thieves Guild...

[dprog1995]

Did you guys find that Bracelet without a guide ?
I spend hours looking for it and in the end I gave up and looked at the guide for it.

Really it was a pretty cheap moment.(I don't think there was any note in the game to tell you the location of it.)

[thirdkeeper]

Guild is the most scabbed together level I've ever seen - including some novice fan made
levels. Thief 1 has far better game and story flow. - I have no idea why they produced Thief
Gold, because it is essentially Thief 1 missions padded with inferior afterthoughts.

It's been quite a few years since I played Gold but I know that I found the bracelet because
I finished the mission without help , but I remember that it's was a long grind and that I had
to scour areas repeatedly and backtrack many times before completing it.

For anyone interested in the original Thief 1 experience:

From the T1&2Crew group:

__________________________________________________________

Had some frustrations myfirst time through The Guild, and figured it might
be better for first time players to try T1.

Originally posted by Mebber:

True, TG isn't really well suited for beginners, plus it has a bad
story pacing in my opinion. Original Thief built up the story nicely until that sudden
stunning plot twist, but TG takes way too long to reach that point of the story, it
drags out unnecessarily.

Thanks so much Mebber for the confirmation . : )

Thanks To: constancejill The creator of Gold2Dark !

Originally posted by constancejill:

I don't like much any of the gold specific missions, neither do I like
most of the changes they introduced to the original ones.

Take it from the experts. - I'm issuing a strong advisement to use the

Gold to Dark fix.

Play Thief how it was meant to be played -> GoldToDark[www.ttlg.com

[dprog1995]

Originally posted by thirdkeeper:

Guild is the most scabbed together level I've ever seen - including some novice fan made
levels. Thief 1 has far better game and story flow. - I have no idea why they produced Thief
Gold, because it is essentially Thief 1 missions padded with inferior afterthoughts.

Well, I think whenever a pc game became successful at that time,developers would make some expansions for it.(Which they instead decided to make an updated version of the main game with some new missions)

Originally posted by thirdkeeper:

Play Thief how it was meant to be played -> GoldToDark[www.ttlg.com ]

thanks, but I'm already in middle of it so I guess I have to finish it.

[Tubs]

I just did the Thieves Guild mission recently and honestly this level is the perfect example of labyrinth like level design, I mean the mission I think isn't that bad but I just think it's way too large and complex for it's good to the point where areas can be separated into missions of their own

[Amras]

After spending 2 hours, 8 minutes and 52 seconds in this horrendous Mission, I finally beat the Thieves Guild. I was trying to skip it but the skip cheat does not work gold missions somehow.

[dprog1995]

Originally posted by amras:

After spending 2 hours, 8 minutes and 52 seconds in this horrendous Mission, I finally beat the Thieves Guild. I was trying to skip it but the skip cheat does not work gold missions somehow.

Now I'm looking back at it, it wasn't that bad.
It just had an annoying bracelet side mission.

[thirdkeeper]

I had a buddy that collected Doom maps and he'd clip out areas that he liked
from different maps and paste them together to make a new composite map.

Except for the Guild itself (the first building in the beginning) the rest looks cobbled
together from discarded ideas from the drafting room floor. - I'm not proposing that
this map was created that way, but it sure gives that impression.

As I remember it - the 'gate' puzzle is the only cohesive part of the map (except for
the start) and requires way too much back and fourth to solve.

The other problem that I had with The Guild mission is that it implies that this route
is the only feasible way into that apartment; Which to me threatens to defy credulity.

[dunbaratu]

Three problems with The Guild are:

1 - The map was apparently made by a blatant liar. It's not just a fun "abstract" version of the truth, which is a cool effect that tends to happen on many other levels of Thief. It actually goes one step further than that and contains information that isn't even true in an abstract sense. It's just information that is outright false. Trying to look at the map will make you *become* lost even if you weren't lost before you looked at it. It's actually easier to play this mission by pretending the map feature doesn't exist in the game and playing without the map.

2 - Same texture re-used everywhere in the sewer tunnels made getting lost more likely. In reality any two randomly chosen corridors wouldn't look *exactly* identical. There'd be weathered pattern differences, stains, color variation, etc. But in computer graphics, they can make corridors look exactly identical if the exact same texture is used. They needed to make a few varied versions of the brown brick sewer wall texture, but they didn't.

3 - The bracelet is a mandatory objective locked behind a hidden secret, with no "readables" hinting where to look with your fine-toothed-comb to find it. Nowhere else in the Thief series did they do this. Everywhere else, even on expert mode, a required object to loot would have hints about where it is, or be in a location you obviously haven't yet explored. Never would you have had this condition where you already *have* been to every room and corridor in the mission, and already *have* studied and read every single readable, and heard every single conversation, and yet still not have the objective and no clue where you need to search to find it. (*).


