Thief: Please be good :(

Just a quick post about Thief – Eidos Montreal got a talking shape to badly ramble about the new reimagining of the classic series at the Eurogamer Expo (I can’t believe that is a thing these days) – the video is on youtube here. Skip to about 12 minutes in for the level.

Notable points – they demo a level, which looks fantastic, Garret’s new voice actor is almost impossibly worse than the old one, and apparently your secondary resource (“focus”) is recharged via the ingestion (or inhalation, who knows) of what I can only assume to be opium straight from the flower.

I have heard many rumblings about this game having a difficult development, but if the demo they showed (a video – mind you) is indicative of the finished game, they should be on to a winner. I have a lot of faith in Eidos Montreal after Deus Ex: Human Revolution, which managed to modernize the Deus Ex series better than I think many of us were even hoping for. Also I am very gratified that they’re just calling it “Thief” now, not Th4if or whatever they started with.

For those whippersnappers who haven’t played this series, Thief is the quintessential (and probably first) stealth “sneak em up”, as it was called back in ye olde days. The first two games are great, but even the rose tinted glasses of growing up in the 90s isn’t quite enough to cut past the Dragon Age 2 style poly budgets for the characters – I mean, the guards have like one triangle per arm, as if they were sending all the rest off to starving Africans or something. Thief 3 (“: Deadly Shadows”), which came out during the rather painful era of the original XBox, is a genuinely good game hamstrung by an appalling engine – it actually terminates the process and restarts each time you change levels (I guess they never found that memory leak, huh) – and boy will you be changing levels a lot! The original XBox, you may recall, had about enough ram for half a shoebox at once.

Anyway, fingers crossed for Thief! It comes out alarmingly soon  – February, although they may pull a DX:HR on us and push it back a billion years. Meanwhile, buy the old games on Steam. Go. Now! Go!