A significant number of words about Thief (and other wonderful uses of time and money)

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ArbitraryWater

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Edited By ArbitraryWater

Sup my young parsons. I finished school for winter semester (I did alright, much to my own relief) and am now bumming around with a part time job and a semi-broken computer. What do I mean by “semi-broken”? I mean that this thing probably doesn’t have much time left, given its propensity for crashing under weirdly specific circumstances and the part where I had to wipe it to get even that far. It’s been 2 ½ years, so I’m not surprised that this hulking behemoth of a “gaming laptop” is starting to falter. Guess it’s a good thing I have this “job” thing, from which I can now derive income from (assuming I don’t blow my next paycheck on a PS3 so I can play all the hot exclusives I missed or anything). Now that I’ve invested in the PC as a platform for modern games and not just RPGs from the late 90s, I can’t very well go back to just consoles if this thing were to break (actually I could, It’d just be a bummer no longer having access to a good chunk of my steam library). But first things first. Video games

Dark Souls II

Me, every time an intruder shows up.
Me, every time an intruder shows up.

After around 12 hours of play, I can confirm that Dark Souls II is indeed more Dark Souls. Is it better than the first? Probably not, given that Dark Souls the first is one of my favorite games of the last console generation and recapturing the magic of that was always going to be difficult. Am I still enjoying it? Hells yes. It’s fun to go into a game like this with minimal spoilerizing for once. Thus far I’ve played my character a similar way to how I did in the first game (using large-ish swords and mostly avoiding magic) and have achieved moderate success. I also joined the Rat Covenant and have done alright there by ganging up on whoever comes in with all mah rat friendz… mostly because I don’t think I could win most 1 on 1s otherwise. What can I say? That Bastard Sword doesn’t swing as fast as whatever nightmarish lightning sword they other guy has can, and I was never good at PVP in the first place. This game at least deserves kudos for theoretically laying the groundwork for more PVP a lot better, though I have yet to be invaded.

Regardless, you can expect some sort of full thoughts whenever I finish this game (let’s pretend before the end of the month), and since I plan on playing Demon’s Souls as well this summer , we can have some sort of weird 3-way comparison blog that will probably end with people being incredibly snobby about the Souls series. Because there certainly isn’t enough of that on the forums already.

Thief

You can tell he is a thief because he is about to steal the title of the game from the front of the box art
You can tell he is a thief because he is about to steal the title of the game from the front of the box art

Reboots are a tricky thing. Maybe a little less tricky for Video Games, but taking an established property and re-gearing it towards a new audience without alienating old fans (assuming that’s the goal in the first place) is the kind of balancing act that is hard to get right. If it goes well, it’s Deus Ex: Human Revolution or XCOM: Enemy Unknown. If it goes poorly, failing to reach both old fans and new converts, you end up with gems like that fake-edgy Bionic Commando game that no one played and Sonic 2006. And somewhere between of those two extremes (well, leaning more towards good than bad), is Thief. As a fan of the old games, but not someone who will rabidly foam at the mouth at the mere mention of them, I think that this Thief reboot deserves more credit than it has been given. Don’t confuse that with me saying it’s the most revelatory stealth game in the history of stealth games, or that it wins a lot of comparisons against the original trilogy, but for something I bought with the expectation of disappointment I think Thi4f holds up pretty well on its own merits as a stealth game that came out in 2014. That being the key phrase.

And indeed, Thief is a stealth game. Sorry to blow your mind or something, but what I mean when I say that is that it’s not some sort of Deus Ex-style hybrid where you can still ostensibly fight your way through conflict or otherwise find different solutions to any given situation. Sure, pure stealth is my favorite way to play through Dishonored and its ilk, but the fact remains that I could succeed entirely with violence if I removed any of my self-imposed restrictions and the game is designed to accommodate that. For that reason, I think comparing Thief’s gameplay directly to Dishonored, as some Games Journalists have done, is a bit disingenuous. Certainly, it’s clear that some parts of this game were tweaked as a response to said Dishonored (leading to a horrible “snake eating its own tail” scenario when you realize that Dishonored borrows a lot of aspects from the original Thief games), but it’s a much more restrictive, contained game that relies a bit more on raw sneakiness over teleporting your way through levels sight-unseen. That’s fine with me. I like stealth games, I like playing the sneaky character in games that allow it and I have very little problem with hitting the F9 key whenever I get detected.

