Thief 2 - Dark Project

Plot Summary

Thief's story takes place in what is best described as a steampunk world (specifically fantasy steampunk). Thief's setting is a conflation of late medieval society with early industrial revolution technology and magic in a dense urban environment.

Guards wear metal armor and are armed with arming swords and bows. Cobbled streets of half timbered houses and stone mansions are lit by electric street lights. The classical elements of earth, fire, air and water naturally form into crystals that can be bought or found around the levels and used as tools. Characters in the game generally speak using modern English (with some exceptions; see below) in variations on British and New England accents. The game also has unique fauna such as Burricks and Craymen (see Opponents).

Thief's narrative is elliptically told, leaving much of the detail regarding characters, events and the game world to be inferred from observation and documents found in the game. The story is progressed through the briefings, several elaborate cutscenes and the missions themselves. In the missions players can read books and scrolls, overhear conversations and Garrett himself often makes comments. The core plot of the story is told via Garrett's narrow perspective, which rarely describes things that aren't of immediate concern. However external aspects and influences on the story are constantly being alluded to. Three groups from Thief society are of particular importance: The Keepers, The Order of the Hammer and the Pagans. The Order of the Hammer features in the game itself, but neither the Keepers or the Pagans are ever explicitly described. They are known primarily through the long quotes that open each briefing video. These quotes are presented as excerpts from the writings of each group and, though not always relevant to the mission, are effectively incluing players in general.
The Keepers are the group with whom Garrett served a lengthy apprenticeship. A secret society, they are enigmatic to the point that it is unclear if a member of the Keepers carries on any public life outside the group. They are preoccupied with the idea of balance in all things and typically portrayed as hooded figures engaged in some scholarly work or observation. The Keepers believe Garrett is too skilled to be left to his own devices.
The Order of the Hammer, or The Hammerites, are a militant theocratic religious group with a long involvement in the City's history. They are named for the favoured tool of the Builder, a messianic figure who led mankind to leave primitive life. The hammer is present in all of their iconography right down to their weapons. Hammerites speak and write in a distinctive fashion, derivative of Early Modern English such as that found in the King James Bible.
The Pagans in Thief: the Dark Project are barely present. Their quotes are taken from poems, songs and fragments of parchment found in abandoned temples and other ruins. They are noted by their use of an, at times barely comprehensible, rustic dialect. Their writings speak of the destruction of the natural order by the 'manfools' and a belief system that has a cyclical view of existence. For example: "Builds your Roofs of Dead Wood. Builds your Walls of Dead Stone. Builds your Dreams of Dead Thoughts. Comes Crying Laughing Singing back to Life, takes what you steal, And pulls the skins from your Dead Bones shrieking."
-Clay tablet in an abandoned Trickster Temple (taken from the briefing to The Sword).

Some in-game documents show characters using the same dialect, indicating that the Pagans have not been completely overridden in the City's culture.

The notion of assembling scraps of information by seeking it out, stumbling upon it or being presented with it is key to Thief's narrative structure and gameplay.

Story outline

The game opens with Garrett telling about his early years as a youth living on the streets of the City. After he gets caught trying to pickpocket a strange man, the man reveals him to be a Keeper, and notes that the fact that Garrett can see him at all is unusual. Garrett accepts his offer to take up the Keeper training, but instead of staying with the Keepers, he leaves to put his skills to other uses.

Some time later Garrett is working as an independent thief in the City. Shortly after a series of succesful missions, thugs working for the local crime lord, Ramirez, attempt to kill Garrett for non payment of tribute. Garrett turns the tables, going on to humiliate Ramirez by looting his mansion. This brazen display of skill attracts the attention of Viktoria, a somewhat mysterious independent fence. She contracts Garrett to steal a magical sword from the eccentric nobleman Constantine. Upon Garret's successful return from Constantine's bizarre mansion, Viktoria reveals that she and Constantine are old associates who were testing Garrett. Constantine offers Garrett a fortune for the job of retrieving a gemstone known as The Eye.

Getting to The Eye means Garrett must venture through the abandoned and walled-off Old Quarter of the City to the old Hammerite cathedral. A mysterious catastrophe, rumored to involve great fires and many undead, caused the area's abandonment decades ago. Garrett finds the cathedral sealed, but the Eye itself tells him of an old Keeper library hidden nearby. Writings there tell of where the talismans that open the cathedral are hidden. The first pair of talismans are found in the Lost City, the ruins of an ancient civilization buried beneath the existing city. To get the second pair of talismans, Garrett enters a Hammerite temple in disguise. Successful, he then returns to the cathedral and collects The Eye from amid the many undead, escaping with the help of Hammerite Brother Murus' ghost.

Garrett visits Constantine to hand over The Eye and collect his payment. Instead of paying, however, Constantine reveals himself to be the fabled Trickster, the entity worshipped by the Pagans. They bind Garrett in vines and pluck out one of his eyes, using it to activate the gemstone, and leave him for dead. However, two Keepers find and free the unconscious Garrett from the vines, leaving him to escape by himself through the caverns beneath Constantine's mansion. On his way, Garret finds Constantine's notes, which tell about the titular "Dark Project" - the Trickster's plan to use the Eye for a ritual that will bring the world back to a wild, uncivilized state.

Upon reaching the surface, Garrett decides the only thing to do is to visit the Hammerites and tell them about what has happened. He heads for the temple, but discovers that the Trickster's minions have gotten there first. He finds the remaining Hammerites in a hidden sanctuary down below the temple. With stealth being the only hope against the Trickster's army, the Hammerites provide Garrett with a booby-trapped copy of The Eye. Garrett descends into the Trickster's realm, where he finds Constantine performing the ritual. Garrett stealthily swaps the Eye for its trapped copy, which explodes, striking down the Trickster.

Garrett, now outfitted with a mechanical eye, returns to town and comes upon a Keeper, who cryptically tells him that Garret will have a great need of the Keepers soon. Garrett says that he doesn't want to have anything to do with them anymore and walks away into the streets. The Keeper says quietly "Beware the dawn of the metal age", foreshadowing the sequel, Thief II: The Metal Age.

Opponents

To create an immersive environment for such adventuring the game's NPCs are often persistently active in a level and always make use of thorough pathfinding. That is, the game's AIs carry on their movements whether the player is around or not (guards patrolling a mansion for instance) and are able to navigate level architecture almost completely. For example, if the player is walking through the courtyard of a mansion and a guard on the second floor sees this through a window, the guard will then run to the nearest stairs and out through the building to attack (even if the nearest stairs are on the opposite side of the building). The aforementioned guard's excitement may cause any other guards he passes to join him in the chase. This and other complex interactions NPCs can have (such as servants running to fetch guards to where they saw the player) coupled with the elaborate level architecture allows for a considerable degree of unpredictability in the gameplay.