With the release of the re-boot in the highly acclaimed Thief series just around the corner, I thought it would be a great time to finally get around to playing Thief: Deadly Shadows.
I know I’m very late to the breaking and entering party, but by the time I actually got into gaming, Thief was a few years old and I was too naive and too much of the “old stuff is lame” mindset to give it a try. Boy was I mistaken. I’ve only played the first few hours, enough I feel to get a big taste of what Thief is about, but I’m sticking this out to the end and then probably starting again.
Playing it reminds me a lot of Dishonored and it becomes really clear how much influence Arkane took from Thief. The wider world feels really deep and complex, the mixture of fantasy and technology, the incidental politics and feuding discovered through NPC chatter, the simple but brilliantly effective stealth mechanic.
The whole gameplay is great for so many reasons. I like that you’re given a brief tutorial, some gadgets and told “Go do this”. No hand holding, no objective marker just a load of autonomy. It reminded me a little bit of pre-Absolution Hitman, as well as Dishonored. It’s an approach that I don’t feel enough games take anymore, just giving you the tools to do something and letting you loose. Like Dishonored and Hitman, there’s a huge choice element to how you play too. I prefer my stealth thwacky. By that I mean that I tend to sneak around, knocking enemies out either from afar or thwacking them, and Deadly Shadows facilitates that as well as it does full-on sneaking.
One of my biggest turn offs about the most recent iteration of Splinter Cell (apart from the weird transition to a clunky FPS) is how non-threatening it is when you’re found out. Whilst the near seamless transition from stealth to third-person shooter is slick, it defeats the point of having to sneak, it removes any real threat. Deadly Shadows, still has that real element of danger.
Maybe I’m getting to the age where I start to yearn for the games of yesteryear, games that didn’t hold your hand, games before being like Call of Duty was a business model for developers. Maybe hope is not lost, Thief is getting a reboot.
However, things aren’t looking too rosy for Thief. Reviews at Giant Bomb and The Telegraph (which has some excellent writing) really don’t rate it at all, whereas John Walker at Rock Paper Shotgun enjoyed it. A lot of the controversy seems to be directed at some of the changes to the game to make it more console friendly and playable to newcomers, all of which can be turned off. I can understand the anger if the new features were mandatory but they’re not.
The games business is a lot bigger than it used to be and is, after all, a business. If a game, even one as established as Thief, can’t bring in new players then it won’t be a viable business model and means that publishers in the future will be less likely to take a punt on something that isn’t a Call of Grand Theft Fifa. It’s a hard position for developers. Either they make a game for the hardcore fans and risk not making enough of a return, or they compromise, adapt to current tastes but risk annoying the long time fans.
