If you were head of the creative team creating a new Thief game: what would the new game be like?

[Apache Fiero]

In this hypothetical scenario Embraces Group puts you in charge of the creative team in charge of creating a new Thief game.

You don't have to do any coding or any of the complicated boring bits and what you say goes.

What would the games plot be?

Would it be a sequel? prequel? reboot or maybe something else?

What new features would be in the game that we haven't seen before in Thief or The Dark Mod?

Can't think of any more question right now but I'm sure you'll have your own interesting ideas beyond anything I've asked.

[chakkman]

Frankly, considering that nobody in his sane mind would touch the franchise with a ten foot pole ever again, and considering the state of nowadays target audience of the more popular games, I think this is a very hpothetical scenario. At least for me, it doesn't make much sense to invest time in imagining what it could look like. It's unrealistic, and therefor I simply won't waste time on it.

I think it makes much more sense to imagine scenarios for Dark Mod missions.

If anything, in future times, I hope for a Dishonored 3. Sure, it's not Thief, but, it's what I'd imagine a goo  more Thief-y game should be like. I played through the whole series for a second time recently, and, man, it's so good that I really wonder how the majority of people can't enjoy such absolute gems. Which, again, speaks volumes about what nowadays' gamers are like. Just like anything with mass appeal, video games completely went down the shitter.

Edited April 5, 2023 by chakkman

[revelator]

amen to that...

[madtaffer]

1. new main actor with brand new plot
2. new city areas and even outskirts with roping to the trees and stealth takedowns beneath
3. visiting brand new city, undercity below, city districts, swamps with cultists and temples around the city
4. new factions and interesting story around them
5. bring back Keepers and their prophecies
6. I like what Dishonored did with blink power and the Void. Maybe new Thief should have fantastical gameplay power/device in similar sense. Player could choose if he wants to be pure thief.
7. Be able to kill everyone, knockout everyone and still finish the mission. The ultimate freedom lies at player's hands.

Edited April 5, 2023 by madtaffer

[JackFarmer]

4 hours ago, madtaffer said:

1. new main actor with brand new plot

...and what would be your new plot?

[madtaffer]

53 minutes ago, JackFarmer said:

...and what would be your new plot?

Every mission has it's own internal plot. Overarching plot could be the reappearance of witches faction who worship mythical beings as Gammal the hag in the temples around the city. These witches are more sinister than Victoria. Thief is brought by the Keepers to investigate city outskirts and temples. He finds that the witches have infiltrated high positions in the city, the brothels, the bank... They are gathering in the city mansions at night for rituals. This could the be first couple of missions.

Thief could break the rituals or enter the world of Primal and disrupt the hag there. This world of Primal would be brand new reimagination of  Thief universe where the old gods lie...

That's the main hook of the story.

Edited April 5, 2023 by madtaffer

[JackFarmer]

The problem is that the story with TDS is quite well concluded. I don't know at the moment (although I have to admit that I have often thought about it), how to connect it (especially there is the problem that the Keepers had let their strange guards loose on the city in TDS, which the city dwellers should not have liked).

So maybe it would be easier to set something in the past, but one has seen the last few years (especially in the cinema and on TV but also in video games) always this approach and... well....

So, if I had to, I would try something set in the past, perhaps with a Keeper as the main character, who would have visions of future threats decades before the events in Thief, but would not be listened to within the community, and therefore would leave the Order to continue investigating on his own.

The charming thing would be to give this character some mysterious abilities like in Dishonored, since he belongs to the Keepers that would even make sense - and as a convinced republican (in the sense of the French Revolution, of course) I would prefer such a game to this royally screwed-up Dishonored any day! 

[chakkman]

A Thief without Garrett is no Thief for me.

And, how is Dishonored screwed up? I think it's very coherent.

[Apache Fiero]

2 minutes ago, chakkman said:

And, how is Dishonored screwed up? I think it's very coherent.

