The (Almost) Perfect Level Design of Thief II: The Metal Age

Despite one almost fatal flaw in its final mission, Thief II: The Metal Age contains some of the most purposefully crafted and well-designed levels of any game you could hope to play.

This is the 2000 sequel to 1998's Thief: The Dark Project, which was a stealth-based immersive sim from Ultima Underworld and System Shock creators Looking Glass Studios. These are first person games where the objective verb is to infiltrate, and the best approach is usually to avoid combat while focusing on lockpicking and looting.

The second game features almost exactly the same gameplay and player abilities, but sees the lead character Garrett more focused on breaking into mansions, banks and other well-guarded locations around the series' steampunk The City, as opposed to delving into tombs and fighting off monsters. The horror atmosphere of the original is largely absent though not entirely, but as far as creating a simulation of being a thief with the tools to rob from the rich and pay the rent, the design of the environments and objectives is nearly spotless.

In contrast to the first game, where the story came first and levels were created to support it, for Thief II the team designed a series of levels and wrote the story around them. This is a design-first game, which likely contributes to its stately pacing and structure.

Unlike some other immersive sims where players can generally eschew stealth in favour of a violent approach, direct confrontation and combat is very challenging. Garrett is pretty fragile, and sword blows from the startled guards will knock his health down at an alarming rate. As far as being an immersive sim goes, this is more about different approaches you can take with the qualifier they have to be stealthy, and about a simulation and engaging realisation of the game world you inhabit. The levels are built in such a way as to encourage expression via different routes and optional areas and objectives, so that players can still find their own “path of least resistance” within the more prescriptive abilities open to Garrett.

The key mechanic of these games is the light gem at the bottom of the screen that dims or brightens depending how much light you are stood in and how fast you are moving – as you play you become accustomed to paying attention to this constantly as it will inform how well guards can see you. Combined with this is an NPC scheduling system that, well before The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, would have guards and other characters moving around levels of their own accord on patrols of varying routes and complexity. Being aware of where you are, where NPCs are, and where you have observed they are likely to be, is key to playing the game.

You also make different levels of noise depending on what you are walking across. The game employs genuine 3D sound, simulating the way real noises bounce off surfaces in its game world. Eric Brosius and the sound team worked with the Dark Engine to give different areas or “room brushes”, different acoustic properties. My source for this is the fandom wiki, where you can also look at some of the various audio environments. The result is that when playing the game, you could close your eyes and know what surface you are walking on.

Do note that although I am mostly not discussing the story, there will be complete spoilers for how the missions themselves play out – and those levels are arguably the most joyful discoveries you will have playing this game, so fair warning if you haven't tried this 20-year old classic yet.

Abilities that change how you move through levels

Garrett does have access to a range of tools and equipment. This includes mines to use as traps, either lethally or not, flares to light up darker areas (this is an extremely gloomy game at times), and most significantly arrows with elemental properties. These can be used to create new paths – there is a water arrow that can be used to douse torches, creating new patches of shadow for Garrett to skulk through, and rope and vine arrows that, once embedded in a surface, will unspool a length of rope or vine to climb up and gain higher ground. This is provided at the beginning of each mission, and you can add to it with the loot you picked up in the last level.

The kicker is, you only have one chance to use your gear – encouraging the player to experiment and try different ways of overcoming or circumventing the guard arrangements and security systems.

The levels, which are designed in such a way as to allow replays to have an altered journey through them, may encourage a player to prioritise a certain gear purchase when they play again, or if they save themselves into an impossible situation and have to restart anyway. Some might have a lot of loud floors so you would want to take more moss arrows to soften your footsteps on those surfaces, others are particularly well lit so you need more water arrows to extinguish the torches, and so on. Perhaps a well-placed rope arrow would create a path that circumvents an encounter you had trouble with.

What this means is that you are getting more out of the game if you do play again, having a different experience, and knowledge of the layouts is meaningful and rewarded. Also, if you do find a level too hard restarting might allow you to swing the odds in your favour with your gear choices.

Thief II's levels – spaces that feel real

The levels in Thief 2 resemble real places rather than corridors or video game environments. Viewed from above, these resemble the charming little maps Garrett often takes with him, which in the fiction he has either purloined from an insider or sketched based on what he knows of the place he's about to hit. The map is a very clever inclusion especially when combined with the compass you have, which is an item on your hotbar that swings as you turn. So the levels are built to support true-to-life compass navigation via a drawn map you can pull up. Not to mention - and why don't games do this more often - you can annotate your map! Being able to personalise this resource can be huge, particularly in later levels which can be both enormous and labyrinthine.

There is a lot of environmental storytelling on offer with readables, signs, notes, books and more that provide narrative and detail on the people who live and work in these spaces – thorough players can begin finding out about key characters and factions almost before they are properly introduced. A perfect example is the early “Shipping... and Receiving”, where each warehouse you open doesn't just reward you with the loot the person had stored there, but information about who they are and what they're up to.

