A guard's footsteps tell on him in Thief Remastered

In Thief: The Dark Project, a patch of tile can be as much trouble as the guard on the other side of it. Garrett has an arrow for that. Shoot moss onto the floor and it grows into soft patches that muffle his steps. The guard can carry on with his patrol while Garrett crosses a stretch of floor that would otherwise give him away.

Thief: The Dark Project Remastered arrives on PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox Series X|S, Switch and Switch 2 on 3 December. Nightdive is bringing back the original 1998 missions and the additions from Thief Gold, alongside a new campaign, The Tarnished Mirror. The return of those old jobs is a good reason to spend a moment on the wrong side of a doorway, listening to a guard you can hear perfectly well before you can see him.

Listen from the doorway

A set of footsteps tells you where a guard is going, how far away he is and what sort of floor he's on. The useful part is how much of that you can learn from cover. Stand still and a patrol can give itself away by getting louder. Let it go past and you have the sound of someone walking away to time your move. By the time you step out, you've already started to learn the room.

Looking Glass built a separate map of how rooms connect so sound could travel through a level in real time. The passage around a corner is part of what carries the noise to you. Lead programmer Tom Leonard describes that work alongside the way the team used speech to let you hear a guard's changing state of mind. A man talking to himself and a man calling for help give you very different reasons to stay where you are.

Pick a fight with a guard and the clash of weapons or a cry for help can bring another one over. You can hear the evening going wrong while you're still in the room where it started. Thief's guards have a job to do when Garrett is out of sight, and the way they alert each other makes slipping past one feel different from getting past the whole building.

Change what the guard hears

A moss arrow is a wonderfully odd thing to carry into a burglary, especially alongside lockpicks and a blackjack. The arrow is most interesting when the shortest route is also the loudest. Put down moss and you can take that route quietly. Keep the arrow for later and you have a reason to look for a different way across.

A noisemaker arrow works at the other end of the problem. It makes a racket where it lands, giving a guard something to investigate away from your route. Finding the arrow can make him suspicious, so the opening it creates is a chance to move while his attention is elsewhere. There's an echo of that at Hitman's Paris fashion show, where the job also depends on what other people are paying attention to. Garrett can arrange his diversion from the shadows with a bow.

Then there's the water arrow. Putting out a torch changes what a guard can see, while moss changes what he can hear. The visibility gem gives you a quick read on how well the darkness is hiding you. Your ears have a different job. A stretch of shadow can still have a floor that announces every step, so a dark corner is a place to stop and work out how to cross, even when you already know which way you want to go.

Follow the Horn of Quintus

Down in the Bonehoard uses that habit for something stranger than a patrol. Garrett is after the Horn of Quintus, and the horn makes a sound you can follow. After spending so much time listening for people who might catch you, you get to listen for the thing you're there to steal. The sound gives the loot a presence somewhere deeper in the tomb before you've laid eyes on it.

Nightdive's mission selector lets you go back to jobs you've finished. The Bonehoard is a good candidate for a second visit. Try keeping track of where you first pick up the horn and what happens to its sound as you turn through the passages. It's the kind of detail that rewards knowing the way already. With less attention on finding the next turn, there's room to hear how the tomb leads you through it.

The Tarnished Mirror takes Garrett from the theft of a hand mirror to a drowned necropolis, with the team behind the fan campaign Thief: The Black Parade making the new story. That's a fresh reason to go back underground in December. The old Bonehoard already shows what an unusual place Thief can make out of a route towards a sound. A guard's footsteps teach you to wait for the noise to pass. Down there, the noise is the reason to take another step.