EPT<a class="t4n" href="#1-1">Entr'Acte</a>
<a class="t4n" href="#1-2">Agency and Understanding</a>
<a class="t4n" href="#1-3">Graphics</a>
<a class="t4n" href="#1-4">Garrett, the Master Thief</a>
<a class="t4n" href="#1-5">The Story</a>
<a class="t4n" href="#1-6">NPCs and AI</a>
<a class="t4n" href="#1-7">Sound and Music</a>
<a class="t4n" href="#1-8"> Misc. Glitches, Immersion</a>
<a class="t4n" href="#1-9">Final Thoughts</a>
<a class="t4n" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nfa5Y5mGfb0" target="_blank">Thief OST</a></div>
![[image loading]](/staff/wo1fwood/blog/thief4/thief.png)
An Uneven Project, In A New Age
Magic. The word has a mystical power about it. It has the ability to imbue ideas with otherworldly attributes. It can also describe personal relationships to unique and deeply moving experiences, and in this case aptly describes my relationship with a man who crept from the shadows 16 years ago. That man's name was Garrett, a master thief who beguiled me with his tale and stole me away to a city with no name.
It's hard to imagine that it really has been 10 years since I last had the opportunity to play a game with thief in the name, but here we are in 2014, beginning anew. The grandfather of stealth gaming that created the genre and holds a lasting influence over a myriad of modern titles is back, and I have to admit that I've been greatly anticipating the return of one of my absolute favorite series of games, but not without a heavy dose of skepticism in tow.
This new Thief has - as has been well documented - been through quite the rough development patch. First it was reportedly going to have 3rd person. Then it wasn't. Then we were told you couldn't jump, and people went ballistic. It had QTE's. Then it didn't. Regardless of my personal feelings on any of these gameplay "techniques", I feel kind of sorry for Stephane and the team for the internal disagreements that have caused such a storm of public worriment. But as Thief is a singular kind of experience it was kind of natural that many of the topics would be somewhat heated discussions. After all, how many first person non-rpg experiences involve so much agency and reward that revolve around you not killing all the things?
Before I dive into my thoughts and impressions of this new city and a new Garrett, I should note that I have been trying very hard to reorganize my thoughts on how video games are constructed as well as ignore all of the content, videos, and talk for the last few months in order to make my experience as fresh and free from "mob-bias" as possible. This I felt was exceedingly important because I have a long history with the Thief series, and as a result have a lot of feelings on how the game should theoretically play out (what it needs to really be a Thief game). But I also had to acknowledge that it is after all 2014 and that this is a new take on something that I have enjoyed dearly over the years.
Developers have been able to use and create standardized techniques (and quite a few to boot) over the last 15 or so years in order to service their ideas better, and In order to come at this fresh and with the least amount of irrational bias as possible I have been trying to keep my expectations in check, and to remind myself to judge the work on whether the techniques used to create this new city service the actual content that it's trying to execute or impart, or if it's getting in the way as somewhat superfluous and unnecessary filigree. Being a composer greatly helps breakdown the technical aspects behind composition as I'm used to being able to organize techniques and blocks into meaningful gestures and sounds in my own work, that and in the last 3-4 years I have begun to really hone in on creative techniques across multiple disciplines helping to see a very interesting and clearer picture of art in general. With that in mind, I'll quit taffing around and get to it, yes?
Sorry. I have to get on my soap box as a web developer for a sec before I begin.
![[image loading]](/staff/wo1fwood/blog/thief4/thief_cardinalsinhtml.jpg)
What in the actual f*&k Eidos Montreal!? We seem to have come full circle. Do you remember how everyone back in the mid 2000's thought they were soo cool using preloaders to deliver their content by providing a 'better' or 'more consistent' user experience? Do you also remember those eventual studies that showed that if your content failed to load in under approx 3 seconds that the likelihood of people who would straight up leave your website before it loaded would tick up to catastrophic levels? I thought we'd learned something in the last 6 years but I guess people still are under the unfortunate delusion that we have an infrastructure in America that can handle these kinds of content requests... Okok, I should note that video games occupy a weird space regarding this in that they generally have very content-heavy sites, but still, I was pretty aghast visiting their site and feel like I had traveled about 4-5 years in the past (you know, when IE6 was still arou.... o wait... :/).
Now lets' begin.
