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Comment by qwertyuiop924 | Hacker News Reader

Funnily enough, I've been playing Thief recently (this one, not the rubbish new one). And wow that game is hard.

It's also an absolute blast to play, and an important piece of gaming history (one of the first First Person Stealth games, helped codify 3D stealth as a genre, engine later used in System Shock 2, had some influence on Warren Spector's next game, Deus Ex).

While the renderer wasn't particularly impressive for the time, the AI, sound, and lighting engines were, which was essential for a stealth game.

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> And wow that game is hard.

It's brutal. I ended up way down at the far end of a level (a sewer I think) only to find that I was missing something I needed to do or have from back near the beginning. Lack of attention gets punished hard. Great game though, you really feel like you earned beating each level.

Finished that and Thief 2 on max objectives on every level. Not because I'm particularly fond of rock hard gameplay, but because you got to appreciate the game to its fullest extent.

Games that up the difficulty by making the mobs bullet sponges, meh.

(With that said, some levels in the first were a real grind to deal with all the guards.)

Well, I finished Thief just before I met my now-wife. In fact I think I finished the last few levels while we were just dating. So it's just as well I didn't go for all the objectives or either I'd not have been too busy to meet her, or I'd have stopped before finishing ;)

I really appreciated the fact that one of the ways they ramped up the difficulty was by increasing the required objectives.

There's literally entire areas you don't need to visit if you use the lower difficulties. On the other hand, the extra cash you get lets you buy a lot more stuff... which you're going to need to accomplish all those objectives.

I don't particularly ever wish to revisit The Cathedral. Spent three hours retracing my steps trying to find about 15 gold...

The real challenge was to finish the game on Expert, where you didn't have to kill anyone. It was a great system that allowed dedicated players to get most out of the stealth mechanics, while still providing an alternative play style for casual players.

There's an even more difficult playstyle called "ghosting" which 'requires' that the player not even alert a guard past a certain level, let alone knock them out.

It's well worth a try if you've never given ghosting a shot, although the game design doesn't always permit it.

For the ultimate challenge, try playing Theif Zatoichi style: entirely blind.

No, I didn't make that up. Someone on the looking glass forums brought it up as a joke. I don't think anyone has done it yet, though.

Given how many games there are blind runs of, though...

I found it not that hard at least on levels with people. Instead of killing, you just blackjacked everyone and hid them.

And the world was so open, you could play as little or as much of a map as you wanted, given you cleared objectives. Rope arrows took you up buildings if you didn't want to crawl through. Plenty of bystanders to scare off playing ghost if you wanted to crawl every inch of their quarters for silver.

If I'm remembering correctly, one of the things that made the higher difficulties more difficult was the fact that you were not allowed to kill anyone.

To be fair, something like half of the first game was full of super-natural creatures (Undead, monsters), which you were both allowed to kill, and had enough supplies to, on any difficulty.

Thief 2 was almost entirely composed of human enemies, and even had some missions where you couldn't knock them out - or even be seen by them.

Aside from the no-kill requirement, higher difficulties reduced the amount of items you could find, increased the number of objectives you needed to accomplish, and greatly increased the number of guards you had to deal with.

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