I’m seriously psyched to play Thick as Thieves, an upcoming PC/console game first teased at the Game Awards a few weeks ago. It has a direct heritage to the original Thief games from the early 2000s, milestones in immersive simulation. (And as a young gamer, got me personally ebullient about interactive immersion as an emergent art form.) By putting the player in the role of a stealthy cat burglar in a steampunk city, Thief made you so keenly aware of the virtual environment (light/shadow, the ambient noisemaking potential of different materials, bored/agitated guards), you felt truly part of the 3D world around you. The original Deus Ex games soon expanded on those ideas in a cyberpunk context.
And now, developers on those games are making immersive simulation a multiplayer experience. If that’s even possible?
While Thick as Thieves' trailer bills it as a game "from" revered designer Warren Spector, lead creator of the original Deus Ex games (who also did some work on the original Thief franchise), the brunt of everyday development is actually led by veteran designers David McDonough and Greg LoPiccolo -- the latter who was project leader on the original Thief game.
In recent weeks I’ve been messaging all three -- on Thick as Thieves’ heritage to Thief/Deus Ex, on the challenge of making an immersive world multiplayer, and much more:
WJA: What design elements did you bring to this from your work on the Deus Ex games?
Warren Spector: Well, there's a high level mission element carried over from Deus Ex. The goal of empowering players to tell their own stories through play, to create unique experiences through experimentation and improvisation, the idea that players can surprise themselves and us - the developers - through the power of emergence. All of that is there in Thick as Thieves.
One thing that carries over that I didn't expect, that came right from Greg and David was the support for multiple playstyles. I love that and it's clearly foundational to Deus Ex, but it seemed almost impossible in the context of a "Stealth Action" game like Thick as Thieves. What they've done is support a "Ghost" style and a "Hunter" style (and everything in between)... a "never be seen and get the loot yourself style" and a "go after other players and steal loot from them" style or a combination of the two that I call the "expedient" playstyle.
They'll be tuning that until the game ships, but they've embraced the idea I've pitched that Playstyle Matters. That's right out of Deus Ex.
WJA: Deus Ex had a multiplayer option that (as I recall) wasn't used much. What lessons from that are you applying to TAT?
WS: Wow. I didn't think anyone remembered the multiplayer thing in the Deus Ex: Game of the Year Edition. It was a deathmatch mode on a small, separate map, completely divorced from the actual game. It was an experiment, a toy, really, to see if the player expression idea would work in multiplayer. And it did, at least as far as I was concerned. The deathmatch experience felt different when informed by the Playstyle Matters idea. But it was really just a toy, an indulgence on my part.
We went a little further with the multiplayer Immersive Sim idea in Disney Epic Mickey: The Power of Two*, where you could play as Mickey Mouse with another player in the role of Oswald the Lucky Rabbit. But it was still just a toe dipped in the water. With Thick as Thieves we're going all-in.
WJA: The marketing heavily emphasizes your role on the project, but can you talk about your input in relation to the team's overall work on it?
WS: My biggest contribution to Thick as Thieves was probably contributing to the kickoff - the establishment of the game's mission and vision. I've been saying for years that multiplayer was the next step for Imm Sims. How would a group of players tell stories together in a simulated world?
And with the increasing relevance of ongoing games, as opposed to games you play, finish and move on, it seemed like the time to create an Imm Sim that was campaign-oriented, like a tabletop RPG campaign.
Finally, there was an opportunity to address the slow, staccato pacing of Imm Sims with a more "actiony" approach (without compromising the planning, player-story, and multiple playstyle focuses of the genre). Those were the challenges laid out for the team. [Studio head] Paul Neurath and I were responsible for that.
After that, I'd say the most important thing I've done is get out of the way of people smarter than me so they can flesh out those high level ideas and turn them into a game.