<h2 id="1-1">Entr'Acte</h2>Immediately jumping into the game I ran straight to the "dishonorable" menus, gameplay options, and difficulty in order to customize the game in the way that I wanted. If you've read some of my other thoughts on gaming you'll know that regarding stealth games I generally want to "not exist". I was really happy to see that I could customize my options exactly to this predilection of mine, so that I could immediately select a Master Custom difficulty that included such things as no focus, no consumables, and no knockouts.<ul><li>Focus</li>The reason I immediately turned this off was because I knew that not only would this setting make the game way to easy, but it significantly lowers the difficulty because you constantly have help in knowing that which you can or cannot do in the game.
<li>Consumables</li>If I'm a ghost, why would I need health?
<li>Knockouts</li>When you think about it, knocking people out is only inviting disaster or alarm when you are trying to steal all the things. What if a guard happens across a body? What if he notices that someone is no longer on patrol or at his post? If the game was thoughtfully designed the entire area would be in a state of heightened awareness thus making your possible traversal through the area that much more precarious. The same could be said for dousing flames, or leaving opened doors, or other "not how I left it" items.</li></ul>There might be one that you'd think odd that I left off... What about no detection? I actually witnessed that in the prologue when I was testing the AI awareness and I found that the immediate halt was incredibly detrimental to the big ol' hot ticket item that Eidos Montreal kept talking about...Immersion. So what if occasionally people see something, or hear a disturbance? It's more challenging to have to deal with that on the fly than to say "Whoops, better try again!" Especially on a first playthrough.
The other big thing other than difficulty that I was able to customize to my heart's content was HUD options. And boy did I immediately turn everything off aside from the light gem, health meter, and weapon. Unfortunately by doing this I quickly became aware of a growing problem this game suffers from, that can be found all over the gaming industry of today, and one that probably won't go away anytime soon (dammit).
<h2 id="1-2">Agency and Understanding</h2>A huge issue that Thief runs into - and this is rampant throughout much of the design - is that either from negligence, lazy design, or internal problems (with this title specifically), how the player interacts with the world hinges on your use of a prompting system. Don't know where the South Quarter is? We've got a waypoint for that. Didn't know you could slip through those crates to get to another area? Interaction prompts are your friend. Trying to find out how to "mantle" on to or off of things? It's ok, we'll tell you. These are all things in the game that when the HUD options are turned off become incredibly frustrating to deal with, or are beyond obtuse. The reason for this frustration is that these prompting choices invariably falter on the most basic level of understanding that a player or the narrative needs. Ask yourself, how would I know that I could interact with this, or know where something is, or how to get to a place on the map? How do you create the necessary affordance so that waypoints aren't the primary distributive model? It certainly takes more thought and time, but anything else is uninspired.
I had early on a problem with entering a factory at one point because I had no idea that I could climb pipes and platform a la Assassins Creed or Tomb Raider (not something the original trilogy ever did). I had to actually enable the prompt after 5-8 minutes of fumbling, and all because the designers couldn't have been bothered to write a short line of monologue to help prompt this kind of interaction from me. Hell, dialogue isn't even needed. Clever enough environmental design can achieve the same results and they do employ that on occasion, just not here (especially important as it's the first time you experience 3rd person platforming).
Another point that stuck out like a sore thumb was trying to hook onto the assembly line in that same factory, and, because I had no prompts, spent 5-10 minutes trying to figure out how to attach myself to the hook. Turns out you had to interact with it, rather than try to jump to it. So, why is this an issue? Well, Thief employs a system where it's important to be able to engage/disengage with items or objects. In some cases you need to jump to interact with one item, use the interact command for others, and disengage by one or two different methods. Which method do you use? The prompting system will tell you. What if you disable thos...yea you can see where this is headed.
Finally, one of the things that still annoys me to no end is the lack of any kind of creativity regarding quest markers. This crutch which is used in so many titles, continually robs the underlying narrative with opportunities to create meaning and interesting world building ideas. What if instead of accepting a job and getting a soulless marker to follow, Garrett were to have a flippant remark about having to go to a shady establishment in some area that he's visited once with a owner that's decidedly untrustworthy? Not only does this create a vessel where Garrett can deliver more personality and wit but it also serves the purpose of giving you directions . It's more nuanced, impactful, and has more than 10 times the weight than a dry and uninteresting dot on a minimap could ever provide. Could we please stop using these things as the primary source of information? Also, quest updates in your journal would be helpful as well. You know, like as if you had actually written down what you just found out.