I thought he was referring to the Thief reboot from 2014

[Xolvix]

Unfortunately I don't think this is a question that can really be answered. As stated before a Thief game in the style of the classic games can't be commercialized anymore, at least one with a typical budget. Maybe an indie could do it but I don't expect Embracer to do so. I'd be happy just to get a decent conclusion to the Jensen Deus Ex trilogy.

There's a reason Thief 4 ended up the way it did - it clearly had high production value in terms of graphics so if you're gonna spend money on a game like that it has to be relatively mainstream in order to have a chance to turn a profit. The Dark Mod is made by enthusiasts so this isn't an issue and things can remain as niche as people want. Because of this, there's no way a new official Thief game will satisfy all parties. Dishonored and the newer Deus Ex games are great titles but are also complicated (and hence expensive) to make and simply not enough people buy them to make them commercially viable, or at least for others to make similar types of games often enough that we have many to choose from.

But hey, if I could fund my own AAA game and didn't care if it was profitable or not, then I'd be interested in mixing things up a bit. Maybe have it start off in a classic, typical Thief setting but then Garrett or whoever does something which launches them into the future, or maybe an alternate universe or something. Also it would be really cool if it was built with the intention of using ray-tracing as a core technology, so if an area is dark you KNOW it's dark and you'll be well hidden, and the boundaries of light and dark areas are properly defined because we can do that now. Stuff like that.

[nbohr1more]

Wrath of Khan trope all the way!

Necromancer brings Karras back from the dead and he lures Garret into increasingly dangerous jobs until Garrett gets trapped in a crazy Karras compound and is taunted by the "ghost" of Karras. ( Alternately some protege or relative of Karras who wishes to avenge him, ideally a relative who has a similar personality and voice. )

Game would use an open source engine like Amnesia or The Dark Mod but would obviously have non-CC commercial assets.

Mission authors can sell new fan missions or offer them for free via the in-game mission store.

[chakkman]

3 hours ago, Xolvix said:

There's a reason Thief 4 ended up the way it did - it clearly had high production value in terms of graphics so if you're gonna spend money on a game like that it has to be relatively mainstream in order to have a chance to turn a profit.

That's the big issue with any kind of rather poplar game these days. Totally dead industry in terms of creativity.

[Apache Fiero]

3 hours ago, Xolvix said:

Unfortunately I don't think this is a question that can really be answered. As stated before a Thief game in the style of the classic games can't be commercialized anymore, at least one with a typical budget.

 

On 4/5/2023 at 1:04 PM, chakkman said:

Frankly, considering that nobody in his sane mind would touch the franchise with a ten foot pole ever again, and considering the state of nowadays target audience of the more popular games, I think this is a very hpothetical scenario. At least for me, it doesn't make much sense to invest time in imagining what it could look like. It's unrealistic, and therefor I simply won't waste time on it.

Can't say I disagree, but I'm a bit of a daydreamer and I enjoy just using my imagination and coming up with fun ideas even when I know they won't ever happen.

[snatcher]

Thief: Reborn. A modern take of the best levels of Thief I & II remastered, revamped, expanded... under a single story.

[kano]

I would do a remake of Thief Gold, designed from the start with ray-traced lighting in mind. Many systems can't handle it? I don't care. Many systems could not handle Thief Deadly Shadows at release either (no pixel shader).

 

I would especially make sure that it support custom missions and modding. The only thing cooler than classic Thief with ray-tracing and modern graphics, would be seeing what mission authors could make with it.

EDIT: Basically I would do similar to what was done with the Resident Evil remake. The environments are a thousand times better, while remaining somewhat familiar, but also containing surprises for people who think they know the game because they played the original. And I would also like to see a ray-traced, fully real-time version of RE1 as well. I certainly wouldn't just take old Thief and slap ray-tracing on top of it.

Edited April 8, 2023 by kano

[ChronA]

12 hours ago, Xolvix said:

As stated before a Thief game in the style of the classic games can't be commercialized anymore, at least one with a typical budget.

