Super Nerd Sunday Presents: Dishonored and Thief!

Back in the early 2000s I would browse bargain bins to try and find games on the cheap. I was young, I was poor, and I wanted to play incredible, incredible games. So once or twice a month, I would beg my mom for a ride to Comp USA and dig through bargain bins while she waited in the car, two twenties jammed into my pocket. This is how I found such venerable titles as Myth and Thief. Well, really Thief 2, but the distinction seems almost academic at this point in gaming history. Plus, the narrative sounds better if I tell you I found Thief, because Thief is really what this is all about.

To the unacquainted: Thief was developed in the mid-ninties using a revolutionary FPS engine called “the Dark Engine” which allowed developers to do things like generate nuanced models of light behavior, script sophisticated AI behavior and populate environments with small, discrete objects that could be manipulated by players to vastly varying effect. That combination of complicated light source and AI behavioral scripting allowed players to sneak, and the manipulation of objects allowed them to do things like hide bodies, or misplace objects so that guards might notice something was missing. It also let them pick up lots of tiny, shiny, varyingly concealed objects. It enabled realistic theft simulation.

Thief also gave players great personal freedom to complete infiltration oriented puzzles on massive, sprawling maps with multiple paths and a wide array of potential solutions. You could complete missions without ever being noticed, or slaughter everyone on the map. You could knock out each enemy covertly and stash their bodies in a big heaping pile in a dark closet somewhere. Higher levels of difficulty on some missions would actually require that you kill no one and be seen by no one.

This didn’t really catch on as a genre at first. The Thief games were singular, framed by their creative counterparts in the System Shock series, and somewhat paralleled by the Deus Ex games, but for the most part Thief stood alone. But recently, stealth play has become more and more of a prominent aspect of many mainstream games. It has been shoehorned in to more conventional titles, generated a focus for some less conventional ones, and employed to make some impressively original mechanics in the indie world. Recently spiritual successors to the Thief games have begun to emerge. I’m thinking, not just of Eidos’ upcoming sequel, which I find a bit unsettling for a number of reasons, but of Dishonored, the Bethesda/Zenimax game about political assassination that swept console audiences not so very long ago.

Dishonored was released to widespread critical and commercial acclaim, and rightly so. It’s a well crafted game that successfully integrates a number of gameplay systems to make one vibrant, complicated “whole” system. Stealth, combat and some light role-playing elements are all bound together in a neat, tidy little package. It’s good, it’s smart, and it takes all the stealth mechanics introduced with titles like Thief and puts them into a nice, neat little action-filled package.

That’s where Dishonored really shines: it’s interested in presenting players with a power fantasy, a raw, throbbing one at that. Along with the gadgets, knives and shadows that Thief introduced, Dishonored throws magical powers into the mix. Some of them are subtle, stealthy mechanics that let you do things like enter the bodies of other creatures or see through walls, but the bulk of the powers orient around a violent approach to gameplay. Summoning hordes of rats, sending blasts of wind at foes, dissolving bodies into ash with a strike or ramping up your attack power as battles drag on are all fair game. Players who want to play through the entire game without killing a single enemy will find most of these powers useless, despite receiving more than enough points to purchase each and every last one of them. Sure, a number of them are straight up necessary to traverse the environments of Dishonored, particularly later in the game when some pretty extreme acrobatic maneuvers are required, but for the most part they’re there to reshape the combat that Dishonored so gleefully pushes you towards.

This really isn’t too shocking when you consider the fact that Arkane Studios, developer of Dishonored, previously made the ambitious/disappointing Heroes of Might and Magic: Dark Messiah, which prominently featured many similar gameplay paradigms. Dark Messiah also wanted players to revel in combat, featured some cute little branching decision trees and let players choose from a number of potential combat paths, one of which was considerably more fleshed out than the others. But it didn’t have the keen, well designed art of Dishonored, nor did it possess the marvelously scripted sequences that make Dishonored such a polished and playable artifact. Dark Messiah made me want to snap my keyboard in half as I struggled to puzzle out how to complete a certain mission or save a certain optional NPC. Dishonored is a durable, flexible thing by comparison: I only ever once had trouble saving an NPC that I wanted to see survive, and the nearly game-breaking bug that caused that problem still didn’t keep me from completing the mission, or doing it in “no kill” hard mode. There’s a level of polish to Dishonored that, paired with tremendously well developed gameplay, is impressive. Dishonored deserves all the praise that’s been heaped upon it. It really was fun to play, and the collectible system is simultaneously useful and attainable given the tools that the game throws your way, all despite one of the more obvious fourth act betrayals of the last year.