One of the weird little things I appreciate about this game is the deliberately tactile way Garrett interacts with the environment. Like grabbing
One of the weird little things I appreciate about this game is the deliberately tactile way Garrett interacts with the environment. Like grabbing "A FORK" for example.

I’d describe most of the gameplay flow of Thief as a connected series of sneaking puzzles, though there were still a decent handful of moments that actively reminded me of the sprawling, open-ended levels of the original games (which I would also describe as “the best moments”). Enemies have their routes and positions, and you have your tools to get around them, which is to say that at least they got Garrett’s arsenal right. Regular Arrows to shoot dudes in the face! Water Arrows to put out torches! Flash Bombs that you’ll never use! Rope Arrows that don’t attach to everything because it’s not a video game from 1998 and doing something like that would be a lot more complicated now! Sometimes that might involve hitting them in the back of the head with your blackjack, deftly staying in the shadows and avoiding their line of sight, or in some cases just finding a vent, because it’s a video game. Similar to Splinter Cell Blacklist, the game grades you based on 3 different playstyles (Ghost, Predator and Opportunist, which I got for every single level without fail, assuming I'm really good at interacting with the environment) and I’d say the design is such where a no kill/no detection playthrough would be totally possible for normal people. Hell, I threw bottles to distract guards. I never do that in games. I either shoot them in the head with my bow/tranquilizer pistol, or I find another way around them. This game? I totally used that to positive effect. That’s as much a statement of your limited options as it is praise for making me want to stay undetected. No Typhoon spamming for you.

Because it wouldn't be fake victorian england without a skeezy brothel level.
Because it wouldn't be fake victorian england without a skeezy brothel level.

In some ways though, Thief seems torn between two different styles of gameplay. You have a “highlight everything of interest/slow down time/free knockout/archery zoom/fast pickpocketing” super mode, which seems to exist mostly because this is a modern video game and has to tell you where everything is and where to go, you don’t have a dedicated jump key but instead have a context-sensitive movement button, there’s an open world-ish hub that alternates between entertaining filler and pointless filler depending on how tired one is of breaking into random houses and stripping the place clean as per the Basso jobs you can get every now and again (there are also actual sidequests that play like smaller, even more contained heists and I think these tighter affairs might actually be more consistently interesting than a lot of the actual missions. That pre-order/DLC bank heist mission might not be worth a full $5, but you’re going to buy this game on sale anyways and in that context it’s well worth picking up). On the other hand Thief is also a raw, straightforward stealth game, which means getting caught isn’t a great idea. While you can fight back (probably by shooting them in the head with an arrow, because engaging in melee is for suckers), like yon olden Thief, fighting more than one or two guys at a time will end in your death. This dichotomy makes Thief feel a tad schizophrenic, torn between the master of focus-tested wide-audience game design and its classical stealth roots. It didn’t bother me so much, but I can’t say the same for you, prospective reader.

To its credit though, the developers recognized this and included the ability to add custom difficulty restrictions to make the game both harder and more “old school”. I played the game with no custom difficulty modifiers (assuming that I should play the game “the way the developers intended” the first time), but after doing so I’d suggest playing with some of the more modern touches turned off. You probably don’t need loot glinting in your face, you don’t need an objective marker telling you exactly where to go (though maybe don’t turn off the minimap, that city hub is sort of confusing to navigate without it), and focus mode is more of a crutch than anything vital. While these difficulty options can’t fully compensate for a game designed around modernized mechanics, they do a decent job of creating a simulacrum of an old stealth game and in this day and age I consider that an impressive feat.

Oh right. There are monsters sometimes. They sort of suck, but they're also not in the game for a whole lot of the time. There's also a creepy asylum level that seems to exist entirely because Thief Deadly Shadows had that creepy asylum level.
Oh right. There are monsters sometimes. They sort of suck, but they're also not in the game for a whole lot of the time. There's also a creepy asylum level that seems to exist entirely because Thief Deadly Shadows had that creepy asylum level.