Maybe there is a sliver of hope that will change in the next 10-15 years. Tech disruptions suck for established interests, but they do have a way of making previously unprofitable products suddenly viable. The problems for an authentic Thief modernization are 3:

1. Such a project needs high fidelity art and sound assets to secure an enthusiastic audience, but such assets are currently too expensive to produce at the optimal budget point for this property. (In fact it's too expensive for most properties, hence why AAA games are so damnably risk averse.) Generative AI stands poised to change this problem drastically, either for the better or the worse. If AI makes it trivial to churn out high quality custom assets for pennies, that would be revolutionary for the viability of niche hi-fi games. But if the AAAs use it to increase expectations again in their pointless graphics arms race that could conceivably leave us still treading water or worse off.
2. The modern standards for rich game worlds requires an army of exploitable labor to build and populate. That again constrains the range of budgets and even the countries such a project can get built in. Procedural environment generation has the potential to solve this problem, but right now the tech is still premature. If generative AI leads to an explosion in coding productivity and creativity that would change, but that's a big if. The tech is almost certainly capable, but the will to train it could fail to materialize. 
3. Modern commercial game engines are not built to support deep stealth because of a chicken and egg problem. Anyone who wants to make a modern deep stealth game needs to sink a bunch of time into building or customizing an engine to do good stealth (with little surety of success). That again boosts the budget into a commercially non-viable range. But then because deep stealth games are not viewed as commercially viable, engines don't support it out of the box, shunting the responsibility to individual devs who will always struggle with the job far more than if the engine makers would do it. If we anticipate an explosion in general coding productivity, plus increased interest in classic immersive stealth mechanics arising from the popularity of ray tracing, maybe engine makers will start giving a damn. But I admit that one is a stretch.

And, even in the best case where all these factors come together ideally, I suspect it's true that Thief is viewed as commercially toxic. The IP owners are unlikely to let it out of their dungeon unless some sort of ultra faithful indie spiritual successor makes a huge splash first.

[ChronA]

What I would want from a new Thief game:

• Appropriate the Darks Souls (and Metroid Prime etc) free-roaming world design formula. I.e. make the entire game a single interconnected environment, with many diversely themed areas that densely link up to each other in interesting ways. This should not be a stretch for Thief because its already the gold standard for how we design individual mansion and city missions. (It doesn't need to be gigantic though. Think how awesome Iris was.)
• A new city with new cultural inspirations. This is one reason I think Dishonored feels like a worthy spiritual successor despite dropping the ball somewhat on gameplay. An Arabian knights tinged Bagdad/Cairo like setting would be interesting to skulk in, or a city with shades of 19th century Hong Kong/Shanghai.
• A new main character who is not a Garrett reboot. If anything our new MC should be a thematic foil to good old Garrett: someone in a similar situation but for different reasons, with a different outlook and character arc. Thief 2X did this well. For instance I would be fine with the MC being a young acolyte of a new Keeper order started by Garrett after Thief 3, but don't have him/her leave to become a thief out of hubristic pride. Have them turn thief out of desperation, post some disaster or failure. Make it something they are distressed over, then over time grow to appreciate the monomythic import of being "The Thief" in the Thief-verse.
• New factions for a new story and MC. While Hammers, Pagans, Keepers, town guards, and crime lords, were cool and thematic for Garrett's story. Our MC should have their own friends and foes. Maybe the city ruling families are a bunch of ancient mage clans. Some are austere isolationists with ties to organized crime, others internationally minded reformers who are embracing the City's steam punk tech. Maybe instead of pagans the new city has a cults of ancestor worshiping necromancers. Maybe the new Keepers are a dysfunctional confederation of ego driven lunatics and schemers, suffering from the neglect of an absentee leader who only seems to care about balance.
• It's still a detective story at heart. All the good Thief games are about slowly and sometimes incidentally figuring out who is the big bad and how your sneaky skills can stop them. That should not change.
• Maybe incorporate some light immersive survival elements, perhaps in the mold of Pathologic, but probably less oppressive. E.g. have the MC need to steal so s/he actually has money to buy food and pay rent on someplace to sleep during the day. Otherwise hit them with penalties.
• I would be fine with MC getting some supernatural movement tech like the Thief 4 Swoop or Dishonored Blink, but it should be late game only (unless the player sequence breaks, which would be a super cool option).