So why can’t I help myself from unfavorably comparing Dishonored to the Thief series?

Maybe it’s the artifice. Thief had a certain lightning in a bottle to it, a pervasive sense that everything you were doing was illicit. Every clusterfuck you ran away from, every guard you knocked out and dumped in a drainage ditch, every flashbang you threw into a room to give yourself a chance, however brief, to run through, was a victory not only over your enemies, but over the game systems themselves. You could bludgeon someone with a blackjack until they were unconscious in toe to toe combat (though it was not advisable). You could accidentally kill injured enemies with a flashbang. You could drop from the ceiling on to someone’s shoulders and knock them out or stab them without the slightest permission from the game – it was just a thing you could do. The game was flush with possibilities.

The same could be said of Dishonored, but Dishonored lets you know that it’s all good. There’s no real sense that you, as a player, are discovering game systems that the developers might not have anticipated and might not like you accessing (even when they’d no doubt be giving you the double thumbs up with each and every gameplay decision you make). There’s a sense of containment that, while it improves polish a great deal, really undermines the ethos of the game: namely, that you as a player are breaking rules, even the rules that confine gameplay. That sense of wholesale defiance is missing from Dishonored, and it’s reflected in the way that Dishonored employs it’s in game cutscenes and limits player choice.

You absolutely must take a drink from Pendleton, because hey, why wouldn’t you? Nevermind that anyone with half a brain would say “fuck it and fuck you, less charismatic version of the Emperor from Star Wars.” There’s no moment in Thief where I felt that way about the course of the story. Each desperate choice Garrett was forced into, every well intentioned error he made, every ambush he narrowly evaded, was a feather in his cap. There was never a face slapping moment of character stupidity that existed solely to forward a weak ass plot. Corvo, an apparently intelligent fellow who uncovers plots left and right and navigates systems to eliminate heavily protected targets, doesn’t detect the most obvious plot against him in the world.

There’s also the manner in which Thief built its world. The City in Thief is an organism, only partially seen, but within it are vibrant characters who exist beyond the confines of the game. Dishonored, on the other hand, showcased every character and place within Dunwall that it mentioned even in passing. Every named character had some sort of role in the game, the potential to be killed at some point by Corvo. There’s no sense that you’re existing in a world bigger than your own experiences: you have your fingers in every pie, and when the game resolves, of course it’s going to resolve totally. There’s a sense that the world doesn’t exist beyond you, a sense that was exacerbated for me, for whatever reason, by the lack of a reliably usable in-game map for missions (something that Thief both featured and used to great story effect on a handful of occasions).

I’m nitpicking. Dishonored is a fine game by any measure, and it represents the ethos of its time. The level of polish and the bombastic stupidity that pervades its narrative are both quite in line with what developers and publishers expect nowadays. If that polish seems to lose something, or if it seems to streamline play in a way that takes away from the sense of constant discovery and violation that earlier games like Thief provided so well… Well, perhaps it’s time that we move past those elements of play. Perhaps they’re no longer quite so critical to us. Perhaps they stand in the way of marketing and selling games. Looking Glass Studios, after all, was famously shuttered after Thief 2. The games that seem to captivate me, the games that have these deep rooted systems that orient themselves away from ease and into a sort of high-art-high-concept delivery of content are perhaps destined to go the way of the dinosaur (or, in the manner of Evoland, a game that thoroughly plays with such conceits, the way of indie games, which is considerably more optimistic).

With a new Thief game in the works, a new Thief game that sounds a great deal like the recent Deus Ex reboot, I’m feeling anxious. A generation of gamers will grow up thinking that stealth involves being able to slow down time and illuminate darkened areas of the map without consequence. They’ll never know the joy of the light gem or the rush of tossing a flashbang into a room and knocking out three guards before they recover from the blast. The sense of hopelessness as a burren chases you down a tunnel will be nothing to these youth who, so prone to being told how to go places, would simply find the original games puzzling and frustrating. Are they right? Are these games we once pored over too hard? Or did they simply ask more of us, an uncomfortable prospect for gamers used to having their victories handed to them? The loss of Stephen Russell from the next Thief game in favor of “an actor who can perform his own stunts” does not augur well in my mind. It’s nice to see the stealth, or action-stealth as many call it, genre growing stronger in recent years. I just worry that the action will overpower the stealth until the careful, sweeping eye old stealth games demanded of their players is no longer even a relevant aspect of gameplay.