Lady Jo on 4/4/2010 at 12:52

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In the room Housekeeper

xaussienanny on 4/4/2010 at 12:55

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Hi ya, need a little help. Cant seem to find key to cell holding sam. The note suggests there should be one with it and the stone, but I couldnt find one. Have also toyed with the idea that the key may be the note or stone, but that hasnt worked for me yet.

ta :confused:

piln on 4/4/2010 at 13:14

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Wow, I'd never seen any of those before, what luck to have them all happen at once! :cheeky: They really were just trivial quirks for me though, didn't spoil my enjoyment of the mission at all - nobody else patrolled the rooms where I'd left KOs, and I guess I was just lucky that the spontaneous deaths also occurred in remote places.

Maybe it would be a good idea to have a sticky in this forum of current TDM known issues, in the hope of reducing the amount of mod bug talk in FM threads? I've brought up a lot of non-FM issues here and I feel responsible for sidelining the thread a bit when there's plenty in this large & detailed mission we should be talking about, but I just didn't know they were mod bugs.

I have a few comments which I hope you'll take as constructive criticism. The first is about the number of inventory items collected - at my last save, I am carrying 25 readables and 25 unique keys (ie, not including duplicates). The majority of those readables didn't need to be pick-ups - IMO flavour & plot texts and some clues (eg the Rear Hall 'key-in-pot' note which has no relevance beyond the room in which it is found) don't need to be taken with me. And the keys, again simply too many items to be carrying around, and I don't think it was necessary to have so many unpickable doors (at times I felt like I was getting into a keyhunt, and it did start to get tedious). The (IMO) OTT quantities of pickups and unpickable doors are two problems that compound each other: from about halfway through, I was scrolling through dozens of inv items every time I came to a locked door (often), and it wasn't fun. I also spent five minutes searching for the key after emerging into the old storage room (I didn't turn my lantern on because of the cage-like door and patrols outside, and I simply couldn't see the key). I know you need to control progress to some degree, but by the end of the mission the reliance on keys was really starting to get old, and I feel the mission would have been more enjoyable with a slightly less controlling approach here.

Finally, regarding navigation in the long corridors of the ground floor - particularly those that run along the south (barracks area) and west (servants) faces of the building. The long distance views were impressive, but the lack of visual variety, the in-and-out stonework and the occasional door-like wooden panels made navigation a little tricky - it took me three visits to find all of the doors (some mission-critical - for example i was searching for the chapel for some time - I must have walked past it at least twice). By contrast, the corridor that opens out into the kitchen/stores area looks great, sticks in the mind and aids thorough navigation because it is so visually distinct.

Hope you don't take that as bashing, I really enjoyed this mission. As someone else has said, it recaptures the feel of Thief 2 in many ways, and at the same time is yet another step forward in showing off the potential of TDM. In fact this one is a leap forward. Despite the above niggles I thoroughly enjoyed it and found a degree of challenge and sheer scale so far unmatched. The way Edridge's increasing paranoia and wierdness are reflected by his home improvements works well. Since completing it, I've gone back in and found a bit more loot and another secret - I thought the clues to secrets were particularly good and the rooftop archery secret is simple but excellent. Still over 2 grand to find, and I liked it enough that I'll be going back to search :)





EDIT:
oh yeah, I forgot a couple of things:

* I'm getting the 'beep' sound mentioned (http://www.ttlg.com/forums/showthread.php?t=130832&p=1960168&viewfull=1#post1960168) here when I touch the slow match against any non-lightable object/surface (love the slow match btw)
* Some areas of carpet are making the noise of the surface underneath, instead of carpet noise (eg - part of the carpet on the wood floor of one of the guard towers; and almost all of the long carpets in the marble corridors that flank the large stairway).

Fidcal on 4/4/2010 at 15:08

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Lady Jo: Sorry I think I misunderstood where you are. I thought you wanted the key to the pump room.

If you are already in the pump room then you need to move the crates to find a key under a stone tile and use it on the hatch door also behind the crates. The key to the cell is to be found further on through there...

xaussienanny on 4/4/2010 at 15:41

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Hi Fidcal, no key there for me, got scroll and stone.