14 DAY TRIAL // The recently revealed Thief reboot, which promises to reinvent the series, has been compared by quite a lot of people with Dishonored, last year's stealth game from Arkane Studios and Bethesda, but developer Eidos Montreal believes the two titles have radically different approaches in terms of gameplay.
Thief titles amazed lots of stealth fans many years ago by proving that a game could have smart enemies not to mention a sarcastic protagonist, in the form of Garrett.
Now, Eidos Montreal is preparing to reboot the franchise with the simply titled Thief, which introduces quite a few changes such as an overall darker tone, which caused many gamers to draw comparisons between it and last year's Dishonored.
According to the game's producer, Stephane Roy, he and the rest of the team really liked Dishonored and highlighted that it still borrowed heavily from previous Thief titles.
"It's cool to see that Thief was a big inspiration for Dishonored. Thief started something new and Dishonored is a kid of this grandfather. On our side we played the game and it's a very, very good game. But they were more about revenge," Roy told CVG.
According to Lead Level Designer Daniel Windfeld Schmidt, the story emphasized revenge while mechanics focused on supernatural abilities, which won't be the case with the upcoming Thief.
"When we were playing it, it was not what we wanted to do because they had very arcade, magical mechanics with teleportation and so on. That gave the player a lot of freedom and a lot of empowerment, but the game was about killing people and about revenge and we're like, ‘we just want to steal stuff! We're going to steal from the poor. We're going to steal from the rich. That's our mandate.’"
Mechanics in the new Thief game will do more to immerse the players into its world and make them relate to what's happening.
"We need people to be able to relate to the real world within our world and that's very important for us. That's why you have the hands [always on display] and why the AI are very nuanced in terms of their different layers of reaction depending on what are doing. So there are similarities, yes, because the source of inspiration is the same. But Thief's a completely different game."
The new Thief title will be released in 2014 on the PC and next-gen consoles.