Thief thrives in stealth and deep shadows

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      Stephane Roy wants you to know that his new video game, Thief, is flawed.

      “The game is far from perfect. Nothing is perfect. Not even me,” the Eidos Montreal producer quipped in an interview with the Georgia Straight, before insisting that despite any flaws, Thief is fun.

      “This is important,” he added. “If you have fun, you are going to forgive a couple of stupid things.”

      Roy made the admission over the phone from Los Angeles, where he had just arrived to promote the game for publisher Square Enix. Thief was released on February 25 for PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4, Windows, Xbox 360, and Xbox One.

      “It’s not an easy franchise to work on,” Roy said, citing the need to appeal to a new generation of players while respecting the legacy of the franchise, which he called a “puzzle”.

      The series has produced three games prior to this reboot. The original Thief: The Dark Project (1998) introduced the idea of using a first-person perspective in a stealth game, something that was preserved. After trying out a couple of new things, Roy said, the development team at Eidos Montreal settled on customization as the best way to serve both audiences.

      “If you are the type of player that you want to have all the tools and all the contextual buttons, they are there,” Roy said. “If you are willing to suffer a little bit, you can really customize your game and the game should adapt to what you want.”

      Among the options that can be turned on and off by the player are feedback elements and assists such as prompts, waypoint markers, highlights, and meters. As well, difficulty settings go beyond the basic easy, normal, and hard to make the game as onerous as players want. For example, players who die or fail a mission must restart the game from the beginning when the “Iron Man” setting is activated.

      Another aspect of Thief that honours its heritage is its setting. The City has a steampunk aesthetic and supernatural flavour. It’s a gritty warren of alleys and stone edifices that provide plenty of hiding places and shadows for a master thief like protagonist Garrett.

      Roy said that the City is a character in its own right. “We want players to feel that the City is alive at the centre of the experience,” he said. Within each mission, Garrett can take any path players want, which Roy noted will help them feel like they are truly citizens.

      And players can also choose how to progress: completely stealthily—in Thief parlance it’s called being a “ghost”—or aggressively. But Roy cautioned that Garrett is not a soldier, so if players want to be predators, they have to isolate prey by getting them into dark corners.

      And in case it needs to be explained, Roy wants to remind players that Thief is a game. “It’s not a live simulation,” he said, responding to players who might bristle at how easily Garrett seems to evade the gaze of his enemies.

      During the game’s testing in Montreal, Roy said, the artificial intelligence that coordinates the movements of the antagonists was able to detect Garrett as well as a real person. But when the AI was programmed to be that responsive, the game stopped being fun. “You’re always fighting with the machine,” he said.

      Instead, Roy hopes players will become immersed in the world. “You should forget where you are,” Roy said. “You should be in the City. You should be Garrett.”

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