Thief: Gold

aka: Dark Project Gold: L'Ombra del Ladro, Dark Project: Der Meisterdieb - Directors Cut
Moby ID: 1404
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Description official descriptions

Thief Gold is a reissue of the game, Thief: The Dark Project, updated to version 1.37. Thief Gold includes three entirely new campaign missions which deepen the plot and provide new challenges, as well as five new types of enemies to overcome. Some of the original Thief levels have had minor modifications, including bug fixes, small design changes, and the new enemies.

Thief Gold also includes a bonus "Behind the scenes at Looking Glass Studios" footage and DromED, a level editor for Thief.

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82 People (77 developers, 5 thanks) · View all

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Reviews

Critics

Average score: 92% (based on 10 ratings)

Players

Average score: 4.3 out of 5 (based on 64 ratings with 6 reviews)

Hmmmm, must have been the rats

The Good
I played Thief Gold after playing its sequel. The sequel ironed out most of the bugs and honed in on the best aspects of gameplay, so visiting its predecessor was a little disappointing. However, I fully recommend this game.

The gist of Thief is that you are Garrett, trained thief and anti-hero who finds himself in the unenviable position of having to save the world. In Thief, you must stay in shadows, pay attention to your noise level, knock out guards, douse torches, etc. In this game, if you aren't a proficient thief, you'll die. That simple rule made the game incredibly immersive and I really felt that it was similar to an RPG. You take on the role of Garrett.

The ambient sound and vocal acting was pretty good. Sometimes character voices seem a little campy. The locations are highly detailed although I preferred the urban locations to the outdoor/other world ones. The story is engaging and the bonus levels included in the Gold edition help to flesh out the plot.

Also, this is one of the few games I've played where the difficulty settings seemed to matter. Each level of difficulty offers different objectives and even forces you to play the game in a different way. At the hardest levels, you are often not allowed to make any kills.

The Bad
I've heard that Looking Glass wasn't sure if players would like a fps that relied on stealth rather than ammunition. As such, some levels require combat and there is a great number of undead. Of course, it was the stealth aspect that became popular and coined the phrase "first person sneaker."

Secondly, there seems to be no advantage to conserving ammunition, items, or gold. You basically start from scratch each level. I would have preferred to have had a wider arsenal at the end levels.

The only other quibble I have is with item interaction. To open doors, pick pockets, etc you must maneuver in such a way that they are highlighted. This is useful but I was often able to open doors from a distance, which seemed unbelievable.

The Bottom Line
This is one of the best examples of what a computer game can be. I loved the vision of a medieval city, struggling between paganism and fanaticism. While this game has some peaks and valleys in level design, there are moments that are as riveting as any movie.

For fun, look straight up when you are outside and shoot an arrow-- how's that for physics?

Windows · by Terrence Bosky (5397) · 2001

Gems such as this are stupidly rare

The Good
I first recall playing ā€˜Thief: The Dark Projectā€™ over the winter holidays my senior year in high school. I was so enthralled with this revolutionary game and played it so obsessively that I think Santa Claus was peeking over my shoulder at 3:00 am Christmas Eve watching me play. You have to realize that in 1998, games like ā€˜Quakeā€™ and ā€˜Half-Lifeā€™ were the standard of the day. While they were good games, they were dreadfully linear and focused on a run-and-gun approach which could wear oneā€™s nerves after awhile. Not so with T: TDP. Never before had I seen such well-written mythology and atmosphere in an FPS, or any other game for that matter. The ā€œsteampunkā€ environment was also highly intriguing; a mixture of 16th century Europe, Industrial Revolution-era England, and the American art-deco/film noir eraā€¦very strange. Itā€™s a game I feel will be more appreciated in the future than it is now for its radical aura.

Needless to say I was ecstatic when I learned that in late ā€™99 the game would be reissued with the three missing levels, which couldnā€™t be finished in time for release. Thief Gold for the most part it is in fact the same, but much longer than the original version, and in my eyes, more complete and logical in regards to plot. Some of the niggling bugs were fixed, and the levels from the original were renovated and retooled to fit the story as it was originally envisioned. A perfect game in almost every way.

The Bad
In terms of voice acting, plot, and level design, I have no complaints whatsoever; perfect in every respect. However, the Dark Engine, which drives the game, is highly prone to bugs that can sometimes be debilitating to the game play. There were more times than I wish to remember where I got hung up on a staircase and was forced to do a quick load. There were also times where the NPCs would get stuck in similar predicaments (which could oftentimes work to your advantage). Also, the graphics were fairly dated even by ā€™98-ā€™99 standards (256 texturesā€¦yes you heard me correctly), and this unfortunately turned many people away.

The Bottom Line
I say with absolute authority that this is one of the best game in history, PC or console, and my #1 game of all time (right alongside its sequel). And since itā€™s now priced at only $9.99, you have no excuse not to pick it upā€¦taffer.