Beyond the in-game prompts, issues of interaction, and necessity of the HUD options is one of the most unhelpful world maps that I have ever had the unfortunate experience with. I mean seriously, what the hell is this supposed to tell you?
![[image loading]](/staff/wo1fwood/blog/thief4/map.jpg)
OK, so it does tell you exactly where you are, and it does tell you what section of The City you are in. But what if you get a quest that needs you to go to the black market, and you're in Audale? Wait, do you even know where that is, or what direction? Well, apparently Garrett doesn't know and neither does the map, but the waypoint marker does.
What's perhaps bigger with the introduction and use of this map however is the lack of personality, something that every map in the original trilogy had. They had much more simplistic maps, but they often had random notes delineating points of interest, secondary entrances, or things important for Garrett to note as he did his reconnoiter of the task before him. This is one thing I miss badly from older, technically "inferior" games. The obsession with the explicitness of the maps that we get nowadays are often times useless and more importantly remove a level of immersion from the game world that a good old fashioned hand drawn map can provide.
![[image loading]](/staff/wo1fwood/blog/thief4/citymap.jpg)
A perfect example of this is the original map of the Lost City, which was in it of itself a simpler map than any of the other from The Dark Project. This archaic sketch provided an underlying curiosity/desire to explore the ruins, and informed a level of caution as everything was in question. Not everything should be explained in rigorous detail.
<h2 id="1-3">Graphics</h2>Speaking of detail, Thief is supposed to be a next gen game and it does look beautiful. I was particularly impressed with the attention to environmental effects (specifically smoke, rain, and fire). However, this game doesn't feel like a next gen title, at least, not for a PC gamer. You can thank The Witcher 2 for this, but we have already been used to this kind of spectacle since 2011. That's a whole 2 years before we even knew about the PS4 or XBone. But that also points out something that I suppose has become a kind of tradition in Thief titles.
Anyone who played Deadly Shadows is likely to remember a guy named PJ, who took it upon himself to up the texture resolution of virtually everything, and taking a game that looked ok, to pretty good. As good as Thief looks, it is oddly contrasted by low res texture maps, resulting in a visually mismatching experience. Clearly this is a compromise for consoles as my PC and its GTX 770 averaged 56fps on 1920x1200. The only time where frames were an issue came oddly with every prerendered cutscene, but the chaotic set pieces and visual spectacles in game? Yea, totally fine.
I should also mention that I was surprised to not have the options to tweak the gamma setting as I felt that in general, Thief was too bright. I mention this because it seemed to hurt the players understanding of depth and enemy distance, especially when in "darkness". I would at times be in plain sight (in darkness) and guards wouldn't notice me even though I would have been visible were it real life. Other times, they would pick me out of darkness at random moments. I do understand the compromise, but I think they erred a little too much on the bright side. Interestingly, Dark Messiah of Might and Magic had a neat take on light, where staring into light sources would screw with your peripheral vision (via pupil dilation) the way it does in real life. This had the effect that when you traversed from light to dark, your "eyes" had to adjust the way they normally would in a non-computer generated setting.
Thief does something in a similar vein called the shroud. It's that darkness or light effect that was around the edges of your screen. It would inform you when you were in darkness and when you would step into the light. When I first saw the shroud I wondered if it would be a interesting addition, or unnecessary and annoying. Well, it turns out it's the latter. The dark shroud actually moves as if to mimic smoke, and I continually found myself being distracted by the movement. The same could be said for the light shroud, whereas every time you stepped into the light you would experience a very jarring flash in your periphery.
I think that overall the shroud was chosen so as to visually emphasize the feeling tunnel vision, or the somewhat claustrophobic nature and nervousness of trying to stay hidden. What it did was distracted me much more than I liked. It also occasionally made looking around more difficult than if it wasn't there at all. It's sort of odd in that on one hand you're trying to emphasize Garrett's vision and a overall feeling, but it falters because of the same issue that current 3D movies falter. In order to be what the developers want your focal point must be fixed in the center of the screen at all times as if your mouse controls your eye movements only, but of course no one is going to do this because it's very unnatural and restrictive, and it's a level of abstraction with external media that we all experience. It would have been much better if the shroud just wasn't a thing as it's telling you something that the light gem already did.
