Game:

Thief (2014)

Duration: 2:01:13

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894

Thief (2014) completed on Custom difficulty with no extra tools bought, almost no suspicions raised and almost no stealing.

* * * GOALS * * *
- Play on Custom difficulty with Master difficulty as a base and all mods enabled for 1300 points (Iron Man, No Alerts, No Kills or Knockouts, Zero Damage, etc.)
- Do not buy extra tools that enable alternative paths (wrench and wirecutter).
- Complete the game without being detected or even making NPCs suspicious, whenever possible (there is a single exception, which I discuss below).
- Expend minimum amount of resources to stay undetected. I managed to complete the game using only 1 water and 2 rope arrows, in addition to 1 water and 1 rope arrow the game forces you to use in the Prologue. None of those 3 arrows were absolutely necessary, though.
- Do not steal anything, unless required to progress. I only had to steal a purse (4:07), syringe (1:07:04) and 3 quest items. All the money came from completing optional thieving objectives.

I didn't bother with:
- Being completely unseen (i.e. not getting any eye icons above NPCs' heads) -- that would've made the run too slow for my tastes. Even if I tried to play like this there would've been too much exceptions anyway.
- Getting 100% Ghost pie-chart without any Opportunist points for every mission, which I'm not sure is possible even without any self-imposed restrictions. Still, I ghosted 5 missions out of 8 perfectly.

* * *
[ !!! ] There is a single exception to my "raise no suspicion" rule in the 4th chapter, where I alert the maid when I use the secret bookshelf entrance (45:20). From what I can tell, the original idea for ghosting this encounter was that you were supposed to wait for her to bend down to inspect the bookshelf in front her, which would completely block her field of view. The problem is that there is a bug in her animation that makes her move a couple of pixels back every time she turns around to face the fireplace. After 2 animation cycles she moves back far enough to allow her to always see you when you stand in front of the secret bookshelf. And no matter how fast you are, she would always go through at least 2 cycles when you get to the library.

There are 3 ways to circumvent this problem, none of which seemed acceptable to me:

1) Buy the wirecutter tool and use it to access the elevator from the house's basement. This is the only way to do it fast and quiet on an Iron Man playthrough. However, I felt that getting an NPC suspicious was less of an issue than buying an extra tool just for one occasion, so I decided against it.
2) If you're playing without Iron Man and Chapter Saves Only mods enabled you can simply save and reload when you are in the room. Reloading a save should force the maid to return to her intended position and would allow you to stay concealed while you interact with the bookshelf.
3) There is also a way to avoid raising suspicion while adhering to all the rules I set for myself. You just have to wait. After about 30-40 animation cycles (10-15 minutes) maid should move away from the bookshelf far enough for you to access it without getting in her field of view. Needless to say, I didn't want to sit there for 15 minutes doing nothing just because of one fairly meaningless stat, so I went with the quick but non-stealthy solution you see in the video.

* * *
CONTENTS
0:06:39 - Chapter 1 (Lockdown)
0:12:15 - Chapter 2 (Dust to Dust)
0:28:05 - Chapter 3 (Dirty Secrets)
0:42:35 - Chapter 4 (A Friend in Need)
1:01:54 - Chapter 5 (The Forsaken)
1:16:25 - Chapter 6 (A Man Apart)
1:32:07 - Chapter 7 (The Hidden City)
1:50:48 - Chapter 8 (The Dawn's Light)
2:00:33 - The End (I show all my stats here)

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