Rock, Paper, Shotgun

With Dishonored reactivating long-dormant stealth glands the world over, now seems a fine time to revisit perhaps its primary ancestor, the Thief games. Doom 3 total conversion The Dark Mod is a mightily ambitious attempt to recreate Thief – its mechanics if not its actual missions – in a more modern, and very much darkness-orientated, engine. It’s just had a major update and a promising new mission added too.

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Thief-inspired Doom 3 mod The Dark Mod has received an extensive new update over here. What’s most interesting about this appears at the end of the announcement, saying that the build does not utilize the recently-freed Doom 3 source code (and as such requires Doom 3 multiplayer to be installed), but that the team are going to try and start integrating the mod using it, so that they can create a standalone game. The team have asked for help in making this happen: “The Dark Mod can not be a standalone release until all the Doom 3 art assets and animations have been fully replaced. If you wish to help with that effort, please visit The Dark Mod forums and post in the “I Want to Help” sub-forum.”

Upset that I didn’t notice this immediately, but news reaches me from Broken Glass Studios’ Subjective Effect that they’ve released an alpha demo of their long-in-progress Doom III mod The Dark Mod. For those who haven’t been following it, it’s basically… well, creating Thief, but in the Doom III Engine. It’ll consist of a set of tools to allow you to make Thief-inspired levels and also a campaign made using those tools. It’s a ludicrously hubristic aim, and while I admired that, I also thought that like most of these enormous projects, it’ll all amount to nothing.

I love being wrong.
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