<h2 id="1-4">Garret, the Master Thief</h2>So now that I've talked about how we react to the world, what about who we're playing and how we feel about him? I gotta say as much as I wish it were Stephen Russell, Romano Orzari does a decent enough job as Garrett, even though he never really gets enough monologue to voice his generally flippant attitude, and is quite a bit more generic overall. It's somewhat reflective of the game as a whole. It's also reflected in his look, which I didn't mind as much as I thought I would, even though the dark emo/goth circles around the eyes and a number of character traits make him more a caricature than a character. Branding, marketing, merchandise reasons? Goth == emotional? really? When was Garrett ever an emotionally brooding individual? I mean, hell, in Thief 1 he gets his eye ripped out and doesn't even bitch about it. Well, I should give this a wide berth as this is after all an entirely different take, though it's worth noting that for a longtime fan it just felt out of place.
I also missed the robust mission preview monologues, the mission start quips about what's important, why, or any important notes that Garret might have. So much of the mood and character development came from these important lines, and while they're handled differently here I do think that overall I wanted more of Garrett telling me about The City.
The next isn't exactly a character trait, but one of the things that Thief does really well is the thieving. It's very satisfying to have to search in cabinets, drawers, behind paintings for secrets. All things of which were not in the series previously. Other supplemental things were the fact that you couldn't leave doors or display cases open else guards would react to these changes. The same went for light sources. If you doused flames, turned off lights, or opened doors too close to individuals, they would notice and even re-light torches or candles. All of these put together made for a strong experience, and definitely felt like an improvement of the past.
What is not an improvement was the linearity of the levels or puzzles. One thing that the originals did so well was give you several options of how to traverse a compound, house, or level and leave it for you to decide how you wanted to do things. This new Thief however has an issue with control, in that it wants to give you 1-3 options, and then tell you that you can do X with option 1, but not Y. This is no more present than how rope arrows are approached. in Thief 1+2 you could shoot rope arrows into wooden surfaces. Any wooden surface. This allowed for an incredible amount of creativity in traversing areas, or circumventing guards, or providing escape paths. I distinctly remember when I was new to Thief, I got caught at a mansion once, and while running away from guards saw a balcony with a wooden awning. I immediately got out my rope arrow and climbed my way to safety, and all because I was given the flexibility to be creative. Rope arrows however in Thief are only valid in very limited places in the world meaning that they aren't creative at all, but roadblocks in an environmental puzzle preventing you from getting places you want to go.
![[image loading]](/staff/wo1fwood/blog/thief4/window.jpg)
How do I get to that damned window?
Platforming and jumping also plays a large role into how a level is designed, but we'll return to that topic when we get to immersion. There is however another movement item I wanted to mention, the swoop mechanic. Personally I thought that while it could be construed as "cool", it has far more negative effects than positives. Adam Sessler described his experience as giving Garrett preternatural abilities so as to impart that Garrett is indeed a master thief. While I agree that you need to sufficiently impart that Garrett is a master at his craft, I would strongly disagree with Adam that the swoop mechanic imparts this.
The question to ask here is this "what makes a master thief?" Is it strength, or speed, or physical ability? Being a good thief does require deft hands and a certain level of dexterous ability to traverse more difficult terrain, but these skills do not make one a master thief. What sets apart Garrett from the rank and file is his intelligence, cleverness, and most of all, patience. The swoop mechanic accentuates none of these skills, so while it's cool - and it is cool (and very Dishonored Blink-like) - it makes very little sense within the context of thieving (sudden movements are supposed to be bad). What it says to the player is that Garret has extraordinary physical skills allowing him to do things others can't. But there's something insidious about swooping. It changes the pace of the game. Whereas with Thief 1-3 your movement had to be carefully planned and researched before you executed, in Thief 4 you can be far more fast and loose with your navigation, partially because floor types aren't really a thing, and partially because you can traverse great distances (especially when chain-swooping) with little to no detriment to your detection.
I should note that while I disagree strongly with its inclusion, that one thing it does well is that it allows a player to deftly move through razor thin circumstances and feel empowered by achieving this feat. This makes the game much more 'exciting' which I'm pretty sure was the intent, but it also takes away from the pacing and overall difficulty.
