Thief 2X Released
Sunday, May 15th, 2005 - 4:56pm
Thief fans are mad. I should know, I'm one of them. Anyway, a long, long time ago (about when Looking Glass died, iirc), some of them got it into their heads that they'd make a full-blown expansion to Thief 2. And now, finally, it's done. Thirteen new missions, new main character, cinematics, all weighing in at a hefty 656 MB download. Mirrors are here. Trailer for the sceptical here.
Right, I'm off to play some. Impressions will follow. Eventually.
"The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one's time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all."
I just made a friend/thief-adept very happy with the news. Sometimes it's so easy to make people happy...
Roo: "Just to cheer you up if any of the above made you sad: Boobies."
Koning_Floris, on my online 'skills': "Stinking is a skill too!"
Let us know how it is! I'm just itching for an excuse to install it again
Certis beat me to it. - Elysium
Congratulations, you've just made me comprehensively wet myself during my revision.
"A fanatic is one who can't change his mind and won't change the subject." - Churchill
Woot. I'm on it. Thanks for the heads up.
More Splinter Cell Coop, and now more Thief 2? What God did I please?
Politely rude. Briskly vague. Firmly uninformative.
Why yourself ResidentGod
.
McChuck wrote:
O.O
You were watching?
Politely rude. Briskly vague. Firmly uninformative.
Is the X for XXXXXXtreme?
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Wha?! Talk about being blindsided! I had no idea something like this was in the works. Thanks for the heads-up, ALG. I'll definately be downloading this!
And please, someone post some impressions.
Swing harder! Swing harder!
-- Lilarcor, Baldur's Gate 2
I only got past the introduction and the first proper mission last night before collapsing into an exhausted, smelly heap, so I can't really give any deeper insights yet. My impression so far is that it's solid but not mindblowing, but clearly that's something later levels can change in a heartbeat.
There's a bunch of niggling stuff, cosmetic changes to differentiate it from Garrett's adventures that really weren't for the better, like the light gem looking rubbish (illustrated in this very 56k unfriendly screenshot) and the plain wacky knockout hammer replacing the blackjack. The story setup also makes the protagonist Zaya look hilariously naive re: her mentor Malak ("Mal. Bad - in the latin.") and his motivations.
The atmosphere seems right though, and really, the levels are where it's at anyway. The intro is rather un-thiefy for resons that'll become obvious once you play it, but first proper level is a far more traditional heist, in case the mad dashing and traps have you worried.
The architecture and texture work is very pleasing so far, and they've certainly paid a whole lot of attention to detail. Certainly looks to provide many hours of thieving fun, but that's hardly a definite verdict. Now, if only that evil daystar radiation would stop giving me monitor glare, I'd go menace some city streets and form more concreete opinions.
"The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one's time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all."
Urgh! It looks more like a light pearl of something.
Sigh. How long will it take people to realise that traditional caricatures just don't cut it anymore. I want some emotional depth, damnit! At least Garrett's moral and intellectual parameters were clearly and realistically defined*.
Thanks for the impressions, ALG.
* In Thief 1 and 2 at least - there's a rant brewing in me pertaining to how those parameters are portrayed in Thief 3.
Swing harder! Swing harder!
-- Lilarcor, Baldur's Gate 2
Her being naive isn't really all that out of character, what with her being an ickle wee foreign girl fresh to the City and all, but it's not very well handled in that particular instance, to say the least.
Two more missions under the belt, and it's still pretty good fun. They do some mad, mad stuff with the Dark Engine in there.
"The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one's time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all."
This is great news. A copy of Thief 3 came with my new system, and it's absolutely craptacular -- hard crashes without warning, despite the latest (stable) nVidia drivers.
I'll be more than happy to take another spin with the tried-n-true predecessor.
I started my own blog so when I feel the need to make an ass out of myself, I won't have as far to go.
I've played the first real mission through and have to say I'm enjoying it quite a bit. They've created a great sense of place. Creeping through rooms with interesting things in each, picking the right time to knock out a guard, discovering and reading through the backstory as you work your way through the level. It's good times.
Poo! I cannot get the thing to work!
I reinstall my Thief 2, and it runs happily.
I get the t2x_setup.exe and run it, pointing at the same Thief 2 directory, and it installs fine.
When I run t2x.exe it starts fine, but as soon as I attempt to do the "start game" after setting the difficulty, I get the "do I want to report this program bug to Microsoft" popup.