[Oktokolo]

Plot:

Act 1: Player is a sneaky ratman or ratwomen breaking free from pagan slavers, finding all members of their enslaved family, freeing them one by one and bringing em home.

Act 2: Builders raid the rat village kill some ratpeople and steal an artifact of immense religious importance. Player gets tasked to recover the artifact and follows the builders to their outpost. Player somehow gets hold of the artifact and brings it back to the ratpeople village.

It is decided that the infinite growth of the human settlements endangers the rat people as a whole and that something has to be done against that. But knowledge about the enemy is scarce and player is one of the very few, who can speak "human" (actually pagan, but close enough). So player gets send to infiltrate the next city with a tinkerer (maintains the player's gear) and a granny which happens to be the only one available who can read and write human (she is supposed to teach player that skill).
Player makes camp somewhere reasonably safe outside next non-pagan human settlement and does some reconnaissance and resource gathering missions.

As new villagers seem to mainly come from an actual city, that city becomes the new exploration target. The three ratpeople travel to the city, make camp somewhere safe outside, find a way in, find a safe place in the sewers and make camp there. More reconnaissance and resource gathering missions happen. It becomes more and more obvious, that resistance would be futile. The humans are just too many.

The three ratpeople travel back to their village and report to the council of the united ratpeople tribes. The decision is to mount a covert resistance with the intent to delay the human expansions until some more sustainable solution is found.

Act 3: Player has most experience in human-controlled area, so it is them who gets to do business in the big port city where all the support from the human's mainland arrives. From the sewer base, reconnaissance, sabotage and support missions to strengthen the local gangs (which are hostile to each other) are done.
This is the longest act. Shittons of different missions are done by the player. The city becomes more and more chaotic. Sometimes the player sets stuff on fire. Sometimes they steal extremely valuable items, sometiems they frame officials - or assassinate them... Places get heavier guarded and look more and more desolate.
Gang contacts yield opportunities for missions too.

Message arrives from home that a solution might have been found. Player is to find out of the whereabouts of an ancient artifact and recover it. Player discovers in missions that the artifact has been brought to a keep in the human's homeland. So player needs to somehow travel to the human homeland with one of humans' big ships.

Player is in a huge port city in humans' homeland. Finds a new hideout in the sewers (seriously the only place humans don't like to lurk around) and does reconnaissance missions to find out where the keep is. At that occasion, some opportunity sabotage and assassinations can be executed too. Player finds out where teh keep is and travels there.

Player finds a way into the keep, finds out where the artifact is, finds out how to get through the mundane and magical safety and security measures and steals the artifact. The artifact immediately takes ownership of the player and commands them to collect the other artifacts of its set. Player travels to other places and does missions to retrieve the artifacts. Player immediately knows where the artifacts are which aren't protected but also has to do missions to find out where the protected ones are kept.

The artifacts are reunited, player does the ritual to combine them and the entity within them demands a new worthy body and a kingdom to rule over. Player finds out where the humans' king is and gets closer and closer, finally touching the king with the artifact. The artifact disintegrates, its former tenant moves inside the king, the possession of player ends and player immediately kills the king (there is a reason why that entity could have been captured in the first place) and the entity is gone (probably just died like a normal person) - but so are the artifacts.

Player travels back to port city, finds a ship headed towards home, sets sail - and arrives at port city it rat peoples' homeland. the city is more or less like it was when player left - just a bit more run down. Player travels back to their rat people village and reports.

Act 4: Missing other options, the rat council decides to continue the covert resistance against the city dwelling humans. The pagans have "joined" the resistance mainly by raiding weaker frontier villages. But they also raid more in general now. So the player is sent to investigate, why... But that is content for the first DLC.