The last thing about making Garret a "master thief" is where you go and what you steal. Funny enough, from Garrett's own mouth one is provided the proof of concept, "It's not about how much you steal, but what you steal." I find this to be an ironic series of words because in the grand scheme of things you rarely steal high value items, which as Garrett mentions is kind of the point. It's more that in Thief it's about how much your steal and where you break into rather than what high value items you take.
In the original trilogy there certainly was the occasional "I'll use my skills to break in to a place no one ever has before, or go somewhere no one would dare", which can be seen all over the place (the bank, clock tower, lost city, etc...). However, the more important emphasis was always about breaking into some place and grab the high value item that resided there. You knew from gossip that a baroness had a special item made for her. You had one chance to grab it due to her attendance at a party or some other excuse. Or, you heard a rumor about an artifact adorned with jewels or was made of pure gold that could be highly lucrative and that would entice you to go searching for it. In The Dark Project, the first mission has you stealing Lord Bafford's jeweled scepter, the sixth mission you steal a magical sword, and the seventh you steal a large mystical stone from an abandoned cathedral. And this enticement doesn't seem to exist in Thief at all. That's mostly because this story is all about a girl, and therefore the thieving - or the whole point of the game - takes a back seat to the unconscionable narrative that is presented to us.
<h2 id="1-5">The Story</h2>Ok, that's a little harsh, but speaking of narrative let's get this out of the way shall we? The story is very uneven and ultimately forgettable. It hinges on you buying into the idea that "the primal" is some ancient magical force - yes, I said magical Eidos Montreal - that is somehow part of the world but only barely known about, and bad things happen when inevitably someone tries to mess with it. On paper that actually sounds more compelling than how it's executed because we are only ever presented with Garrett's limited perception of the situation. Every plot piece about the primal is dictated to us in the hopes that we'll buy into its ambiguity, and this is a huge mistake because there's never any reason to. There's never any enticement through passing conversations between NPCs. It's never described in books or texts that we as the player can read. It's never part of a painting or structure we can explore. There's never a monologue from Garret mentioning previous factions or groups of people that dealt with this force. Eidos Montreal went out of their way to try to remove the "magical" elements from the game (hammers, pagans, woodsie lord, religious overtones, etc...), but their primary narrative piece is a magical force. Calling it mystical or otherwise doesn't make a difference because at its core it's still an otherworldly force.
![[image loading]](/staff/wo1fwood/blog/thief4/primal.jpg)
One really strong place of opportunity to explain things would have been throughout Chapter 3 when traversing the "keeper compound". This would have been a perfect time to explain what the primal was, how it was discovered, anything else to entice us to understand and buy into the mystery. And this was where I really wanted to learn more as a player. Unfortunately all you ever do is look at a few tits, grab a book, and leave. Wait, tits? Yep, need I remind you that this is a French Canadian studio?
Anyway... I think the moment that I'd had enough with the story is when the queen of beggars magically appears in your hideout after one of the later missions to tell you a critical piece of information. Not only did this piece of information seem rather farfetched and foreign (particularly because it's never strongly established that the primal force is grounded in this world), but why she would even know anything about it and in that kind of detail baffles the mind. I know that because of her eyes they were trying to tell you that she'd had previous (and rather direct) experience with the primal, but experience does not automatically infer expertise, and why am I supposed to trust someone that I don't really know? Garrett as a character might, but as a player we have little to no interaction with her especially when you turn off focus, so it questions her credibility. As a contrast, you wouldn't question a keeper from the older trilogy. They had a myriad of historical tomes, a girl who wrote down prophecies, and displayed great skills when they needed to, all reinforcing their credibility as people who knew secret things.
There were good things about the story though. The visual chaos of the explosions of the keep and the fire and destruction of the bridge stand out as strong set pieces. Trying to navigate when things are collapsing around you aren't exactly Thief-ish, but I like variety, and so they worked well enough. They sure were pretty. I should mention though that while I did enjoy the chaos of the bridge, it also was a big letdown at the same time. Reason being that the level of destruction was simply not possible. Last time I checked, a stone-built building would only collapse in on itself if the supporting inner structure was wooden. A bridge would not have these features, so while a certain level of destruction is warranted it was taken way to far, all in the name of amping up the emotional responses of the player. In fact a lot of Thief goes this route of trying to elicit a response, and forgetting all practicality and reason along the way. The escape scenario is one such example where Garrett could have (based on the timing they presented) easily slipped out unnoticed instead of standing around sheepishly waiting for the guards to bust through and catch him.
