The Thief 2 v 1.19 Patch

I saw this last week somewhere. I can’t exactly remember where, but I think it may have been Sshock2.com, which has more frequent updates than say thief-thecircle.com.

In any case, it appears that some mysterious taffer who goes by the name of “Le Corbeau”, on a French language forum has been working on a version 1.19 patch for Thief 2, and not only that, but has a patch for System Shock 2 as well that upgrades it from v 2.3 to v 2.4. These are unofficial, mind you. It’s been 12 years or more since Thief II v 1.18 was released by LGS.

These patches introduce a whole host of new fixes, from graphics, textures and resolution to gameplay and AI – fixes which probably aren’t apparent to anyone right away when playing the game, but this patch does make the game easier to run on modern operating systems and hardware. There’s also an upgrade to the editor, DromEd, too.

This comes at an opportune time as I was just contemplating whether I really wanted to install Thief II and play it… again. I’m now leaning more towards yes more than ever. Not only because of the patch, but because of some mods and FMs that I’ve downloaded for the game as well recently.

There’s a thread over the TTLG forums where you can get download links for these unofficial patches.

Thief and Thief II over at Good Old Games

I received this info this month while visiting Cheap Thief Missions recently. It seems as though GOG finally got a hold of Thief Gold and Thief II: The Metal Age!

Going over there to have a look at the games’ pages, the user reviews are in and it’s 5 stars all round – and it should be, because these truly are classic titles that served to inspire further games that took a more stealthy route rather than all-out gunplay.

They both currently go for $9.99, but that price may well drop as time goes by, as the average price for games on GOG is about $5.99. But still, both games for $20 – that’s not too bad at all. Of course, these are digital downloads and both game are a bout a CD’s content in weight. For those of you who don’t have a decent internet connection, you can still get these games as retail products, with boxes and manuals – everything. And they’re not too expensive. Really, from Amazon you can get Thief and even full Thief series bundles (including Deadly Shadows) if you shop around a bit for less than $9.99 and shipping is free. So while digital might be more convenient for those in the first world, in my opinion GOG should lower the price for competitive reasons soon.

Now all they have to do is get System Shock and System Shock 2 on there – they’ve been two of the most demanded titles yet to appear on GOG for some time now. Then the Looking Glass collection would be a little nearer to being complete.

The Dark Mod Version 1.07 Released

I was just reading yesterday that the latest version of The Dark Mod, 1.07 is now out!

There’s plenty of bugfixes and AI has been improved quite a bit. NPCs now notice ropes dangling from wooden structures (rope arrows), interact better with doors and so on, and combat animations have been improved too (about time).

In addition to, that I’m quite excited to see that for the first time, vine arrows are now available for mappers to use in their fan missions. Vine arrows differ from rope arrows in the way that they can be used on both wooden surfaces and metal grates. Traditionally they are more expensive than rope arrows in official Thief games (they’ve only appeared so far in Thief II: The Metal Age – late in the game, too).

It’s always the little things that count…

There’s plenty of other improvements in this release - there’s an entire list for you to read. The download weight should be about 184 MB, apparently. Run your tdm_update.exe file to update your version to the latest one. Finish your FMs first. Savegames won’t work after the upgrade.

By the way, I took a look over at The Dark Mod’s Moddb page, and I saw that now they have a version 1.06 file (going on 2 GB) for download. Previously there was only a version 1.03.

----

Source: TDM