In The Black Parade you play the character of Hume, a hardened criminal who was sent into exile as a punishment for his crimes. The year is 833, you are now back in The City, a sprawling metropolis of soot-caked brick, greasy fumes and noisy machinery, with many a sinister conspiracy whispered behind closed doors. Lost and without a penny to your name, you are back to your life of thievery and must find your old associate Dahlquist. Shadows and silence are your allies. Light is your enemy. Stealth and cunning are your tools. And the riches of others are yours for the taking.
The Black Parade aims at being a love letter to Thief: The Dark Project, and we hope we succeeded! It is recommended to have played through Thief: The Dark Project and/or Thief 2: The Metal Age at least once beforehand, since these missions are overall tougher than the base game.
The Black Parade also comes with a few tweaks to the classic Thief gameplay formula:
- Hume is not a Keeper and thus never received Garrett’s training: AIs will now notice you if they bump into you or vice versa, sometimes even in a perfect shadow. Be careful!
- Hume can move banners aside instead of having to slash them.
- Hume has additional footstep sounds for chains and pipes; these are metal sounds that aren’t as noisy as regular metal (about as noisy as stone/wood).
- Water arrows can now be used to expand moss patches.
- Servants will re-light extinguished torches on higher difficulty levels.
- Servants may clean moss on the floor if they notice it on higher difficulty levels.
- Zombies now smash wooden doors open instead of simply opening them.
- Electric lanterns carried by guards can be turned off.
- A few guards in the campaign are outfitted with heavy armor and helms so they cannot be knocked out using the Blackjack.
- Hume can pick up small creature corpses such as spiders or sweels.
Articles
It is finally here! After 7-ish years of development, The Black Parade is finally released.
So, what awaits you in this campaign?
- 10 huge, open-ended and meticulously crafted missions with varied themes packed with content.
- A brand new protagonist thrown into a dark, intricately woven story of crime and conspiracies.
- 4 new tools happily supplied by the undermarket, at a price.
- Many tweaks to the AI to make the game a bit more challenging but still fair.
- A brand new "banter" system where AIs greet each other during their rounds and nightly life.
- 28 voiced characters totaling roughly 1,800 new lines of dialogue.
- 30 minutes of gorgeous hand-drawn briefings and cutscenes.
- Brand new AI motions making the denizens of The City look more alive.
- Full English subtitles.
In The Black Parade you play the character of Hume, a hardened criminal who was sent into exile as a punishment for his crimes. The year is 833, you are now back in The City, a sprawling metropolis of soot-caked brick, greasy fumes and noisy machinery, with many a sinister conspiracy whispered behind closed doors. Lost and without a penny to your name, you are back to your life of thievery and must find your old associate Dahlquist. Shadows and silence are your allies. Light is your enemy. Stealth and cunning are your tools. And the riches of others are yours for the taking.
The Black Parade aims at being a love letter to Thief: The Dark Project, and we hope we succeeded! It is recommended to have played through Thief: The Dark Project and/or Thief 2: The Metal Age at least once beforehand, since these missions are overall tougher than the base game.
The Black Parade also comes with a few tweaks to the classic Thief gameplay formula:
- Hume is not a Keeper and thus never received Garrett’s training: AIs will now notice you if they bump into you or vice versa, sometimes even in a perfect shadow. Be careful!
- Hume can move banners aside instead of having to slash them.
- Hume has additional footstep sounds for chains and pipes; these are metal sounds that aren’t as noisy as regular metal (about as noisy as stone/wood).
- Water arrows can now be used to expand moss patches.
- Servants will re-light extinguished torches on higher difficulty levels.
- Servants may clean moss on the floor if they notice it on higher difficulty levels.
- Zombies now smash wooden doors open instead of simply opening them.
- Electric lanterns carried by guards can be turned off.
- A few guards in the campaign are outfitted with heavy armor and helms so they cannot be knocked out using the Blackjack.
- Hume can pick up small creature corpses such as spiders or sweels.
HOW TO PLAY
The file provided is an archive that cannot be read by the game as is. Here is a very handy guide penned by nicked, another Thief Fan Mission author, that explains everything you need to know: Nickdablin.wordpress.com
It is HIGHLY recommended you read this guide if you have no experience playing Thief missions.
IMPORTANT NOTES
The Black Parade requires NewDark 1.26 or above! Make sure you use the latest version of TFix/TFix Lite before playing!
The Black Parade should be launched with FMSel, NewDarkLoader or AngelLoader. It is not recommended to launch this campaign with DarkLoader or GarrettLoader. Note that mods such as Thief Gold HD Mod, NecroAge or Enhancement Pack are not compatible with this campaign. Remember that this is a campaign for THIEF GOLD, not Thief 2!