As for less directly story driven things, one that became very obvious and something that I have a weird relationship with here is the homage to the past. There's a lot of it throughout Thief in varying degrees of subtlety all to appease longtime fans? Inside jokes? I'm not really sure of the exact motivations, but I am sure that for me they felt in ways clever and lazy all at the same time. I counted more than 15 separate nods to the past, including:
- The Asylum: source, T3 Shalebridge Cradle
- The Cathedral: source, T1 Haunted Cathedral and Lost City
- The Bank Heist: source, T2 Bank Job
- The Keep and Clock Tower: source, T2 Clock Tower
- Brothel Underground: source, T1-3 Keeper Compound
- Factional Conflict: source, T3 Hammers and Pagan Conflict
- Garrett's eye: source, T1-3 mechanical eye
![[image loading]](/staff/wo1fwood/blog/thief4/asylum.jpg)
Do you remember how creepy I was the first time?
<h2 id="1-6">NPCs and AI</h2>As for other parts of the story, the AI and NPCs that inhabited The City are important. As not impressed with the AI as I was from Dishonored, I am happy to say that there are a number of big improvements. Some, like being more aware in the immediate vicinity of your interaction with the environment I noted previously, and this kind of deserves another nod as it is a welcome improvement. Along with this awareness, you can accidentally bump in to them, and from what I've heard NPCs can go to guards to alert your presence if you are detected. Not that this ever happened to me, but I'll take TB's word on this.
Unfortunately there are downsides as well. Like Deus the Third, enemies have a pretty hard time looking around corners in spaces where they most definitely should see you. I feel they also needed an improvement on noticing light sources being out, even when you did this out of their notification range. Another would be why guards have face scarves the way Garrett does. I could understand "OMG the Gloom!", but if that were the case wouldn't everyone be wearing face masks as a precautionary measure and not just guards? Enemy combatants also have very little patrol variation. I did appreciate that once you moved to flagged sections that sometimes guard paths would change, but they would always change in a predictable manner. This is somewhat good/bad in that by introducing multiple patrol paths you up the difficulty a bit, or at least the time needed to properly plan your traversal. I would have loved to see this however because it would allow for more variance in the system and in turn simply be more "alive" to the player.
One somewhat unrelated note about Guards was that I didn't like that they had been reduced to walking bags of gold. I mean, anyone who's played the original trilogy remembers how often you could lift keys off guards so that you wouldn't need to pick locks. By removing this choice from the game it made guards in general more one dimensional, and - perhaps more importantly - forced me to ask the question of "How do guards get around if they don't have keys? They carry lockpicks?" Those would be some pretty untrustworthy guards if they did. It's certainly not a thing for everyone to have, but even more senior guards getting keys would have gone a long way to giving more personality to those NPCs in general.
Lastly, I am pained to say something we witnessed from the E3 demo, and something that I was concerned about, was not corrected. NPC reactions to sound cues, specifically set pieces that make a lot of sound. They are great at noticing yapping birds, and broken glass (which are nice variant editions), but any crate that falls is paid no mind at all. The same goes with large moving and loud set pieces. Opening the main safe in the bank? Apparently no one can hear that when it happens. And this brings me to one of the strongest and simultaneously weakest elements of this title.
<h2 id="1-7">Sound and Music</h2>Simply put, sound is the most important part of any stealth game. When placed into a situation where you cannot gain visual cues, auditory cues become of primary importance, and in Thief have a long history. I really wish I could tell you that the sound overall is fantastic, but it's implementation is both buggy and incomplete. The main problem with Thief is that sound specialization is terrible. Were this not a stealth game, the implementation would have been perfectly acceptable, but in a genre where sound is a primary indicator, the cues need to be near perfect, or at least generally correct; and their neither.
The first noticeable thing for veterans is that surface types have been significantly downplayed in this iteration. I actually don't mind that so much, but it does have a problem with not treating with surface types and specific movements paradigms. Say you are walking on a stone floor, and then start climbing a wooden staircase? Not only has the floor type changed, but the way the person places their feet on that surface also changes, which in turn modifies the sound in a noticeable way. I actually got caught a few times because I heard the footsteps, but unable to discern that they were on the stairs or even how close they were resulted in my getting caught. Which brings me to the worst offender in the spacialization of sound in Thief.
