NoClip Thief Retrospective Documentary

[demagogue]

NoClip has put out a fantastic retrospective of the Thief games that interviews a lot of the creators on how the game was designed.
 

Edit: New things I learned (or had forgotten & learned again)...

- The whole magic system was geared around the 4 elements, which they later played down as such, but they also made up the original arrows, air/gas, water, earth/moss, fire... But noise & rope arrows were too useful to leave out.

- A major design idea was "active stealth", one idea of which was creating distractions and negotiating "safe spaces", and a major inspiration was Ken Levine's experience with sub sims, where you can release noise makers and use thermal layers to slip past, both of which had natural extensions in Thief gameplay.

- The other game LGS was making right at the same time as TDP was a Golf game. For that game, they had to fill a lot of dead space with commentator patter, which fed directly into using guard patter to fill time since the player was avoiding most things.

- I also respected Randy's postmortem of TDS. It was pretty clear he was just as crushed by the design flaws that the rest of the community was (the body awareness supreme backfire, the heartbreaking necessity to break up the levels to meet the XBox memory limits, the render woes & being stuck with a wonky engine, etc.), and I think he did a good job of explained how and why they happened. More or less, he made design decisions before getting all the relevant information that affected what they could do, and some decisions (like body awareness) just didn't work in practice like they may have looked on paper. I can't be too upset. Some good levels and moments still came out of that game, I still love Randy's levels & design thinking (generally), I can understand and very much sympathize with his position and (ultimately mistaken) thinking and intuitions, which I might well have gone along with myself if I were a team member, and above all ... if TDS hadn't been what it was, we probably wouldn't have Darkmod now, and I'm really, really happy we have Darkmod.

[JackFarmer]

I revised my opinion on Thief 3 latest after Thief 2014- Deadly Shadows is not a bad game.

It has a great atmosphere. Nobody should be ashamed of having worked on it.

The franchise owners should be ashamed of what they did to the series afterwards.

However, we have discussed the latter in extense in the past, no need to elaborate on that once again.

Edited August 12, 2021 by JackFarmer

[Diego]

Just finished watching it and came here to comment.

Excellent documentary indeed! Really cool hearing all those people who worked on it.

The deadly shadows part made me feel bad for him. It's a flawed game, for sure, not just because of constraints and technical difficulties, I think the wrong choices were made and only later they understood them. However, it's clear from the interview that it was obviously made with a lot of love and effort, and sometimes bad choices are not obvious at the time. And flawed as it may be, I still hold the opinion that the plot is at the same great level on all three games.

The way they worked at Looking Glass goes against all my instincts of any creative project. It was very much a chaotic group effort, there is no one person who you could say made Thief. To me that is a terrible way of making art, but I guess that it has its merits if it can produce Thief, system shock and deus ex.