You'll have a variety of methods of ingress, including crawlspaces, rooftops, back doors and more. Some areas have very open spaces while others are enclosed, making it more difficult to avoid notice and reducing the visibility advantages you often have over the guards. The guards themselves – and the robots and monsters that are introduced with surprising narrative deftness – may be stationary or patrolling. The levels are also designed to enable you to ghost them if you want to, with each guard patrol or security system offering at least one exploit for the player. On harder difficulties you will often be failed for knocking out guards even non-lethally. Streets, corridors and rooms are designed to enable guards a pretty good view of most of it, most of the time, so that with timing and by taking advantage of patches of shadow Garrett can effectively sneak past.

All of these elements of design and gameplay are brought to bear in a series of 15 missions that, for the most part, make exceptionally good use of each to guide the player through an escalating series of challenges and rewarding experiences.

One of the best first-fifths in gaming

The opening three levels ingeniously introduce gameplay and up the challenge in stages. Unlike the first game Thief II doesn't feature a training level, but the opening mission does an excellent job of tutorialising the gameplay. While still shaped like a real place, 'Running Interference' gently pushes players through the Rumsford Manor in almost a straight line. Unusually, Garrett starts off with a key – which opens one door on the other side of the manor from his target, his friend's captured fiance who he must rescue. This linear infiltration introduces each mechanic in turn, with a few different arrangements of guards near generous pools of shadow so the player can get accustomed to alertness levels and taking advantage of hiding places in a low risk way. On normal difficulty, exploration of the second floor of the mansion is completely optional – deftly introducing the idea that pushing around the edges of levels will be greatly rewarded.

'Shipping... and Receiving' opens up, giving you a large open area to explore. With a cleverly simple hook – Garrett needs to steal enough money to be able to pay the rent – you are dropped into a warehouse district and can make your own path around the area to complete this objective. You can explore however you want, with a number of points of ingress to the warehouses that will eventually bring you to a central control room from which to open the lockboxes. Readables found throughout the level and a hint you can buy beforehand will clue you in to where the best loot is found, and you basically choose who you want to rob and then go. Or, rob everyone and have more money for gear in the next level.

It provides a feeling of freedom and possibility that, this early in the game, is formative. The level is well placed (in contrast to the first game's second mission 'Break from Cragscleft Prison' which is quite linear and hostile). It showed me that I could expect locations to offer a number of ways for me to get into them and back out again, and that beyond the completion of my objectives, how much longer I spent in a level would be largely up to me.

The third level, 'Framed' (full writeup here), is where Thief II begins to play some of its best cards. You are infiltrating a police station, and compared to the warehouse district the player is now closed in by a tighter and more restrictive environment which necessitates a hall-by-hall and room-by-room puzzle solving approach. Robotic security systems are introduced as well.

However the ace up the sleeves of the designers for this level, Rich Carlson and Rob Caminos, is that even on the Normal difficulty, you'll fail the mission if you knock out more than five guards. This partially enforces a “ghosting” style of play. Part of the thrill of these games is getting past guards without them ever knowing anything was wrong, but some players (myself included) might initially be too nervous to leave the guard wandering around and so knock them out and hide them in a corner. Having a restriction like this placed on me not only encouraged me to shake up my playstyle, but felt like the game was saying to me that I could do this, if I just gave it a try.

As a result I began moving more quickly and confidently around the level, taking care to memorise where guards were and prioritising those that were likely to cause the most trouble if left to wander about. This had a permanent effect on the way I played the game, and for the remainder of the 20hr campaign I was much more comfortable efficiently moving around guards and staying out of their sight rather than feeling the need to knock them out. The level's objectives had made me develop the approach I needed to get through the game.

This opening fifth of the game makes the player feel like a thief by showing them how to overcome or work around each obstacle with the right plan of action, and guide the person playing towards a style of play that best fits the power fantasy of moving through a space completing a task while hostile forces are completely unaware.

A campaign packed with standout missions

The game's middle sections feature several banner examples of Thief II levels that put these abilities to the test, such as First City Bank and Trust, a large but enclosed stealth playground with dense options for routes and solutions. There's Blackmail, which brilliantly changes the objective partway through with an unexpected twist. 'Ambush' is a large area of The City, and along with the rooftop-scouring Life of the Party is an antecedent to the level design of Arkane Studios' excellent Dishonored games. The latter is particularly notable for how it constantly makes the player feel like they are taking an unusual route or sequence-breaking even if they are largely tracing the route the designers had in mind – the journey feels organic. This is an example of where environments being designed to resemble places rather than video game levels contributes to the suspension of disbelief. This also provides an empowering feeling of navigating with real-world logic across a topography that isn't built to be crossed – and that the enemies and other NPCs in the level would be unable to traverse.

A highlight is Precious Cargo, which is a mix of haunted house, submarine and secret base, with the ghost of a long-dead pirate lurking hidden somewhere in the level, tragic fates to discover in the environment's readables, and a suitably creepy lighthouse to ascend. There are many different surfaces, from soft mulch to the metal of the submarine, requiring the player to constantly assess their surroundings and consider their path, and the diverse environment offers interiors, wide open spaces, verticality and even subaquatic exploration of the gigantic wireframe with an ebb and flow of tension. Fittingly, this is one of the levels in which Garrett must fill out his map as he goes, adding to the sense of learning about the area and gradually having the knowledge to quickly move about and get things done. Murky waters and atmospherically limited draw distances plus the soupy overcast colour palette add to the creepy vibe and the sense that Garrett and the player are far from their established environment of mansions and back alleys. Everyone talks about Life of the Party, but this was my favourite mission.