Still, don’t confuse all of this for gushing praise. Thief, unsurprisingly, has problems. With this reboot (and it’s a reboot, not a sequel), they changed the interesting world of The City, the medieval/steampunkish place with hammerites, pagans and keepers into generic steampunkish fake Victorian England (which should not be confused with the non-generic whale-powered steampunkish fake Victorian England setting of Dishonored) You may have noticed I haven’t mentioned the story once yet either. That’s because it’s nonsensical, poorly written and ends with an anticlimactic cliffhanger that may or may not ever be resolved assuming they make a sequel. While this new guy does an alright job of conveying Garrett’s dry snark, he’s not the guy who did his voice in the old games. The AI is dumb as a brick. The game also takes the wrong page out of Deus Ex: Human Revolution’s playbook by having the last two levels end with what are essentially crappy boss battles. Getting around The City is tedious and could’ve benefited from either fast travel or more shortcuts. Aside from aforementioned boss battles, there are a few sequences that I could have done without. If I were to assign this game a numerical rating, perhaps out of 5, it would be a strong 3 or a weak 4. It doesn’t do anything revelatory, nor is it as smoothly competent as Splinter Cell Blacklist, the other stealth game I’ve played recently, but I think it does alright with what it has. There are hints here and there that Thief was going to be a more ambitious game, but given the stories about its development history I guess I’m just glad it ended up as alright as it did. If you like stealth games (and that is important), I may suggest picking this one up on sale. It’s not half-bad. It’s not the old games, it can’t be the old games because those are definitive classics. But hey, I still mostly enjoyed it (which is more than can be said for the last 4 chapters of Bravely Default). That has to count for something, right?

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eccentrix

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Sounds like another excuse to spend a lot of money. Thanks!

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ryanmgraef

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My thoughts almost exactly. Theif was a good time.

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eccentrix

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Oh yeah, I wanted to say that I've had my "gaming laptop" for around 4 years now and it's still working well, even if it's not as relevant as it once was.

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Oldirtybearon

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This is the best write up I've seen of Thief. Everything else I've read has been non-stealth people bitching about a stealth game, which left me completely in the dark (hur hur) about Thief's quality as a stealth title.

Sounds like it's worth a shot from this read, so good on you.

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Slag

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Hunh that sounds like a very fair take on Thief.

So bottom line what is this in your eyes a 3 star game-ish?

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ArbitraryWater

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#7  Edited By ArbitraryWater

@slag: "Three star" aspects of this game... hmmm. The story is really bad, as I've mentioned. The hub world can be a pain to navigate when you just want to get from one point to another, even disregarding all of the little sidequests you can take part in. Those two boss battles, while not Deus Ex: Human Revolution levels of bad, are still totally unnecessary. Usual stuff in stealth games where the enemy will detect you and you're not entirely sure why.

@oldirtybearon: Thanks! It's good to know that this was written well enough to convince someone one way or the other! I got this game for $33 via Greenman Gaming and for that price I feel totally fine about the 20 or so hours of enjoyment I got out of it, but you can probably expect $20 or lower on the Steam Summer Sale.

@eccentrix: Yeah, this computer can still handle modern games alright, so if I wasn't half-convinced it was going to break within the next 6 months I probably wouldn't be thinking about getting a replacement. As it stands now, there are days when it works just fine and days when it decides to go kaput for no reason.

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Slag

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@slag: "Three star" aspects of this game... hmmm. The story is really bad, as I've mentioned. The hub world can be a pain to navigate when you just want to get from one point to another, even disregarding all of the little sidequests you can take part in. Those two boss battles, while not Deus Ex: Human Revolution levels of bad, are still totally unnecessary. Usual stuff in stealth games where the enemy will detect you and you're not entirely sure why.

Ugh, bad story and bad boss fights I can stomach. But bad travel could be a dealbreaker for me. Hmm sounds like I need to wait for a steep sale for this one.

Thanks man!

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Tennmuerti

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#9  Edited By Tennmuerti

I gotta say, I was pretty positive on the new Thief at the start. Have to second that tactile comment by the way, all the hand animations and actions are indeed great.

Then somewhere down the line it lost me bit by bit, it might have been the hundreds of the same pieces of various furniture that you have to open 3-4 times to check thoroughly, or what is probably the most boring asylum level in gaming history, lack of real exploration when i feel like everything is railroaded on purpose just for you, a story i wanted to stab in the eye, and unchanging enemies. It's one of the very few games in recent years that I started but have not had the will to finish. It was a death by a thousand cuts at the end of which I didn't give a shit anymore and other games were waiting.

