Thick as Thieves is one of my most anticipated games and every Thief fan should backstab this wishlist button

On December 13, 2024By Karl

Thick as Thieves – Announced Trailer – YouTube
Thick as Thieves - Announced Trailer - YouTube

Starting tonight, Warren Spector’s studio can claim to have one of the world’s most ambitious gaming concepts: the four-player multiplayer Thief.

Announced today, Thick as Thieves is a first-person PvPvE stealth game coming in 2026. When I saw the game in Los Angeles the day before it was announced at The Game Awards, creators OtherSide Entertainment were telling me all the right things about the game. creative approach.

You are a thief infiltrating a busy city and trying to defeat other players to capture a valuable item at the center of a shared mission. “Everything in the game is systematic” and prioritizes player creativity in 20-30 minute sessions. Each run will feel different, aided by a mix of enemies and elements (perhaps the most frequently made promise in the history of video games). Deception and cleverness will replace war; While you can certainly knock your opponents out of the game with a handful of combat vehicles, this is a game that wants to live in the more cerebral realms of environmental awareness, listening and planning rather than DPS.

“Immersive simulations are about coming up with your own solutions to problems and thinking creatively. Everything in our game is designed to make sure you can come into the game with ideas about what makes the best master thief, what tools you use, etc. David McDonough, the game’s lead designer, said while watching the first footage of the game. “How you will pass the level, using what abilities, and how you will react to situations.”

If you’re a Thief, Deus Ex, or Dishonored person, this is all music to your ears, and that’s no coincidence: several of the people who founded the immersive simulation genre are gathered at OtherSide Entertainment: Greg LoPiccolo (Thief, System Shock), Paul Neurath (Ultima Underworld, Thief, System Shock 2) and frequent collaborator Warren Spector.

Spector says he and Neurath founded OtherSide to take immersive simulations “to the next level, to see the genre continue and evolve.” Spector says this evolution is Thick As Thieves. “I’ve been thinking for years that the next logical step was multiplayer.”

Two thieves, one with a mechanical arm, run through dark streets

(Image credit: Megabit)

Adapting the complex design of immersive simulations into a competitive format is a massive creative undertaking; So it’s perhaps unsurprising that Thick as Thieves sticks to the relatively familiar setting of a fictional UK city in the early 1910s.

The dense, 5×5-block neighborhood I showed wouldn’t be out of place in Dishonored 2 or Thief. There are leakable enclosures, trawlable sewers, train stations, offices, residences and roof overhangs begging to be grappled.

McDonough says the setting combines “the stone aesthetic of the old world with the street layout of the beginning of the modern, jazz age type of things. So neon, steam, but also radio, automobiles, electricity.” In other words, enough technology that thieves can tamper with, but not so much that Thick As Thieves drifts into James Bond gadgetry.

Throwing a grenade at a guard holding a crackling electric nightstick

(Image credit: Megabit)

You and your opposing thieves are members of a guild, and while each unique thief will carry their own signature element, such as a hook, that only they can bring to a match, they are not character classes per se but rather “named individuals” who have a backstory and a story to tell,” McDonough said of the studio. He says he thinks it has a “slightly new approach to narrative, where the world is a story and you can play missions about the guild, political forces, or other actors in the city, but you can also play out your own story as well as the normal objectives.” It’s a personal story that unfolds as quests that you can follow in missions.”

Your competitors are trying to achieve similar or related goals, and all your activities influence each other
David McDonough, lead designer

There’s magic in this universe, too, but don’t expect to use flashy abilities with cooldowns: it’s more Thief than Dishonored. One of your five carried tools might be the pickpocketing fairy you carry in the jar, but there’s no such thing as an invisibility spell like Gandalffy.

“Thieves are not wizards,” says McDonough. “Magic is similar to objects, devices, or places in the world.” One of the Thief character templates, the Chameleon, has a disguise kit that allows you to perfectly mimic the appearance of another character, but it’s “magical in a way that still makes sense in the landscape of what you’re going to do, but it can be countered by another player, they can see it, they can undo it, “They don’t have to run away when the fireball comes or something like that, that’s how we think of magic,” McDonough says. .

Sneaking up behind a guard with a grappling device

(Image credit: Megabit)

In the demo, I see one of the simpler ways for one player to eliminate another. Behind a metal door in the sewers, our thief reaches one of the preliminary objects that will give a clue to the location of the real target; The thing all thieves hope to walk away with. They placed a disabled gas bulb right inside the door of the room and lied in wait. A minute later, we can barely hear the thief across from us opening the door on the left. Once inside, the knockout gas (which can be thrown as well as deployed) detonates like a proximity grenade, disorienting the enemy and lining them up for a relatively easy KO from behind.

