Thief Gold Gets A Shiny HD Coat Of Paint With This New Mod

Thief: The Dark Project is genuinely acknowledged as one of the greatest stealth games of all time. The only times when it isn’t is generally because people are nominating the sequel instead. But the original hasn’t held up particularly well – although this mod does a damn good job of changing that.

Published in 1998, Looking Glass Studios tried to recreate a Middle Ages-like atmosphere with the original Thief. But like most shooters of that era, the capacity of computers and game engines were never capable of standing the test of time, which is a shame considering how ahead of the curve some of the mechanics (sound, lighting and detection systems) were.

Fortunately, if you’ve been holding off on the original or want to tickle that stealth itch there is now a good reason to give the original Thief another crack. It’s called the Thief Gold HD Texture mod, a project that Bentraxx Productions has been developing for a couple of years.

Version 1.0–typically the “release” version–was released earlier today and it’s a hefty upgrade on the Gold version of the game. Weighing in at just over 1gb, the pack adds HD textures for all original missions, new torch and fire effects, new lava and water textures, vegetation that wasn’t included in the original Gold release, full English subtitles for all characters, new skyboxes, interactive candles, and new skins for the zombies, burricks and bugbeasts.

There’s also a NewDark Graphics Settings tool which lets you toggle VSync, antialiasing up to 16x, mipmap biases, windowed mode, post processing effects, enhanced detection for the AI, custom configurations that affect the colour and bloom and more.

Below you can see some of the inclusions, such as the added vegetation, improved lighting systems and the available options in the graphics launcher.

You can find out more about the Thief Gold HD mod over on the ModDB page.