Windows · by HandofShadow (49) · 2007

A masterfully paced, artistic achievement with a great underlying paradox

The Good
"Thief" is an extremely well put-together game, its production values range from high to impeccable across the board. The graphics are fine and fluid, the animation outstanding, music is scarce but extremely effective and has an interesting style (it's sort of an ambient-industrial blend) and sound design is simply perfect. Adding to that, "Thief" boasted quite an A.I. for its time, which can be considered to be quite effective, even today. The interface is complex and yet easy to control (with a small amount of learning applied), but most important, its initial premise of playing a thief, who is basically a weakling and won't be able to live through a second fight, is both original and fun. One has to sneak past guards, stay constantly in the shadows, pickpocket bloated, rich madmen and silently kill enemies (very frightening ones, too). Unless, of course, one chooses a higher difficulty setting which will most certainly go with the condition to not kill anybody. In my opinion, this a wonderful design element of the game, actually aimed at influencing the player to kill as few enemies as possible on any difficulty setting, for the whole tone even of the existence of such a feature suggests that killing will only be resorted to by "rookies", and that it's unnecessary for the "real" thief. Some game developers should have a look at such an idea and re-evaluate their own "the bloodier, the better"-routines, for here it is: a game where one may kill all sorts of people, yet is encouraged not to do so, not merely out of "heard-em-already" moral reasons, but because it is simply more of a challenge! And this is just one of "Thief"s many intelligent ideas and devices, and there are a lot more points which are in desperate need of flattering.

"Thief" is one of the few games I know that ties its different elements so closely together that the final game approaches complete homogeneity. It ceases to be merely a parallel display of graphics, music, content and control, on the contrary, all these elements are fused so well that one is bound to forget that this game was not created by a single artist. This becomes clear when one has a look at one of its extremely well designed levels, namely #5, "The Sword". It starts out as a regular thieving mission to some guy's mansion, however, the introductory cutscene mentions something about said guy being extremely extravagant or even...crazy. The level begins normal enough, one breaks into the house, raids a few rooms, then, suddenly, one is standing on a floor's ceiling, the walls have slowly become more and more tilted, colour palette has changed from subdued brownish to twisted LSD, and with these changes there are eerie sound effects coming up, a sinister, silent laugh, getting louder and louder as one approaches the central aim of the level, where all sorts of spooky, natural sounds, evoking the thought of a dark and threatening forest, will hit the player while the level's ending cutscene doesn't deliver any relief to this rising tension but makes it leap to yet another level. Sounds, graphics and even cut-scenes completely blend in with level design, just because "Thief" does not continuously try to impress the player with its technical prowess, but aims at mastering the art of dosage, of pacing, of build-up. If you want to have an effect of real, intense loudness, go ahead and start out silent, that's the philosophy behind "Thief". Music is only used sparingly at chosen moments, sound design will always come up with new, uncomfortable surprises, and the graphics really come to life due to the architecture employed during the different levels. Here, too, "Thief" succeeds in delivering the maximum effect because of its masterful change between immense structures vs. creepy tunnels, light-flooded mansions vs. dark prison cells and civilized casinos vs. zombie-infested graveyards.

This whole philosophy of merging elements and applying them at just the right time is also true for the whole world displayed in this game, and what a world it is. This has nothing to do with your average,"Lord-of-the-Ringy" fantasy stuff - and boy is it nice to have some change in that department going on once in a while. "Thief" employs a steampunk, "futuristic Victorian" look, combines it with medieval elements, adds a whole load of horror stuff and delves it in a simplified kind of a Miltonic, "split" world-view where you'd have:

reality vs. dreams, light vs. darkness, security vs. fear, order vs. chaos, stagnation vs. creativity, Satan/Pagans vs. God/Hammerites

As I said, it's all quite simplistic, but it's extremely focused and to the point, offering a highly original, yet familiar world where one feels immediately "at home" in spite of all the strange things going on. Moreover, the moral ambiguity with which both main fractions of the game (Pagans and Hammerites) are portrayed actually makes the main character's own shadowy, "neutral" (albeit self-serving) way not only the most appealing, but probably the better one, too, and all this is addressed not only in the game's background (by exploring, reading stuff, etc.), it's all part of the main story and one's own character's development as well. However, the best thing is the way the game's title ("The Dark Project") is implemented into the story, and the resulting paradox.

!!!WARNING!!! UPCOMING SPOILER:

How great is it to create a game where the player is absolutely dependant on darkness and not-being-seen, yet has to look for something called "The Eye" and prevent the world from a total black-out?



The Bad
This is one of the very few games where I could not find a real flaw. Moreover, I find many of the flaws found by other players quite wonderful. I thought the zombies were plain horrifically well done, and I did not find that "Thief" was lacking a freely explorable city, on the contrary, I found that the division into different levels actually helped the game's sense of drama.

One could criticize the ever-oppressing nature of "Thief" though, and the sheer intensity of all the sneaking going on. It can be quite an exhausting game because it never offers any "relief" - however, I like that, too.

The Bottom Line
The perfect blend between all its different elements, their ingenious, individual executions and an overall great sense of pacing and dosage make "Thief" stand out as a masterfully created, frightful experience destined to distract the player from reality for quite some time (it's a rather long game, after all). And when one re-enters that reality, one may well think about the amount of hypocrisy and of stubborn, religious fundamentalism to be found there, too, or about our desperate need to shut out as many reminders of our own mortality as possible - for that is, after all, one of the reasons we put lights everywhere, isn't it?

A final note on this version of the game: The "Gold" edition of "Thief" features three more, superbly designed levels which are well integrated into the games plot, making the its division into introduction-main part-endgame more balanced. In my opinion it's the best version of "Thief".

Windows · by worldwideweird (29) · 2007

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Game added by Kate Jones.

Additional contributors: Xoleras, Danfer.

Game added May 4, 2000. Last modified March 17, 2024.