Let’s put on our nostalgia goggles for a second here. It’s 1998, and you’re rocking out on your PC playing stuff like Quake, Duke Nukem 3D, and Doom. All first person games where you run around and mow down enemies. Just visceral fun. Along comes this game, billed as a ‘strategy-action hybrid’, and your interest is piqued. You buy the game and are instantly confused. This game you bought is played by sneaking by enemies unnoticed, rather than attacking them head on. You need to use distractions, hide in the shadows, and make sure you don’t make any noise. You can’t rush through the game, and if someone sees you, you’re dead. Sure, you can try to play it like you play your regular first person games, but you can’t get far. It’s a completely unique game, and you’ve never played anything like it before.
Eidos was taking a huge chance with Thief. There weren’t any FPS games based around just sneaking and waiting for your enemies to walk away. Metal Gear Solid, probably one of the closest equivalents then, had just come out a month before. If you were stuck with only a PC, you had no clue how much you were going to like a game where the main draw isn’t killing enemies. Eidos didn’t have a clue either. They were in uncharted waters, and it showed. The developers hadn’t completely made a stealth game. They made sure to shoehorn in dinosaurs and spiders that attack you to make sure it had some generic combat in the game. Thief definitely went against the grain when most games around that time were about running around really fast and killing enemies. Thief is a slow game. To be good at it, you have to be patient. Slip past your foes quietly. Do stuff like that. Eidos probably didn’t expect it, but it was a hit with gamers. It was nice change of pace, and did something new for the FPS genre. It was also huge in technical innovations too. The game is well known for its use of lights and shadows, and how sound can give away your location. In pretty much every FPS now, footsteps give away your location. One of the first to implement it in gameplay was Thief.
Thief 2: The Metal Age improved immensely on the first one. They removed the dinosaur things when they realized people actually liked sneaking into places and stealing stuff. They refined the layouts of their levels, and added a bunch of new gadgets. It’s sometimes considered the best, and it’s obvious why. They gave you a mission, and let you loose. You could do whatever you wanted as long as you got your objective completed. It was pure undiluted Thief. The sequel, Thief Deadly Shadows, also was well received. They did some new things too. Instead of just being a completely linear game, teleporting from mission to mission, you were now able to walk around between missions, pick up side quests, and steal from random folks. People enjoyed it a lot, just as they had the previous ones.
Deadly Shadows came out back in 2004, and was the last one released. This brings up the question, why did the Thief series stop? All of the games were well received, and usually lauded as the best or defining games of the stealth genre. Well, it was a combination of developers going defunct, slow sales, and publisher problems. The series was never the most popular kind of game. It started out in a niche market, and began to get popular, but it just didn’t happen fast enough. The first two were made by Looking Glass Studios, who made stuff like System Shock and.. System Shock 2, but when their publisher, Eidos, ran into hard times, they closed down the developer. A few of the guys moved on to another developer called Ion Storm, and made Deadly Shadows, but they were closed down again after releasing some mediocre games like Daikatana, and when some higher-ups like Warren Spector left. Eidos still held the rights to Thief, but never went through with making another. They milled about for years and focused first on the Deus Ex sequel, Human Revolution. When that game came out, they then teased that the next project they’d be working on was a AAA title that starts with a T.
Of course now we know that a new Thief is indeed on its way. How will Thief be received in this day? We’ve had a ton of awesome stealth games since Deadly Shadows. Stuff like Hitman, Assassin’s Creed, and Splinter Cell. Recently games like these have struggled to do games based purely on stealth. Splinter Cell is quickly moving away from its stealth roots, while Assassin’s Creed is also forgetting about the days where it was about hiding in a crowd to assassinate someone. Nowadays, most games have stealth built in. There’s not really any clear cut pure action game or pure stealth game. Every game implements a little bit. Far Cry 3 rewarded you for not being detected when attacking outposts, Crysis wants you to use its cloak, and even Deus Ex: Human Revolution had a whole series of vents set up in each level for those 3 people who used them. Dishonored and things like that are based around sneaking, but you don’t get punished for not sneaking either. If you went crazy in Thief, you’d get your face lopped off. Not too many games do that. Maybe Thief 4 will bring the stealth genre back to its roots. I suppose we’ll find out!
