> > The thing is, there's plenty of times where
> >killing a guard would make sense in the context
> >of the game. Watching a few patrolling guards'
> >patterns in order to snipe one on a tower at the
> >right time could be very strategic and with the
> >flow of the game. But this is virtually
> >un-doable. And there could be consequences for
> >doing so indiscriminately -- guards finding
> >corpses, hearing death cries, etc. But again, if
> >the game doesn't want you to kill anybody at all,
> >why are you armed?
>
> This works exactly as you describe it. In fact, In the first level I *did* stand in a high place and "snipe" a guard below me. And he died. And his buddy came along, saw the body, and tore off down the hall looking for me.
>
> > Ideally, yes. But that requires an incredible
> >amount of sneaking around and generally requires
> >that you do it in the way the developers intended
> >you because it's all about timing. One of the
> >things I loved about a game like Half-Life is
> >that I can kill people strategically. There's
> >almost always more than one way to approach a
> >situation. In Thief you pretty much always have
> >to follow along the specified "route" finding the
> >unlocked or pickable doors and avoiding guards by
> >memorizing a bunch of timed movements. I don't
> >really feel like I'm interacting here.
>
> Bull. I played the demo level about 25 times. And I'm not the type of person to play it the same damned way 25 times, either. I tried whole bunches of different scenarios. Sure, there were some that worked better than others, and the one that "worked best" was probably the one the developers had in mind. But it doesn't mean I couldn't do other things, or that I was locked into one way of playing. I think Thief has almost endless variety in how you handle many of the basic situations.
>

There is more then one demo version of Theif (original)out that I know of - the one that I'll be discussing is the one where you start out in a shop and 2 guys try and shoot you, miss, and shoot the shop owner. You then have to follow them to some guy's mansion, that has many locked doors, some of them have alarm wires attached to them. Having said that, here's the amusing part:

Once I went through a door with an alarm on it. The alarm actually worked and I was being chased by about 10 guys with swords through the house....and I still managed to win the mission (on easy, of course, so that I was allowed to kill the guards). There's how it worked. With all these guys chasing me, I went out of the mansion and took the first left. There was a very small river there, and on the other side there was a platform wth a light. I swam to the other side of the river and stood on that platform. All the guards, being unable to swim, just stood on the other side of the river trying to chase me becasue they could see me very easily, but none could get across the river. I just pulled out my flame arrows and wasted all of them. Once they were dead, I just swam over to the now-deserted mansion (With the alarm still blaring) and completed the mission.

I have to admit though, that was pretty pathetic. PLEASE tell me that they improved the computer