“That’s the basic concept, the context contest of resourcefulness, the whole idea of Thick as Thieves, what if all the great stealth gameplay, the cunning, the manipulation and caution and all those things that make a Thief game rich, but your opponents are just security, artificial It’s not intelligence and level design (resources), it’s other thieves who are just as smart as you trying to do the same thing, and they’re all trying to accomplish similar or related goals, and many of your activities influence each other,” McDonough says.

I don’t see many NPCs in the first few minutes of the game that OtherSide showed me, but game director Greg LoPiccolo says you shouldn’t expect to kill your way through hoards of guards like in Assassin’s Creed. “They’re pretty menacing,” LoPiccolo says of the game’s guards.

Two guards, one with a stick, seen from above

(Image credit: Megabit)

“One on one, you can definitely sneak up on a guard unawares, and there are plenty of opportunities to do that. It’s pretty satisfying. Or pickpocket to get his keys, etc. But once you get two, three, four guards, cornered, you’re probably done. So are we.” that’s how we set it up,” LoPiccolo continues. “We don’t want to make a game about PvP combat against guards, do we? That’s fine. You have to lose those counters. Most of what we’re involved in right now is creating a lot of contextual details about what the guards say to each other. Or if you disguise yourself as a guard, other guards will come up to you and you’ll be there too.” “Civilians are powerless, but if you scare a civilian in their bedroom, they’ll fly up the stairs and find a guard to come back and kick your ass.”

Will OtherSide’s plan work?

Despite their decades-long legacy and significant impact, immersive simulations are still viewed as exotic beasts by most gaming audiences. I’m excited about Thick as Thieves, but I’m also skeptical that it can attract millions of players even if it walks and talks like a modern service game as OtherSide plans.

While police chase a suspect down the street, a thief stakes out the building called The Underhand

(Image credit: Megabit)

The precedent for games in this genre is small and not encouraging. Only two multiplayer stealth heist games have been released recently: Hood: Outlaws and LegendsAn attempt to bring Assassin’s Creed-style stealth multiplayer gaming to 2021 is a doomed attempt, and Sweet Bandits’ spy fiction shooter Deceive Inc. announced earlier this month. is closing its doors.

This is a game about competition, not about fighting
Warren Spector, studio director

Deceive Inc. is an undeniably new, creative FPS where players can disguise themselves as NPCs on a sprawling Hitman-style map. Why didn’t it find an audience? I asked the Thick as Thieves team if they had played this game and if they had any theories.

McDonough, Deceive Inc. “It’s basically a shooter game, whether you succeed or fail depends mainly on your fighting ability,” he says of . “The amount of variability between missions was a lot less than what we had (in Thys as Thieves). The symmetry of the level design and objectives tended to make it sort of a battle royale at the point of extraction, no matter who won… In the end, I think it was a little too indexed to being a team shooter and It’s over, not up. We’ve differentiated enough and started on a different path from the very beginning, like we don’t want to be thought of as a shooter.”

A building with a bright neon sign that reads MacNeish Jeweler

(Image credit: Megabit)

Spector adds: “This is a game about competition, not about combat. Again, we allow combat very loosely because we want to support a variety of play styles and player choices. But the competitive element of it is really strong.”

“It’s exciting and kind of terrifying, isn’t it? Because we’re solving some, you know, some pretty challenging design problems where a world emerges that pops up and is highly variable and has a lot of things you can’t predict,” LoPiccolo says. what the team is building. “But, you know, it’s pretty magical when it works, because elaborate scenarios like this come out with flashbacks and twists and breakthroughs that feel like they were actually scripted.”

What OtherSide hopes is that replacing “kill” with a wider range of interesting verbs will attract players’ attention. “You can ambush, you can sneak up, you can hunt, you can disable other thieves to eliminate competition or steal the things they carry. But you can also compete indirectly, using the environment against them, Guards need to catch or chase them, lock them out of rooms, deny them privacy ” says McDonough. “We’re imagining a game where one player can kick in the door, knock everyone out, break the display case, and then jump out the window. And another player could be hiding in the rafters the whole time, watching, and no one even knows they’re there too, and both of those play styles are they are equally valid and will compete directly with each other.”