Even Dishonored (for as much as I have criticized that game in the past and given Patrick shit for referencing it all the time) managed to engage me enough to see it to completion.

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Humanity

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Thief had me really excited - then after release and the subsequent reviews it was like a cold bucket of water was spilled on the ever fading spark of interest I held. Reading this blog is kind of kindling that spark once more now that I've caught up with the current releases and Dark Souls 2 is no longer a reasonable time sink.

Although I have just started playing Nier and man what a depressing game. Time to look for these kids' mother that got lost when looking for scrap, oh wait she didn't get lost at all, she abandoned them to run off with some guy..

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Steadying

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#11  Edited By Steadying

@humanity: Although you won't know why until your second playthrough for reasons I won't spoil, you actually witnessed/did something even more depressing in that factory than that. Enjoy!

EDIT: Actually, nevermind, I don't think the part I'm talking about happens until later. Well, regardless, that factory holds a sad, sad story.

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Humanity

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@humanity: Although you won't know why until your second playthrough for reasons I won't spoil, you actually witnessed/did something even more depressing in that factory than that. Enjoy!

EDIT: Actually, nevermind, I don't think the part I'm talking about happens until later. Well, regardless, that factory holds a sad, sad story.

It's a really interesting game that is both somewhat ugly and performs terribly for how it looks. During the first boss fight I think the framerate quite literally dropped to about 5 FPS in key moments. The running back and forth to the same locations is also a tragic old design choice. Fast Travel would have been much appreciated. I've been taking the advice of others to skip pretty much all sidequests and I think I'm better off for it. I'm already running back and forth a ton for the "main storyline" and I think I'd go insane if I would do all those fetch quests along the way.

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Steadying

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#13  Edited By Steadying

@humanity: The side quests suck, but just so you know, if you wanna get the most out of the story, you're gonna need to do them. I think? Good luck, because while the fetch quests are boring, there are a couple real tedious ones. There's one that will actually require you to mess around with your console's clock to complete if you don't wanna sit around for days. Or you could just look up the other endings on YouTube. I do recommend playing through the game at least twice though, since the second playthrough actually straight up adds dialog and story to the main quest. And don't worry, they start you off, like, half way through the game. It takes like 2 hours to beat it again. :P

And yeah, I'm not sure why the hell the frame rate gets like that sometimes considering how it looks (which isn't THAT bad in my opinion. But still). Video games I guess!

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ArbitraryWater

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@tennmuerti: I fully understand and acknowledge a lot of your complaints. Maybe that stuff didn't bother me as much because I played this game over the course of two months between school, this computer breaking, Age of Wonders and Bravely Default. That Asylum level is pretty bad though.

@steadyingmeat: @humanity: Everything I hear about Nier simultaneously makes me way more and less interested in actually playing it. It just seems like the anti-video game at some point.

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@arbitrarywater: That is a great way of describing it as it's exactly what it feels like for me when I play it. I'm at once fascinated and completely put off by the experience. There is an interesting story with some inventive combat locked in some really bad game design. Quests that have you go through an area so you can come back to the quest giver, only to be sent into the exact same area again with all the enemies respawned. Stuff like that.

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danielkempster

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Great write-up Arbitrary. As you highlighted, a lot of what I've read about Thief seems to have been from the perspective of players who've wanted it to be some choose-your-own-path action RPG where stealth is an option rather than the intended playstyle. In light of that, it's refreshing to read something written by someone with... dare I say realistic expectations? You definitely make the game sound like a three-star experience by Giant Bomb's review code (by which I mean, it sounds like something fans of the series or genre will probably find a lot to like about, in spite of its problems).

My experience with the Thief series amounts to dabbling with the original for an hour or so as part of a 'deciding what to play next' session. I definitely enjoyed what little I played of it, and would like to return to it and play it through properly at some point. Reading this may well have just provided me with the impetus I needed to actually do that. I just need to stop stealing shit in Skyrim first...

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xyzygy

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Sounds good. I actually am quite excited to play the game at some point, to tell the truth! I don't care what people say about it!