Of the many remarkable abilities possessed by Dishonored hero Corvo Attano, perhaps the most remarkable is, well, possession: Corvo can possess creatures, most famously the game’s plentiful rats, to get up to all sorts of trouble, including accessing locations that would be inaccessible to his full-sized body. As it turns out, this wasn’t an entirely original idea. More than a decade earlier it had been considered for use in Dishonored’s masterpiece progenitor, Thief: The Dark Project.
Thief basically is Dishonored, speaking very broadly: A guy who’s good at sneaking around gets caught up in a bunch of political nonsense he’d really rather avoid because of a woman he can’t admit to being in love with because it’d be weird. One chief difference is that Garrett, the titular thief of the Thief games (the ones that matter, anyway) doesn’t have any powers.
He almost did, though. In a 2018 PC Gamer magazine interview marking the 20th anniversary of Thief’s debut, lead designer Tim Stellmach said Looking Glass Studios had pondered giving Garrett the ability to shrink himself and travel through small passageways like drains. The idea was ultimately dropped, though, for eminently practical reasons.
“We just decided it was gonna be way too much work to do it right,” Stellmach explained. And, maybe more importantly: “It started raising questions that we didn’t want to answer.”
From the archives
This interview was originally published in PC Gamer #325 (UK, Christmas 2018).
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Stellmach didn’t expand on the nature of those questions, but it’s not too difficult to guess. As a pure stealth game (another big difference between Thief and Dishonored: Garrett is not great in a fight), getting from point A to point B without being seen is central to the experience: Being able to transform into a small, innocuous rodent might make traversing Soulforge less of a brain-crushing grind, but it’d also suck the fun out of the whole thing, right?
Thief is, in many ways, an unforgiving experience, and as we noted a few years back, many of its innovations have been left behind in favor of mainstream accessibility. Stealth is an option in games like Dishonored, but there’s always a Plan B of ‘kill everyone’ if you blow it or just get bored of sneaking around. That’s just not an option in Thief, where Garrett can generally handle one guy at a time but no more than that. But it worked: As Richard Cobbett wrote in his own retrospective on how Thief defined the stealth genre, the game’s singular focus resulted in a singular immersive sim experience.
Thief is back in the news these days thanks to the Nightdive remaster announced at the PC Gaming Show in June, which despite being called Thief: The Dark Project Remastered will also include the additional missions from Thief Gold, along with a beefy slate of other improvements and upgrades. To ensure it’s done right, Nightdive has brought back Thief artist Daniel Thron to help revamp the game’s cutscenes, a vital part of any serious Thief reconstruction effort.
There’s still no release date on the remaster but as PC Gamer immsim weirdo Joshua Wolens correctly stated when the game was revealed, “Oh hell yes.”
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