It ignores walls. It disregards the way sound propagates within a room and how items in that room can modify that propagation. It's two dimensional. Wait what does that last one mean? Well, simply put, if you hear footsteps or a conversation from a room above or below you, it sounds like it's on the same vertical plane as you are. Basically, the acoustic model of how sound propagates in Thief is a circle, when it should be a sphere. Put together, they make discerning movement and the placement of individuals or sound sources incredibly difficult. They're in a... general...that way direction.
And it's really unfortunate because the sound design and music while somewhat uneven in places, are really well done overall when not experiencing the occasional technical glitch, or being subjected to poor specialization techniques. I'm not sure how people will take to the new musical penchant of Thief, but I was pretty impressed. Not only was Luc St.Pierre and the rest of the design team smart enough to use the generative process that the original games had, but they very smartly used certain auditory ideas to reinforce the mood, setting, or emotional state of the player. Getting caught is a great example of how all of a sudden we get a somewhat cacophonous sounding of rhythms that very cleverly mimics heart palpitations (in trying to accentuate the level of apprehension and fear of the player). They also used granular synthesis and other smart fragmentary techniques to essentially "dirty" the sound world so that it would help create the overall mood of The City. And this is the strongest part of this game. The setting, and overall mood of The City stands at the forefront of things gotten right with this game. One thing about the musical choices that I didn't like was that sometimes it caught a case of Hollywood syndrome to create a somewhat bland and generic brooding mood-piece, but even when that did happen there were other elements present to try to help create a more complicated and unique palette.
![[image loading]](/staff/wo1fwood/blog/thief4/pd.jpg)
Oh, and hats off for using PD for the generative process. What's PD? It's Pure Data, and it's an incredibly powerful and complicated audio synthesis tool. The above image a sample patch for PD that I created when I was researching Just Intonation comparatively to Equal Temperament. And let me tell you, this patch is incredibly basic. If you want to read more on the how things were done, RPS had a <a href="http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2013/11/20/the-suite-science-paul-weir-talks-generative-music/" target="_blank">feature</a> that covered this a little while back, and it's pretty interesting.
<h2 id="1-8">Misc. Glitches, and Immersion</h2> I'm not sure of others experiences, but for me Thief was pretty buggy. Shockingly only in small ways considering the copious development troubles, but they are there nonetheless. Here are a list of problems that kept coming out of the shadows:
<ul><li>Guard pathing broking on a new load when quick saved during a conversation</li><li>Music cutting out abruptly</li><li>Sound spacialization in the wrong physical space (notably with environmental effects and where they would drop off in and out of doors) </li><li>Heat seeking arrows from the Thief Taker General</li><li>Great safe combination not matching the in game notes</li><li>Visions being skipped (twice in Asylum) </li><li>Guard pathing glitches, making them swirl around when interacting with weather effects on the ground</li><li>Audio cues for guards to notice a disturbances ignored at various times</li><li>The exact same audio conversations repeated ad nausem</li><li>Audio conversations fired twice, thus creating conversational overlap</li><li>Audio drops out entirely</li><li>Audio levels not honoring custom settings, or swapping relationships (where Garrett became inaudible at times)</li></ul>And that's my list of weird occurrences. Again, I'm shocked that this game didn't go full Aliens, Colonial Marines on us, but thank god it didn't.
Finally I'd love to talk about a word that developers use a lot these days in conjunction with design choices. Immersion, Affordance, and Agency are all big buzzwords right now. I wanted focus on Immersion and discuss some of the kinds of choices that create it, and what choices inevitably break it in Thief.
<uL><li>Menus</li>There's a history of trying to maintain the palpability of the world even within menus in Thief games. The main reason for this is that often times you would read notes or mission plans, or look at maps for important areas and always have a feeling of connectedness to the world. In Thief 4 menus are a barren and ultimately an immersion breaking experience partially because the notes, maps, and papers, once actual fabrications of real world objects are now streamlined into the existing menu schema, but also in that there is a distinct absence of sound that Thief 1-3 purposefully maintained. I also kind of wished that the reading of this material was in-game, but that's I think a personal preference.