But I do take exception to the claim that the extra levels of Thief Gold were mere afterthoughts. If you look at the pacing and layout of the original game, it's clear that what the 3 extra levels were was actually content that was originally intended, but got cut before it got very far along in development, rather than content that was never originally planned at all. (Then after the initial release, they took a bit of time to go back and finish the cut content to make the Gold re-release, although clearly they didn't give those 3 levels the time and care they needed to be done properly.)

Here's my reasons for believing the 3 extra levels were intended content, although admittedly very poorly executed:

Assassins - The Assassins mission clearly reveals that some of the nobility are in cahoots with the seedy criminal elements of The City, and that Ramirez's fortune rests largely on having the thieves of the city in his pocket. Furthermore, it's Garret's refusal to join Ramirez's guild that causes Ramirez to put out a hit on Garret. That hints very strongly that The Guild, and Garret's relationship with the Guild was content they had originally been thinking of putting in the game, but chose to cut it part way through development.

The other two extra Gold missions are about getting the talismans. The game clearly was designed to assume there would exist 4 talismans. It makes sense to assume they intended originally for those to be one mission per talisman, but then had to shave off some development time to make the deadline and did so by putting 2 talismans per mission so they could have 2 missions instead of 4. If you look at the layout of, say, The Lost City, the location of the Fire Talisman makes sense as the finale "boss fight", so to speak, of that level. The location of the Water Talisman feels like far less of a "finale". In "Undercover" they even put the two talismans in exactly the same location behind the same exact locked grate, so you get two talismans for solving one puzzle. Again this hints strongly at the idea that it was originally designed for just one talisman, the air talisman, but they had to also put the earth talisman in there because of the deleted the level where the earth talisman would have been.

It's possible the other two talisman levels were cut early in development, early enough that they never really designed those two levels at all and might not have even gotten so far as to decide "one will be Mages, the other will be an Opera house". But the notion that there were originally planned to be 4 missions, one talisman per mission, does seem quite likely to me.

(*) - The closest the stock game came to this problem of a mandatory objective you have no clue what the heck you should do to achieve it was helping out the ghost of the Hammerite brother in Return to The Cathedral. The quests he gives you to do are delivered ONLY in audio form, by a speech event that is triggered based on you stepping vaguely near the special locations where he will appear when you get near those spots. The game doesn't "know" if you actually heard him or not. It also doesn't know if something else that was louder was going on at the same time. It can trigger the speech event when he's still far enough away that he's not loud enough to make out what he said. It can trigger the speech events when the ghost isn't even in view, on the other side of a wall. It triggers only based on stepping into the radius of a circle around him. The game doesn't "know" if you were even sticking around to listen or if you were in the middle of running away from a foe when you stepped within that trigger radius and started the sound clip and could not hear all of it. The game never mentions what he said on the objective screen (it should have, or it should have allowed his hint to be re-triggerable so you can hear it again if you missed part of it the first time). If that clip plays and you didn't catch what he said, that's it you're stuck just doing random stuff and hoping one of the random things happens to be what he asked of you.

[lionhart]

Originally posted by dunbaratu:

(*) - The closest the stock game came to this problem of a mandatory objective you have no clue what the heck you should do to achieve it was helping out the ghost of the Hammerite brother in Return to The Cathedral. The quests he gives you to do are delivered ONLY in audio form, by a speech event that is triggered based on you stepping vaguely near the special locations where he will appear when you get near those spots. The game doesn't "know" if you actually heard him or not.

The first time I played Return to the Cathedral, I thought Brother Murus was one of the haunts, and I ran away from him the first time I saw him, so I never heard anything he said. I went around collecting all of the objects he tells you to collect, and I figured out that some sort of ritual had to be performed with them. I even found Murus' grave in the graveyard (don't recall why or how I realized it was significant), and I tried to perform the ritual by myself, but of course it did not work. Finally, after several hours of finding nothing else to do, I went back to Murus and he said, "I see you have collected all of the items we need. Meet me at my grave." So I ended up doing that mission completely out of the order the developers intended.

I still think it would have been cool if you could complete that mission the way I tried to do it, simply by collecting the objects and learning from in-game notes what you need to do with them. That probably would have been a little too obscure for most players, though.

[Minim]

Funny thing, I actually found the bracelet by accident while looking for the key to the house. But I will agree, that is very easy to miss for a quest item. I would expect something like that to be in a treasury or something.