Thief 2 FM: Rebellion of the Builder 2 - 2 - The Pleasantries Continue
30Correction: there IS a guy called Greg in the first mission of TROTB. He's the guy with the sawblade shooter. You know, the unassuming random servant-looking guy on the top floor sleeping in the tiny nothing bedroom doing nothing of import and with the wimpy servant voice set. No other mention is made of him anywhere and he is the last frigging guy you would expect to own the mansion. You certainly wouldn't remember him a whole campaign and possibly a decade later. Lord Greg? Greg? What's next, Warden Dave?! And you want me to know that he owns the estate - not Sir Frederick or his progeny, but "Greg" - and that it's "sinking" somehow? WHAT. This doesn't change my conclusion. W-H-A-T.
It just seems to come out of nowhere, this dead-serious reference to a place and a guy you can't remember ever hearing about before. If he'd called it by a name you'd remember, like "that mystic estate" (title drop) or "that estate" or "that damned estate" or "that estate I robbed before getting into this mess" or just anything clearer like that, then maybe I'd know what he meant. As it stands, the addition of "Greg" and the attribute "sinking" overpower the one familiar word, "estate", and my brain goes "uh, pardon? what are you even talking about?"
Also, there's the mention of seeing the volcano. Now, maybe there really was a brief glimpse of a volcano in the first mission of TROTB, but if so then no attention was drawn to it and no mention was made of it and there's no real reason to expect me to remember that either, if it even existed and wasn't just retconned in.
Maybe you could generously call the last part of the forest mission "volcano-like" in places, but then that wasn't "seen from a far distance from the top of Greg's sinking house", it was straight-up gone into and explored at a close distance. I just don't know how to even interpret this.
Also, I repeat, the estate was in no way sinking. Not even by the loosest, most lenient, most squint-your-eyes-and-look-at-it-sideways interpretetation could you in any way whatsoever claim that the house was sinking. At all.
My reaction here is basically exactly what my reaction was when I first played this, except then I didn't even manage to figure it out at all. I just chalked it up to "random, jarring reference to something that doesn't exist, just try to forget about it and move on".
● Mission thread / download:
https://www.ttlg.com/forums/showthread.php?t=148112
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