“The Thief games are good in this respect – there are plenty of problems, but they can be solved by forethought, care, cunning, lateral thinking or running like hell.” “I think a game goes wrong when you start to fight the programmer rather than the game,” he observes. “But being able to hide from guards who appear to have amazing acuity sometimes is a talent in itself.” He also liked that Thief II let you solve its problems at your own pace, and in your own way. “I get edgy in games that require killing as an objective,” he wrote in July 2002.
Pratchett liked that Thief II was a game that you could finish without killing anyone, which appealed to his personal morals. “High above the city in a world of your own, exploring every opportunity, with no other goal than ‘nick anything you find’, and the sounds of the Watch are floating up from below …”Īngelwatch, the mechanised tower of Life of the Party, viewed from the rooftops along the Thieves’ Highway. “Life of the Party before you get to the tower seemed to me what should all be about,” he wrote. In a post titled: “Favourite Thief II Mission”, he chooses Life of the Party, an expansive level wherein Garrett gatecrashes an extravagant reception hosted inside a vast, mechanised tower, infiltrating the structure via the city’s rooftops.
Can anyone help, please?” Pratchett wrote.īut he soon begins to share his own thoughts on the game. “Whatever I do, the game ends on the basis that I’ve been spotted – even if, as I head up the slope, I go invisible. In a post titled: “Help! Spotted Every time” he requests assistance with Thief II’s eighth mission Trace the Courier, in which players must follow a Lieutenant of the City Watch as she carries a secret message to an unknown recipient. Like so many players who become involved in online communities, he posted because he was stuck. Pratchett first appears on the forum in August 2001. Combined, they provide a fascinating record of Pratchett’s evolving relationship with both the Thief series and video games in general. That newsgroup, analogous to a modern forum, has long since been deactivated, but its posts survive in a Google groups archive. He played all three games in the series, and often contributed to a Usenet newsgroup named -dark-project. But Pratchett held a particular affection for Thief. He even helped to create a mod (an unofficial add-on) for The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, writing lines of dialogue for a character.
Always technologically savvy, he was an early adopter of PC gaming, and enjoyed everything from Doom to Deus Ex and Call of Duty. Pratchett’s relationship with video games is well documented. To slip past guards in Thief, you must hide in shadows, and avoid treading on noisy tiles and metal.
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