Educating the player with levels that have a lesson to impart

The game seems invested in teaching the player. Even past the opening three missions and their immaculate tutorialisation of the gameplay, Thief II has a smattering of missions that demonstrate specific ways to playing that will later pay off in high-stakes situations and enemy-dense areas. Trace the Courier has you re-traverse exactly the same environment as in Ambush!, but you are shadowing a courier and so have to get through the area very quickly and without getting into fights or slowing down too much. You have to learn how to quickly and stealthily navigate areas you might otherwise have taken your sweet time in. Trail of Blood has you follow yes, a trail of blood, so that you always have to be taking notice of the environment while quickly moving through it – I got turned around at least once trying to be clever and sequence-break.

Eavesdropping and Kidnap have randomly generated elements in them, which apart from adding replay value seem to be about goading the player to be reactive and formulate plans based on what is in front of them. In the former you have to creep up to the right door and listen in for the location of a key – which could be in any of 14 locations and is randomised each time you play. In the latter, your target could be in a number of places, and the player has to use information they find along the way to deduce where they are and what signs to look out for. These dynamic designs keep the player on their toes and encourage a responsive approach.

The penultimate levels have elicited mixed reactions based on what I've read online on forums and comment sections, and from comments on the Inside at Last podcast about the first two Thief games.

'Casing the Joint' and 'Masks' take place in the same sprawling mansion, which Garrett must enter firstly to fill out his map and examine the security systems, then return to on the night of an exhibition of priceless masks to steal at least one of them. The criticism is that this is the same environment twice. 'Casing the Joint' enforces ghosting – you now can't knock anyone out, and must move through a large indoors space without aggroing anyone. The idea of memorising an area so that you can get back across it quickly and efficiently is accurate to what a thief might do when casing a ritzy manor, and fits with what I like from immersive sims which is the feeling of gaining mastery over a space.

For me, these levels deliver on the promise of being a thief, with high levels of challenge and a dense combination of everything the player has already done. It is all leading into something that will notch the difficulty up for a new challenge – for better and worse, but the significance of the mission's placement is that it is honing abilities the player is about to absolutely need in the final mission.

A difficult final mission

Sabotage at Soulforge is either pretty high or pretty low on players' lists of their favourite missions in this game, based on forum-diving, and I also found a lot of posts purely expressing frustration with it. It is fair to say that it is a divisive denouement to a brilliant game. I had been warned that it was a significant hike in difficulty, but I still wasn't quite ready for what I found.

The first half of the mission requires you to gather materials and items to craft a beacon, which is plot-necessary in order to thwart the primary antagonist's plans. To understand where to get the components, how to combine them and where, you need to pay close attention to a sort of manual Garrett will find early on. Meanwhile, the areas you will be visiting are patrolled by a denser than ever concentration of high level enemies and security systems – no matter how much loot you scrounge up in the mission prior, you simply won't be able to knock out every guard and disable every robot.

The sticking point is that the main concern requires you to keep track of materials, items and what are basically crafting stations throughout a gigantic map, and it causes so much inventory tax that for me it got past the point of working with the map and compass – which is good and fun – and became very fiddly.

However, the final section redeems the mission – and the final taste that the game leaves you with. Once Garrett has his beacon, he has to change the signal for a number of broadcasting points. On the normal difficulty you have to hit five of a possible eight. This is very successfully done, as each area has its own self-contained stealth challenges that are all different and all pretty tough. They use different mix-ups of enemies, set-ups and geography that the player has dealt with before, but with everything turned up a notch.

So the enforced ghosting, navigation of tight spaces at speed and use of various tools throughout the levels has all been leading to this, where every ability the player has developed will be tested. Using your map and compass to get from one place to another and find the beacon points is another essential skill that you've been well prepared for at this point. While the beginning of the mission is not really representative of what the game has been asking you to do so far, the final section is a well designed final exam – particularly as players on the normal difficulty can choose another of the areas to deal with if one doesn't suit the play style they have developed.

Conclusion

Overall I found this game to be a 101 in using mechanics to teach a player to make the most of their abilities to overcome greater and greater challenges. It is nearly let down by a hurdle at the end, which I initially didn't enjoy and which feedback online suggests has been off-putting for others in the many years since the game came out. Fortunately, the back half of the mission is so strong that – personally – I remembered everything I loved about playing the game and was able to use almost everything I had learned in getting to that point.

While the sound design, sensation of being in a real place due to the amazing blueprinting of each level, the replay value due to the porous environments and multiple paths, the way the narrative unlocks through readables and environmental storytelling is all masterclass level, the structure of the game and how it builds up the player's relatonship with the mechanics is what stuck with me.