A friend asked me if I'd seen the most recently Thief 4 trailer, and when I said no,
when I told him I was worried about the direction of the game and so I'd stopped
paying attention to it, he said something interesting to me to get me to check
it out. He told me that the trailer had
reminded him of Deus Ex.
Deus Ex, to those
who don't know, is a role playing/action game with some shooting and stealth
slapped into it. It was also a franchise
reboot, fully titled Deus Ex: Human
Revolution, of an old game that had a bunch of problems with shooting
mechanics and stealth mechanics that also did some incredibly interesting
things with non-violence and consequence in gameplay that Deus Ex: Human Revolution mostly ditched in favor of presenting a
neat, sleek actiony package.
I don't mean to knock Deus
Ex's reboot, which is a fine game on its own - if it had been released as
an independent property, I'm sure I'd be extolling its revolutionary framework
and its streamlined object interactions, which harken back to gaming days of
old. But it was placed in the context of
a super-cerebral self-serious franchise that did some insane things quite well
and some simple things quite poorly and, as such, I contextualize it within the
scope of that earlier game, with its boundless, unfulfilled ambition and
shimmering capacity to encorporate the unexpected into its framework. Deus
Ex: Human Revolution was fun, it was good, but it wasn't Deus Ex.
Thief is a game I
have a considerably less tortured relationship with than Deus Ex. I absolutely love Thief.
When I was in high school, I downloaded the demo of the
first Thief game years after it had
come out and played through it again and again and again, dreaming of a day
when I could save up enough allowance to buy it, or guilt my parents into
grabbing me a copy. In the end, I
somehow managed to get the money together to try and grab a copy and, instead
of getting Thief 1, I discovered that
I could only find Thief 2.
I was okay with that - I'd get back to Thief the First later.
I played through Thief
2 with a kind of rapid obsession that came in starts and fits - I'd rumble
through a particularly easy passage, and then stall out. It's worth noting that I played it on the
hardest possible difficulty level, which insisted that I never kill anyone,
ever, and played through it trying to pick up every penny I could. I did pretty well, too, even though it took
me an absurd amount of time. Eventually,
I hit the last level and then, after a month of recklessly running down passages,
finally finished the game. It was an
amazing experience, a kind of harrowing triumph that rarely emerges from
videogamedom, the kind of decision that developers tend to avoid in this day
and age. Thief 2 was clumsy and rewarding, it was challenging and
breezy. It had a queer, tense pace that
made every single aspect of it into a kind of nightmare dribblefest through
quick, tense bits of action and long, dull slogs of surveillance. I still recall, with queer accuracy,
navigating the game's clumsy systems well enough to drop down on an enemy from
above and slam them in the face with my blackjack, knocking them unconscious.
I was also absolutely mystified by Garrett. Stephen Russell's marvelous performance cast
an anti-hero who, unlike say a Han Solo (awesome antihero in his own right) was
truly only concerned with his own survival and well-being. That's not to say that Garrett was the kind
of blithe misanthrope who took advantage of anyone who wasn't watching their
wallet carefully enough: he was a calm, calculating professional who knew his
trade, knew how to make a living at it, and didn't attempt to moralize. He didn't kill without needing to, didn't
take jobs just for the hell of it, and thought his actions through carefully,
cautiously, meticulously. This was a
character I could get behind, an outsider who did alright on his own, who
really didn't want to be involved with anyone else, who was, as he put it, just
interested in keeping his ribs from meeting his spine.
Imagine my petulance when I saw that Stephen Russell, fresh
off a performance in Skyrim as something
like four thieves, had been replaced.
And then imagine how I felt when, after watching the trailer for the new
Thief game, I heard Romano Ozari declare that "When I want something, I
always get it." The character I'd
loved as a young man was now replaced by this strange new thing, this vector
for wish fulfillment who seemed to be less of a pragmatic survivor constantly
drawn into events by the skein of fate and more like an extreme sports nut who
used stealing the way some people use parkour.
The surreally animated cutscenes were gone, replaced by
photorealistic renderings of a steampunk society run amok. An interesting prospect, and maybe even an
interesting story, but not a Thiefy
prospect, not a story about the Garrett who had captivated me as a young man,
who continued to captivate me as an adult.
Instead, I saw something that made me think, more than anything else, of
a game that bridged Mirror's Edge's
failures and Assassin's Creed's
successes, a sort of stealthed up version of faster games that attempted to
play on the nostalgia I had for something old.
And it might not be bad, it might even be good, but it won't be that
thing, that object, that artifact that captured my imagination when I was
young, because it will play on being smooth, sleek, fluid, all the things the Thief series reveled in not being.
My friend was right - this was a Deus Exing, brought to bear on Thief.
I think I'm likely in the minority in feeling that the
infiltration of action into the stealth genre is a bad thing - it makes the
games punchier, more interesting, more engaging. But it sacrifices intensity and consequence,
it sacrifices the notion of painstaking exploration and planning that the Thief
games impressed upon their players. When
I played Dishonored, I thought This
is what Thief might've been like if Thief had been a game about feeling
powerful. But it wasn't a game about
feeling powerful - it was a game about feeling weak and small and alone and
still triumphing. It was a game about
outwitting and outmaneuvering, rather than outrunning or overpowering.
The migration of action into stealth games seems aimed towards
this sort of power fantasy. The creative
influences of the new Thief game, the
Assassin's Creeds and Splinter Cells, focus on fast, brutal,
quiet combat. This makes sense: it
presents a powerful, enjoyable fantasy: you're a recontextualized ninja, doing
ninja shit, beating people up, slinking away, getting away with
everything. It's cool and its fun.
Thief, on the
other hand, isn't fun, or at least, it isn't or wasn't always fun. It was harrowing, taxing, exhausting. It made you feel like you'd been put through
a ringer when you finished a particularly challenging level, and it never,
ever, ever made you feel like you were a particularly tough or quick
individual. But it did invest you in
being a character, in inhabiting a world, in really, really considering how
your actions played out in a way that few, if any, titles today do.
So I find myself perturbed by the infiltration of action
into stealth, of the way that Thief
is now looking like the Deus Ex
reboot. I liked Thief when it was Thief,
when there were levels where I couldn't touch anyone, and levels where I didn't
even see anyone who wasn't a freakish salamander monster capable of broiling me
in my own skin before I even got a chance to look at them sideways. I've got no desire to see what the latest
incarnation of the Hammerites are up to if it's with some other, newer Garrett
who is climbing up the side of buildings so that he can ledge assassinate
guards.
I'd love to play a game that does those things, but it isn't
a stealth game, and it certainly isn't a Thief
game. And that, to me, is the problem:
not that this game is being made, but that it's being called Thief instead of something new,
something all its own that stays the potential for any kind of reboot or sequel
more ideologically aligned with the original Thief series. To me, that's
simply tragic, even if Thief 4 is, in
the end, great.
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