Thief II: The Metal Age is a 2000 stealth video game developed by Looking Glass Studios and published by Eidos Interactive in March 2000. Like its predecessor Thief: The Dark Project, the game follows Garrett, a master thief who works in and around a steampunk metropolis called the City. The player assumes the role of Garrett as he unravels a conspiracy related to a new religious sect. Garrett takes on missions such as burglaries and frameups, while trying to avoid detection by guards and automated security.
Thief II was designed to build on the foundation of its predecessor. In response to feedback from players of Thief, the team placed a heavy focus on urban stealth in the sequel, and they minimized the use of monsters and maze-like levels. The game was made with the third iteration of the Dark Engine, which had been used previously to develop Thief and System Shock 2. Thief II was announced at the 1999 Electronic Entertainment Expo, as part of an extended contract between Looking Glass and Eidos to release games in the Thief series. Looking Glass neared bankruptcy as the game was developed, and the company was kept running by advances from Eidos.
Thief II received positive reviews from critics, and its initial sales were stronger than those of its predecessor. However, the game's royalties were processed slowly, which compounded Looking Glass's financial troubles. As a result, the company closed in May 2000, with plans for Thief III cancelled. The third game in the series, entitled Thief: Deadly Shadows, was developed by Ion Storm and published by Eidos in 2004. Thief 2X: Shadows of the Metal Age, a widely praised expansion mod for Thief II, was released in 2005. In 2014, Square Enix published a reboot of the series, developed by Eidos-Montréal.
Gameplay
left|thumb|The player holds the [[Baton (law enforcement)|blackjack and hides in a shadow from a patrolling guard. The light monitor in the bottom-center of the screen is completely dark, indicating that the player character is not visible to the enemy.]]
Thief II is a stealth game that takes place from a first-person perspective in a three-dimensional (3D) graphical environment. The player seeks to complete mission objectives and to evade the notice of opponents such as guards. While it is possible for the player character to engage in direct combat, he is easily defeated. Guards may be knocked out with a blackjack or killed with a bow or sword, and their fallen bodies may be picked up and hidden. Thief II takes place one year after the first game. a schism in the Hammerite religion spawns the "Mechanist" sect, which fanatically values technological progress. The game's primary antagonist is the founder of the Mechanists, Father Karras (also voiced by Russell), a mentally unstable inventor who despises the natural world.
Story
The game begins as Garrett continues his life as a thief. However, he is betrayed by his fence and ambushed after an early mission, and he determines that Truart, the local sheriff, is hunting him. which he ignores. As Garrett leaves, Artemus, the Keeper who brought him into the order, informs him that Truart had been hired to kill him, and he gives Garrett a letter that directs him to eavesdrop on a Mechanist meeting. There, Garrett overhears Truart and Father Karras discussing the conversion of street people into mindless "Servants", who wear masks that emit a red vapor capable of reducing themselves and any nearby organic material to rust. Truart promises to provide Karras with twenty victims for the Servant project, not realizing that Karras is recording his words for use in blackmail. Garrett steals the recording from a safe deposit box, in order to coerce Truart into revealing his employer.
However, when Garrett sneaks into Truart's estate to confront him, he finds Truart has been murdered. Evidence at the crime scene leads him to spy on the police officer Lt. Mosley. Garrett sees Mosley deliver a suspicious letter, which is carried through a portal by a wounded pagan. Garrett enters the portal and finds himself outside the City, and he follows the pagan's trail of blood to Viktoria, who persuades Garrett to join her against the Mechanists. On a lead from Viktoria, he infiltrates Karras' office to learn about the "Cetus Project", and inadvertently discovers that Karras is giving Servants to the City's nobles. Garrett travels to a Mechanist base to find out more about the Cetus Project, which is revealed to be a submarine. In order to locate and kidnap a high-ranking Mechanist named Brother Cavador, Garrett stows away in the vehicle.
After delivering Cavador to Viktoria, Garrett steals a Servant mask to learn about a Mechanist technology called a "Cultivator". Meanwhile, Karras hides inside the Mechanist cathedral in preparation for his plan. Garrett and Viktoria learn that it is the Cultivators inside Servant masks which emit red vapor, or "rust gas". Karras had provided Servants to nobles with gardens in order to set off an apocalyptic chain reaction. Viktoria plans to lure the Servants into the hermetically sealed Mechanist cathedral before Karras activates their masks, but Garrett believes this to be too dangerous and leaves. Viktoria goes to the cathedral alone and dies while filling it with plants, and Garrett completes her plan, killing Karras in the rust gas. Afterward, Garrett is approached by Artemus, who explains that Karras' scheme and Viktoria's death had been prophesied. Garrett demands to know the rest of the Keepers' prophecies as the game ends.
Development
Early production
Looking Glass Studios began designing Thief II in January 1999. a game that Thief II project director Steve Pearsall later said was an experiment. He explained that the team had played it safe by including certain "exploration ... or adventure oriented" missions with "jumping and climbing puzzles" in Thief, and that the new game was significantly more focused on stealth. Combat was given less prominence than in the original. Pearsall stated that Thiefs monsters were negatively received because, unlike the game's human enemies, they did not clearly indicate when they noticed the player. The team sought to remedy this problem by improving the audio cues given by non-human enemies in the sequel.
Production of Thief II commenced in February. Rich "zdim" Carlson and Iikka Keränen joined from Ion Storm's Daikatana team, and Looking Glass contractor Terri Brosius was hired as a full-time designer. Pearsall said that the latter two films were Thief IIs "biggest aesthetic influences", while the main inspiration for its plot was Umberto Eco's novel The Name of the Rose. The City's technology and architecture were influenced by the appearance of Victorian London, and certain areas were given an Art Deco theme to provide "sort of a Batman feel", in reference to the 1989 film. The deal had been signed on May 7, roughly three months after Thief II entered production. The demo was used to showcase the updated Dark Engine, which featured support for colored lighting, higher polygon models and larger environments. Plans to include a cooperative multiplayer mode were also detailed at the show.
The game's sound team was composed of Kemal Amarasingham, Ramin Djawadi and audio director Eric Brosius. To achieve this effect, each level's geometry was input both to the level editor and to a "separate [sound] database", which mapped how sound would realistically propagate based on "the physical room characteristics [... and] how all the different rooms and areas are connected together".
Artist Dan Thron returned to create the game's cutscenes, with assistance from Jennifer Hrabota-Lesser.
Final months
By October 1999, the team had cut the game's multiplayer feature. As Thief IIs development continued, Looking Glass experienced extreme financial troubles. The company's Marc LeBlanc later said that "Eidos was writing a check every week to cover our burn rate" during the last months of the project. The game's final cost was roughly $2.5 million. According to company head Paul Neurath, Eidos informed Looking Glass that "it was not an option" for Thief II to miss its release date, and that there would be "dire consequences if [we] missed by even a day". An anonymous Looking Glass staffer later told Salon.com that Eidos "told us basically to ship [Thief II] by their fiscal quarter or die".
By January, Pearsall confirmed that the game had reached beta, and that most of the team's energy was being spent "tuning, polishing, and fixing bugs". Certain employees slept in the office and avoided bathing so that the game could reach its March deadline. LeBlanc later stated his belief that the game was rushed, and that its quality suffered as a result. Nevertheless, the team met their goal, Eidos expedited the company's payment for completing the game.-->