KNOWN ISSUES
- Due to the complexity of the missions, there can be cases where some NPCs might get stuck walking against walls. There is unfortunately not much that can be done about this.
For all additional questions, you can reach us on the TTLG forums. Here is a link to the campaign's release thread: Ttlg.com
Players Choice - Mod of the Year 2023
Feature 21 commentsThe voting period for the Top 100 mods has closed, and it's now time to announce the winners of the 2023 Mod of the Year Awards, as chosen by you!
Files
Thief: The Black Parade 1.0
Full Version 20 commentsThis is the initial release of Thief: The Black Parade, an unofficial expansion for Thief Gold.
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Are there plans to add some sort of flashlight item? because the game is dark as fcuk at some places and its really annoying, especially in death dominion, the map is confusing by itself and the "i cant see **** part" makes this great map really annoying. What about to add a permanent item like light stick from thief 2 so you can light up especially dark places?
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Already played through the campaign 2 times within the past half of the year, always finding new secrets and noticing new details. Hard to believe that such level of detailing, game- and sound-design has been put into modification of a 25-years old game.
Hope the team will continue on making such campaigns, so I’ll wish them good luck! Thank you all for that unexpected new year present!
5/5 - The best way I can describe this is "More Thief than Thief". That's my bottom line experience. Somehow, this team has managed to capture the exact things that make Thief great, and amplify them.
This is not just another entry in nostalgia culture - it's more of a genuinely good thing. It's faithful without being repetitive. It's original without straying too far. It explores the unexplored. It's just like the old games, but turned up to 11. That feeling of getting lost while frantically running away (or creeping around) an unfamiliar environment? It's there, just enhanced, because modern computers allow the environments to be bigger. There are great colors, great textures, and great level designs. I particularly enjoyed how this mod makes more use of space - both the vertical (i.e. there are way more options for climbing up/down than in the originals), and the random diagonals (i.e. there are a lot more sightlines to keep track of / avoid).
The base level difficulty is higher, but in a perfectly reasonable way. The higher difficulty settings on this succeed where many games fail, because these drive you to experience more of the game (actual additional content) than the lower settings do. It's not punishing - you get the content plus the challenge that the game is made of. It's all reward!
This story has a darker tone than the originals, and there are more horror elements than I remember in the Dark Project and the Metal Age. I think that worked well here, though, and never felt gratuitous (unlike the orphanage/asylum mission from Deadly Shadows, which was a low point for the series).
Any critiques I had were minimal. Some of the physics on the new models were a bit off, and some of the voice acting could use more polish, but these were really minor issues; the positives that we got out of it (new models, a huge amount of unique banter) far outweighed any shortcomings. I also would have preferred fewer details about the world being explicitly written down (dates, mostly, and some neighborhood mapping) in order to maintain the general mystique of the City as a setting, but it didn't go so far as to shine a light on every aspect of the world (which would have been too much). Overall, the details that were added and the topics that the story explores nicely fill a niche in Thief lore that I didn't realize was empty.
Seeing the raw material of these games somehow reach even more of their potential so many years later was an incredibly rewarding experience! I am so grateful to the team who spent so much time making this happen. Thank you, thank you, thank you! You have opened my eyes to the potential of mods, and made me believe more in what we can do as a society together.
My father said you are the best in the business
I've just partly played through the first mission but this is amazingly well done. Leaps and bounds above any other fan mission I've played. This feels like a legitimate new Thief installment made my real game developers. I love the Dishonored guard banter reference LOL!
But yes I would have liked some more step-by-step install instructions. Even having played fan missions before, it did not occur to me that this would be installed in the same way. I guess it makes sense that it would be, but it is being presented as more its own thing that might have its own installer rather than using the existing FM infrastructure.
Nevertheless this is really impressive. Something to be proud of!
I love you
I solved subtitle issue. Go to fm.cfg in mod folder, open it with notepad, and write two lines:
enable_subtitles
subtitles_bg_color 0 0 0 0
First is for subtitles, second line will remove black background on subs.
I can't get working subtitles in this mod. Cutscenes and voice dialogues are without text.
Is Sound Effects Enhancement pack addon for Thief 1/Gold is compatible with this mod? Also i've installed your mod with your "step by step guide", with GOG version of the game and TFix Lite. But while playing the mod, launched from FMSel, the subtitles are not working. They are located in The Black Parade mod folder, but in game i don't see text while Hume is talking, or another NPC, and no subtitles in the cutscenes too. Please help.
Yes you can use the SFX enhancement pack with Black Parade the
"Note that mods such as Thief Gold HD Mod, NecroAge or Enhancement Pack are not compatible with this campaign."
refers to a different mod just called Enhancement Pack, which replaces models of items and such.
The answer to your first question is in the "Important Notes" section:
"Note that mods such as Thief Gold HD Mod, NecroAge or Enhancement Pack are not compatible with this campaign."