<li>Out of Body Experience, Advance Information</li>This is a specific case regarding non-first person perspectives. A number of times in the game you would get a panning camera shot outside Garrett's body that would serve to tell something, either as a story element, or piece of information. The latter is very problematic because by doing this you are giving the player advance information. In a game where information is key to success, this makes the game easier and far less exciting because you were explicitly told there were exactly seven guards in the vicinity, instead of having to carefully survey and find this out yourself.
<li>Swooping and Platforming</li>I've discussed this beforehand, but the generally inhuman feats of agility and out of body platforming for me were things that jarred my experience with the game. I talked about swooping, but platforming? The reason I believe this to be ultimately immersion breaking is because, just like the out of body camera shots you are ripped from your body and given information that you shouldn't have. I had to think on this more too because initially I hated the Tomb Raider/Splinter Cell/Assassins Creed style of platforming. But as I thought about it, what really bothered me was the visual spectacle and not the actual act. What would have been really ballsy and something befitting the Thief legacy would be if when platforming, you still were restricted to a 1st person perspective. Doing this would enhance that sense of immediacy and immersion, it would have played into the uneasiness of having a distinct lack of visual information, but it also would ground and intensify the feeling that these are physically difficult feats that you as the player are pulling off. As it was, I never felt any sense of danger or difficulty in my traversal of these paths, and that's a compelling idea that's ends up as a missed opportunity.
<li>Jumping or Mantling</li>The lack of jumping was something that many were very fearful of. It's because we worried that the lack of player freedom would restrict how we could approach tasks. And it unfortunately does this exact thing. I can't say that I hated mantling as it actually worked much better than I ever expected it to. It's actually not that bad, but there are big downsides. Removing jumping, like the change to rope arrows allows for developers to heard players down the paths they want, rather than allowing the player to be creative in an environment. But also, removing jumping negates any skill requirement when traversing to and from precarious paths. I mention that because one thing that games can teach really well is depth perception and hand eye coordination. With these semi-automated systems where you can't fall from overly sloped paths, narrow walkways, or not jump far enough to another platform, it removes any chance for humans to develop and hone these skills. Aren't we missing something here?
<li>Player Extremities</li>This one is somewhat counterbalanced. On one hand, I loved that there was a tangible feeling to interaction with items in the world. It made the thieving aspect more impactful as it subtly reinforced my ownership of theft. What I thought was pretty goofy was when you were crouched - which was all the time for me - that your arms were stretched out before you so the camera had vision of them. Try that. Go crouch and put your arms in front of you like they did and tell me that doesn't feel awkward as hell. I do understand that this is a compromise. When you crouch it is natural to counterbalance with your arms, but generally your arms are never going to be that far in front or that high. Essentially the developers then made a call to raise them to try to enhance the sense of self and hope it's not too awkward. I think they overdid it as placing the arms in a more sensible place - as in almost completely off the screen - would have done the same thing they wanted, and remained less silly. And yes, I did get the obscure Indiana Jones reference.</ul>
![[image loading]](/staff/wo1fwood/blog/thief4/t4fin.jpg)
<h2 id="1-9">Final Thoughts</h2>The choice to reboot Thief was a ballsy one. Even more so after trying to tackle another revered franchise in Deus Ex. So with all the discrete analysis from the explicit to the subtle, what are my overall thoughts and experiences with Thief? If I were to try to reduce the game to a concise description I would probably say that Thief is a somewhat unfinished and uninspired experience that occasionally shows true brilliance when honing in on the core elements that made the originals such magical experiences. It has strong gameplay, if somewhat repetitive and uninspiring level design. It has a story that is generally terrible, but could have been greatly helped if had simply been more carefully considered and fleshed out. Ultimately, it's a game that needed more time to develop properly, and ironically, probably should have had its development rebooted once the overall vision had become more unified.
I also feel kind of sorry for those involved with the project as I can't imagine the heartache and pressure they must have endured throughout the entire process. For what they were able to deliver, they should get some serious credit as it could have been very easy to deliver a poor product. Instead we get an uneven one that is in a funny way, a testament that stealth gaming has truly amazing potential. Even through developmental troubles it shows us just how magical this kind of experience can be. It also makes me wish in some ways that they would try again, as the Thief that I hoped we would get - and I hope you would agree - would be a truly inspiring game worthy of the pedigree that it comes from.
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