Thief was recently received after a weird mix of anticipation and hateful views or just outright skepticism. It sort of scored among mixed results as well, hitting everything between 5-9's range. I rented it myself, as while I was a massive skeptic on it the developers were making some clear compromises since the original bad reveal and the footage from reviews and early folks seemed pretty fun. The reason so many people, myself included, have been quite skeptical or even hateful is because Thief was following the trend of advertising itself as the more accessible edition of a series, and something more streamlined, while also being a reboot. This has been quite common in gaming lately, and we're seeing a lot of old beloved titles or just new ones following respected ideas under ways that are viewed as too easy or too simple. Publishers wont let budgets go reasonable anymore, so they don't want to risk the action being too hard or the gameplay to have too much of a learning curve. So common platforming in games has been reduced to quick time events and mashing one button while moving forward, searching or interactions are as easy to make as switching on a super vision that's a little too convenient, and there's always a HUD piece to direct you where you go.
The problem people have with this is that its just too convenient or too helpful, or just too simple to really enjoy a game for what it is anymore. Your not supposed to have arrows and highlights for everything because you should be exploring, platforming should be fun if its there at all, and the gameplay needs to be proud to be itself rather than giving you crutches for every elements so you can turn it into an on-rails experience. Even though the idea here is that this makes it for "the COD audience" it really seems more like a trend that Assassins creed and Batman started more so than anything else. However to be fair games like Killzone, Battlefield, and 3rd person shooters suffer from that sort of "COD accessibility" fate so its not like that concern doesn't exist. However for the most part shooters have shot themselves in the foot for going 1 direction and so it looks natural when they're all using the same helping tools, but when everything non-shooter related in the action gaming area is following common stepping stones for lesser players it becomes its own weird category of bad accessibility. People are hating this for a pretty good reason to, as it really is a shame that for all that time Tomb Raider, AC, or even uncharted shove platforming in that none of it has any depth to it whatsoever, and the same can be said about achieving the whole experience with collectibles, enemies, etc. Its actually funny that people want to call out AC on its repetitive stalking missions, when that's actually a nice bit of focus on stealth while the rest of the game lets you go unpunished for how careless you are against foes. It isn't all about the difficulty or depth though, its also about the controls and free will of the player. Sometimes this supposed bare platforming is the same button as run, and climb, and maybe some other mashed together option. Thanks to the stream lining process, you wont have to have a lot of buttons to remember but you will have to fight with the control of your character to get them into the right spot and this can honestly break the game at certain moments.
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| Pictured here: stealth kills |
However I'm here more to talk about the good than the bad... I want to get it out of the way and say that Thief is far above its similar fellow action stealth games.... partially because the "action" barely exists and the game proudly does stand on itself as a strong stealth game with some good accessibility to change it based on how good of a gamer I feel like I am. Thief sadly trips on pretty much everything I've talked about here, but with one major piece that steps it up above the rest... options. Well for starters I could turn off the stupid bits of HUD I didn't want. That was nice, but nothing so new.... but hey, I feel more encouraged to explore rather than pushed on. Then there's the fact that I can turn off the entire super vision "focus" mechanic and still play it greatly. I can then set a ton of other little extra rules in place to make the game harder, and I'm rewarded with trophies and points for that. I've been walking with less speed, I'm not aloud to alert guards, limited take downs, and again there are no magical tools to help me. It basically all comes down to my skill, my purchased tools, and getting all the loot I can. The game feels like real stealth, I've got enough depth to play around with it, and you know I can easily loosen up and play through the game with everything on if I find myself trapped within my own customized difficulty. Though it does mean restarting, that's kind of good as if the option was always there the whole time you'd just find it too convenient and use it, it would be like in other games where your telling yourself to not go in with the vision mode to begin with but its still clearly there. However for sticking to my custom options I'm rewarded for playing it tough by trophies and a score multiplier that scales for each hardship I put myself through, and I can tone it up to some insane ones. There's even a modifier where its total perma-death, if you screw up the entire save file is shot. In addition to this customization and scoring system that goes with it, each level has a giant list of things to check off, stats its tracked you by, small side objectives to hit, and rates your style with one of 3 titles and adds those stats in a separate stat tracker for the total game as well. The total effect of it all gives Thief a weird meta-game value to it, like there's an arcade score attack game in addition to the stealth game you thought you were buying. It is brilliant!
