Eidos Montreal talks Thief concerns

Eidos Montreal producer Joe Khoury has said that his team is “well aware” of some of the community’s concerns over the upcoming re-imagining of Thief, reassuring VideoGamer.com that his team understands “what was so special” about the original games.

Attempting to allay some fans’ fears over the upcoming game, Khoury said that, “first and foremost, [we know] where they’re coming from being fans ourselves, and obviously, some of the feedback that they have is valid, it’s good, and some of it we are really well aware of it. We listen a lot. There’s a lot that we know that they don’t know yet. So, some of the feedback we get back, wait until the game comes out.”

The situation isn’t helped by marketing schedules and planned feature reveals, Khoury suggests, who appears frustrated at being limited to certain topics, rather than being able to discuss more about the game.

“You know, we wish we could talk about more detail [and] show more like what you saw today,” he continued. “I hope that once [players] get their hands-on they’ll understand that a lot of comments they were talking about have made their way to the game. And it’s not just because they’ve mentioned it, it’s because we’re aware of them and we’re working on them. It’s exciting but it’s tough, because if we could only tell them that yes, this is happening and yes, we’re doing this.”

One of the biggest fears appears to be over the implementation of Garrett’s new Focus ability, an option that enhances the player’s combat, lock picking and pickpocketing skills, and highlights items in the environment.

But Khoury says that Eidos Montreal has made it clear time and time again that the ability is entirely optional.

“We’ve mentioned over and over and over again that you can turn [Focus] off,” he says. “So it’s interesting that there are some fans that are now saying, ‘Well, they’ve mentioned that you can turn it off numerously’. It’s almost getting to a point where a lot of people are saying, you know what, the game is so close to being released that we’ll see when it comes out.”

As well as introducing features to open the series up to a new audience, a key part of Thief’s re-imagining is to understand which elements give Thief fans “such great memories”, Khoury says.

“Everybody’s got different experiences about [Thief]…,” he continues. “There’s a general feeling of what made these games successful, but if you ask every single person what [they] would keep from the first Thiefs, everybody would say something different, and in the end you might come out with a game that is basically a remake of the first game. And even then people would be like, well they didn’t innovate, they didn’t use any of the lessons learned over the past years.

“Understanding what gave us such great memories of this game and understanding what it means to be able to bring that into this generation of gamers is where it’s important, not necessarily the micro details, or saying this colour or this character. If I ask every single person just high level what do you remember of the first Thief [they would say], ‘Oh, this feeling of having this or that.’

“That was what’s important for us to hit and that’s again some of the stuff that we can’t necessarily just directly spit out. It comes out in bits and pieces but it’s something that the player discovers playing the game, just like it was when they played the first Thief. That’s the essence of what we’re trying to bring back with this game, not necessarily picking out specific things from the first game that we wanted to say that exclusively is coming back – apart from Garrett which we thought was a character definitely worth revisiting today.”

He continued: “Having cared a lot about the franchise we have some really big fans on the team, and some of these fans are decision-makers. They understand what the first games did. Knowing that there are people on the team that are micro-analysing the game and understanding what it meant, I’m very confident in them understanding what was so special about the first Thiefs and what is worth reimagining.”

Thief launches on Xbox One, Xbox 360, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 3 and PC on February 28, 2014.