Thief

Back in the late 1990’s, if you were involved in the PC gaming scene, you were undoubtedly at least aware of Thief: The Dark Project.  As the original title in the series, the game served as a culmination of what was possible in games.  Combining action, strategy, and stealth and pitting you as a cunning protagonist who lurked in the shadows the game offered an experience like nothing else available.  Both this game and Thief II: The Metal Age were developed by Looking Glass Studios (also famous for the System Shock games).

After Looking Glass Studios folded, some former employees set out to join Ion Storm to put together the third game in the series Thief: Deadly Shadows.  While not up to the same lofty bar as it’s predecessors, it was largely successful in carrying on the Thief tradition.  However, the game would serve as the developer’s final release.  It would be many years before rumblings began regarding the next release.

Thief 4 was the original working title and thankfully it was rebranded as simply Thief.  It was developed by Eidos Montreal, the same studio behind Deus Ex: Human Revolution but by a different team at that studio.  With a healthy development timetable, it seemed that Eidos Montreal might just be able to make a worthy successor.

In the game you still play as Garrett, but it’s kind of a different Garrett.  There is no direct continuity between the characters and the game takes place hundreds of years after the previous games.  While there is mention of the previous Master Thief Garrett, all of this is merely a mechanism to reboot the franchise and character without erasing the old cannon.

The game begins with a new job to do.  Someone wants something stolen and is paying you well to steal it.  One thing different from usual is that accompanying you on this mission is Erin, your former apprentice.  While she has mastered much of the technical skill involved in the business, she is young and lacks wisdom and tact.  Her headstrong and careless ways immediately let you know how things are going to end up.

Once close to the item you are contracted to steal, you spy upon some sort of ritual with mystical energies taking place.  Due to Erin’s brashness, guards are following you and the situation suddenly turns very bleak with Erin falling down into the ritual and a huge explosion ensues.  You are carted off by unknown townsfolk and Erin is no more.  When you finally wake up, a dark energy has taken over the city.

The game is played through a first-person perspective.  The overall flow of the game has you sent out specific missions and in between each mission you end up at your “base” which is the innards of  a large clock-tower.  Each mission begins with navigating through town to where the mission takes place.  Guards patrol the streets and your exploits quickly make you a wanted man.

If you can look past the very generic back and forth between your base and the missions you set out on, level design is actually one of the game’s stronger points.  Eidos Montreal did a very good job adding meaningful variety to what you do.  Some missions have you slinking around an enemy base to steal something, some take you to more exotic or frightening locations to gain some valuable piece of intel, and others have you racing to safety as the world around you crumbles.  The net effect of all this is that you don’t every get very bored because each mission pits you somewhere new doing something different.

The overlooked and not as exciting part of each mission is the repetitive running through town to get to the various levels.  As stated before, every mission begins with you in your clock-tower home.  There is normally some dialogue or some little cutscene instructing you where you need to go.  Then you need to navigate through town to get to that location.  Once there, the mission starts.

It’s that in between phase that seems rather pointless.  The city looks pretty decent from a visuals perspective and you occasionally see some little tidbit that goes along with what’s happening in the game such as someone getting taken off to jail, or getting executed.  Overall though, all of this running around town is largely pointless.  Nothing important happens.  There’s guards you have to avoid, but nothing difficult enough to be remotely challenging, and the city is almost entirely static.

It’s not as if you can talk with people or have any sort of meaningful interaction with anything.  You just run to your destination, and you quickly realize that you can just run straight through all the guards and they won’t be able to catch you before you reach the mission start point after which the new area loads and you are safe.

Aside from enemies and cutscenes, the only people you can ever interact with are vendors which sell various tools and different arrow types to help you on your mission.  Obviously you want to purchase all the tools as quickly as you can, but the whole vendor mechanic is very flawed.

Garrett has a wide variety of cool and fun to use arrows that can do everything from putting out lights, putting down noisy birds, killing guards, and more, but aside from a very small number of these specialized arrows you find in the environment, you are completely dependent on hounding down the supply vendor.  It makes the whole process seem like a giant waste of time that in all of your meaningless back and forth travels around town, you need to put in time to keep finding the vendor to maximize the game’s enjoyment.  Two options which would have made the game much better would be to loot more supplies which then you can craft into your desired arrows or to simply have the vendor at your base so you don’t have to waste all the time running around for it.

The main storyline of the game is actually pretty interesting and novel.  The problem is that plot and story in general is only sparsely involved in the game.  The amount of dialogue between all characters is very sparse.  It’s an interesting world, with interest characters, and interesting things going on, but it is all given such superficial treatment.  The game would be so much more meaningful if they explored all this more.

As with any reboot, there are always dilemmas with what from the past needs to be brought forward and what should be left behind.  In the past decade, games have matured tremendously and throwing in a childish and generic character like the Thief-Taker General seems very out of place in a game that is supposed to take place in a realistic world.

Even though the game was put together by a different team than Deus Ex: Human Revolution, this game again seems to confirm that Eidos Montreal has difficulty closing games.  The ending, including the final battle are bizarre and out of place.  Admittedly, when you declare that you can go the entire game without killing anyone, it makes it hard to have anything resembling a normal boss battle, but surely the game could have had a better ending.

Is Thief a bad game?  Absolutely not.  A lot of the core stealth and navigation mechanics work really well.  The problem is that aside from that, the best way to describe the rest of the game would be failed potential.  Thief had a lot going for it and was fun to play, but it had the potential to be so much more.