Other games may have tried similar options before, but it feels hamfisted there. For example, some games have it so that super vision is forced off in the top highest difficulty.... yeah that's nice that its there for perfectionists, but some of us don't like the bullet sponge enemies, glass health, insane shop prices, or whatever other weird rules you'd impose on us in brutal mode just to get rid of the super convenient vision. Thief gets it right by letting us build our easy, medium, hard, and brutal modes ourselves, and not the other way around. I especially appreciate this as I'm not a fan of hard for the sake of hard, and I like playing my games where the natural depth of the game provides its challenge more so than stupid odds, so I really love being able to toggle mechanics on/off while keeping other things normal unless I choose otherwise. Honestly I've been having a hard enough time as it is with my own choices, but I feel good about beating the missions and a victory feels fair and well earned while a defeat often is on my part and leads me to learn more and more about my environment until I've conquered it. I simply wouldn't have bothered with that though if it was an all or nothing affair with the difficulty and mechanics.
Now thief still does some wrong. Most notably, that streamlining stuff I mentioned before feels overboard here and its not something you can just flip off. You have a run/climb/grapple button that magically transports you where you conveniently need to go and always keeps me safe, rope arrows are restricted to highlighted bits that are so rare I just honestly forget the concept even exists during play, level design is severely trimmed and simple compared to older games or even Dishonored, and probably the worst thing of all is that next to everything is mapped to friggin' square. This constantly gets in the way, especially the conflict between peak and pick-up. If there's a big crate with a piece of silver on it, and a guard right by it, I might try to swoop in and grab the loot before hiding... but nope, it registers that my command was a "peak" around the crate leaving me glued to it and getting caught by the guy right there. This is the best example I have ever seen of why this one-button-fits-all mentality is so terrible. So honestly while Thief gets the idea of accessibility down perfectly, allowing anyone to play it very loosely and unpunished but an incentive to crank it up to test their abilities and give themselves a learning curve is genius, but the game falls a bit when it comes to streamlining. Streamlining here is just done way too simple. Its a brilliant game, and it keeps its theme of stealth better than any other recent game due to its intentionally terrible and clunky combat system and most modifiers aiming to challenge you sneak and loot grabbing abilities. Meanwhile Dishonored and Splinter cell and other games like it can easily lead you down a path of a gun wielding lunatic if you desire it, but Thief gives back that loss of playstyle with the ability to customize your stealth experience beyond what others are capable of. It really is a great move, I just wish the streamlining didn't hurt as bad as it does here, it would be fun to have more buildings to climb or go through, the ability to jump when you wanted to test where you could go to, and they really need to remap the peak button in a patch.
I suppose unless something better comes up, you could also count this as a non-endgame review of Thief. I pretty much described the prime points that I love and hate, and honestly anything else (graphics, story, sound) are kind of brushed off to the side and out of my care really. The game is about stealth, and if that's what you want your going to love it. Fans of tricksters, mischief, and of course thieves will find themselves at home in this game and will probably be thrilled with what you could do and wont have to worry about it being too easy or hard for you, though it probably wont top whatever your favorite stealth game is. Otherwise if you wanted a big story, or a big action game, or some pretty tech show you are way off of your course.... like way, waaaaay off. My main message though was on how to get accessibility right. Its not about dumbing down the game, or lowering the standard down to where everyone and their grandma can play, its about giving the player options and the freedom to find the game they wanted within it. I truly do believe that's a big part of the reason COD caught on in the first place. Sure its stupidly easy on paper, but honestly its also one of the few super content packed shooters that also just so happen to hold a great split-screen mode and has an extensive private match list of game defining options while one of its biggest competitors is charging you to even start a private game last I checked. Ok this isn't really the best example, but you get the point. I also feel like Torchlight 2 was accessible in a similar way. There were no typical RPG barriers, and instead what you wanted out of your character you could build. The brute could use magical wands and bows while using his typical brawling powers, the gun slinger could use claws in addition to summoning undead minions, and the engineer could have a wand in one hand, and a pistol in the other, and at any time in the game you could give your pet any spell you wanted to if you had the spell to give out. The game was super open ended without compromising its difficulty at all, and it lead to possibly one of my top 10 favorite games of all time. However if you were a traditionalist, the game encouraged and could be well (if not better) played by being by the book with your role. You could do what you wanted with your pet, you could stick to very specific gear for your class and build, and you of course had full control over how your leveling worked. Game industry... we need more of this. Freedom and custom experiences is what lets in the masses while keeping the loyalty from the serious gamers, and gives us all amazing and memorable experiences you (the developers and to an extent players) designed.
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