Since then, I've reviewed documents and artwork and lurked during many playtest sessions and provided more feedback than the team probably wanted. I meet with Greg and David to go over where the project stands and talk about problem areas. And I've been working on narrative some, mostly because I like that stuff and deserve to have some fun, too. But make no mistake, once the initial goals and constraints were set, all the heavy lifting has been done by Greg, David and an incredibly talented team.
WJA: What was the most challenging aspect of turning Thief-style stealth gameplay into a multiplayer experience?
David McDonough: I would say pacing. Thief and other single-player stealth games are famously slow, deliberative, highly tense experiences where caution and observation are vital.
But in a multiplayer game, you don't have the luxury of that kind of time when you're trying to beat your rivals to a treasure or hunt down a competitor. We had to look deeper at all the systemic gameplay that stealth games are built on to make sure the same observe-decide-act loop applied to our game even at higher speed. We had to craft our challenges and objectives in a way where rushing is more destructive than constructive so players can trust that they can afford to be crafty and won't lose the race. It's a moving target, too, as players become more adept, and their primary challenge shifts from the environment to the other players. That's quite tricky in a game where player agency is so important and the design cannot truly know what each player will decide to do in any situation.
WJA: What are some of the more interesting examples of emergent gameplay you've seen during player testing?
DM: The best emergence comes when two players are directly competing for the same goal but have wildly different tools and abilities and are trying to outfox one another. You see players manipulate the environment in unexpected ways, like gathering mobs of AI to go after their opponents or setting off alarms in the hopes of slipping unnoticed through the chaos, or lurking sometimes for minutes in an unexpected place to try to ambush their rival.
I've seen very clever disguise strategies where players fool one another for a time, and then suddenly both catch wise and there's a mad scramble as they try to figure out what to do next.
I can recall one memorable occasion where a player knocked out a basement guard, disguised as him, and then pretended to walk his patrol for several minutes knowing another thief was probably inbound. [Emphasis mine! - WJA] they invested in their act, even to the point of pretending to respond to a noise in another room to give their rival a sense of security. Then they sprang the trap when the other least expected it.
That use of the environment, the mind game with the other thief, and the skillful use of a particular tool to create a unique situation - that's the stuff Thick as Thieves is made of.
WJA: Will TAT have a solo campaign and if so, what'll it be like (roughly)?
Greg LoPiccolo: We'll have a very limited solo campaign, with two functions:
A simple set of onboarding missions to get new players up to speed with our tools and tactics in a safe environment
Some training challenges - which may populate a leaderboard, but are really just an excuse for low-investment fun - like beating a mission without being detected, or speedruns, or max-loot-in-10-minutes - that kind of thing, so players can refine their skills outside the main arena.
WJA: Thief had an amazing mod community; do you expect to release the TAT tools to modders?
GL: It would be cool to support - but we're not anywhere near ready to commit to something like this.
WJA: What design elements did you bring to this from your work on the Thief games?
GL: It turns out that just the baseline set of NPC AI behaviors that was worked out in Thief 1 twenty-five years ago is (a) totally relevant to our updated version of stealth gameplay, and (b) just as fussy and time-consuming to implement as I remembered!
So I have been focused on working with the AI design/engineering team to get those gameplay elements built and refined. It is exciting insofar as we are able to build on those foundations set by Thief (response to sound and light stims, expression of AI state and intent etc), and extend them into some new territory - particularly now that we have multiple human players in the mix, providing a more complex set of stims to our guards and civilians. A lot of the most cool emergent moments are arising from AI response to more complex situations involving multiple thieves.
WJA: Will TAT have any narrative connections / allusions / easter eggs related to the Thief universe?
GL: If you encounter them in the shipping game, that is how you will know :)
Follow/Wishlist Thick as Thieves on Steam here.
* Spector adds: “Oh, and by the way, Epic Mickey damn well was an Immersive Sim -- okay, maybe an Immersive Sim lite - even if most gamers didn't see it. Not that I'm bitter or anything…”
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