I reran t2x_setup.exe to reinstall. Nothing changes.
I even followed the steps to make t2x be what you get to when you run "Thief 2", and it worked just the same as the t2x.exe did.
Looking through the FAQ and the pointed-to forum failed to yield any clues to what's wrong, at least to my feeble scanning.
Anyone have ideas where to do next, or do I just give up and go back to trying to finish Thief 3?
"Gamers With Jobs will take over the world someday. I hope they're benevolent overlords." -- Bill Harris
Well Thief 3, while definately not perfect, is well worth finishing. Some of the last levels are quite nice.
Any chance of posting the details of the error message? Might point us in a direction to get you going.
This could be a cutscene issue. Do the cutscenes in Thief 2 vanilla play correctly?
Swing harder! Swing harder!
-- Lilarcor, Baldur's Gate 2
Have you patched Thief2 up to v1.18?
I`m Artsy Partsy Gun For Hire
I whined about this elsewhere here in GWJ, but my Thief 3 game is in a cannot-use-any-items state and has been for quite a while. This means I cannot heal myself, cannot use holy water, cannot make any flaming oil, toss a flash mine, etc.
I'm at the being-hunted-by-the-keeper-assassins stage, and am only down a couple of health points (through lots of save-try-and-restores) and just haven't had the energy to get back to trying this portion so restricted.
If you know what I need to tweak to get my item use reenabled, please let me know!
I assumed it was the usual memory fault or the like -- it's not like you get a core file or anything really useful when a program dies like you do on UNIX. Anyway, I guess I'll reinstall it all and
copy down the info.
Yes, they did. Although since the expansion added a new codec, presumably one not used by the old Thief 2, maybe there was something up with that portion.
I wasn't sure where to look for the version, but I got Thief 1 and 2
as a pair in the "platinum collection" version, and checking Eidos for updates, they didn't have any for that version, only for the separately purchased Thief 2's. Also, doing the "check for updates" when installing and also from the start-up Thief 2 pop-up didn't have any effect.
Therefore I assumed it was as up-to-date as it could be.
"Gamers With Jobs will take over the world someday. I hope they're benevolent overlords." -- Bill Harris
check www.thief-thecircle.com for patches. It seems that many retail versions have v1.07 like mine did (bought some weird Sold-out repackaged version). Autoupdate said I was all set, so I patched it manually. Also, there are two different patches from 1.07 to 1.18 - one is around 30megs and one around 45. 45 megabytes version is for so called "premiere" version, I needed that one. No one one seems to know why versions differ so substantially size-wise. Thecircle has both.
I`m Artsy Partsy Gun For Hire
That's some bad mojo there Croaker. Combine that with the issues you're having with Thief 2x and I'm inclined to ask if you've any other apps that's giving you issues.
As far as the error message after the Thief 2 crash. If you hit details and grab the code. Sometimes you can get an Idea of what's causing it from a google search.
That's a different game I'm going to get back to finishing.
Not particularly. If I were to do anything to my system, I'd add another 0.5 Gig of RAM. I rarely have problems on newer games, but sometimes have issues with older ones--but I've assumed that was mostly WinXP v. DOS/WIn95/Win98 issues.
And I'll admit that I never finished the original Thief 2. I just couldn't slog my way through the final mission in the huge mechanists building. I reached the point where it seemed like I'd need to be guided directly by a walkthrough, and that's just not fun for me. I'd done all the rest essentially on my own, and all at "expert" level (just as I'm doing with Thief 3), but it was too much, I guess.
"Gamers With Jobs will take over the world someday. I hope they're benevolent overlords." -- Bill Harris
Success!
The version was up-to-date as I expected, but I was wrong about the regular Thief 2 working fine. When I tried to play it, T2 hung hard (as in had to use the reset button hard) shorly after walking around the first mission.
Checking the http://www.thief-thecircle.com/ site it had the problem described there: Thief just ain't happy running on a CPU with hyperthreading enabled. If you only permit thief2.exe to run on one CPU (set affinity menu button through the task manager) Thief 2 runs fine. (Unfortunately unless you use some utility to fiddle with the executables, you need to do this adjustment each time you start the game.)
Then I did the t2x_setup.exe and did the same modification when starting that way, and everything seems to be working fine.
Now, if I can just get an answer to my Thief 3 no-item-using bug, I'd be set!
Thanks for your help folks.
"Gamers With Jobs will take over the world someday. I hope they're benevolent overlords." -- Bill Harris