Gameplay:

Semi-open maps (maybe even a whole village as "open world" but no actual open-world-sized open world).
Mechanics that interact with eachother waiting to be exploited by players in (un)anticipated ways.
Real shadows, real sounds, some parcour (plus sliding down ladders/pipes/ropes, hanging down ledges and procedural free climbing).
The blackjack, the rat's claws, the rat's teeth, the broadhead (but none of the other arrow types).
No mines or grenades in most missions (just an unlimited supply of stones for distraction).
No potions (maybe holy water to throw on the ground or directly at undead), healing by eating (very slow regeneration).
Lockpicks with various designs (the minigame is the same but you don't have to choose the pick or change it in the middle and for some locks a purely cosmetic tension wrench is used for immersion's sake too).
Missions are selected from the main menu, from a menu when using an exfiltration point, from a menu that pops up when frobbing a map in one of the hideouts or camps - or by talking with other people. Where game world consistency allows for it, missions are playable in any order. Once-completed missions can be replayed at any time.
You can save whenever you want like in TDM and there are autosaves triggered on mission start/completion, map change and at mission-specified events.

Tech & development:

Unreal Engine 5, SpeedTree, prerendered AI-generated voices (they are good enough now), game mechanics from TDM plus a bit more procedural parcour, better physics and a dialog system. The stim system is rad and has to be in there too. Missions are mostly like small-to-medium-sized TDM maps. Assets are made in Blender, maps are made in Unreal. If something is needed that is missing in unreal or Blender, a plugin for Unreal or Blender is created... As it is impossible to fund such a niche game completely in advance, the game is developed as early access with modding as first-class citizen from the start and all plugins are released as FOSS as they are made (hoping to establish a Bethesda-style long-tail business due to people still buying the game ten years after creation because they want to play the mods).

[SeriousToni]

On 4/6/2023 at 4:01 PM, nbohr1more said:

Wrath of Khan trope all the way!

Necromancer brings Karras back from the dead and he lures Garret into increasingly dangerous jobs until Garrett gets trapped in a crazy Karras compound and is taunted by the "ghost" of Karras. ( Alternately some protege or relative of Karras who wishes to avenge him, ideally a relative who has a similar personality and voice. )

 

I have foreseen your wish hehe..

Edited April 9, 2023 by SeriousToni

[revelator]

Sadly while i could probably come up with something good my artistic skills leave quite a lot to be desired (i usually break both pen and paper while trying to draw something ) i have huge vistas and 3 sometimes 4 dimensional stories that look gorgeous in my mind but when i try to get them printed in real world i usually end up with a . In that regard i was allways a bit handicapped in game development even though at some point i was a pretty good coder i struggled getting things to look right in the projects i worked on, and it was hard going to find an artist with the same imagination who could help me get those things right. If at some point an artist had clicked with me i would envision the end of the world as i allways had a fascination with survival horror games and bringing my demented visions to bear would probably cause the poor gamer to go insane hehe.

Spoiler

Dead space has nothing on me

 

[Fidcal]

It doesn't matter if it's not commercialy realistic or not; this is a thought experiment. So, my thoughts...

Main plot: Kind of generic revenge theme in many movies but the originality would have to be in the implentation. Garrett married, settled down, and mostly honest (but does the odd thieving on the side.) His teen son/daughter (also called Garrett since I've always assumed it's a surname?) learns from him. Because Garrett is a loose cannon, the Keepers send an assassin who kills Mr and Mrs Garrett (perhaps not knowing they have a child.) We now play the son/daughter called Garrett and (if male) with the same voice actor Stephen Russell or a good soundalike thus providing continuity. Our main purpose is to destroy the assassin and possible the entire Keepers organisation.

Keep all the old classic tools/weapons/armour/features with new ones for added interest. Find a way for player to use that remote eyeball camera thing.

Highly three-dimensional open-world with tons of rooftops, etc. and lots of optional sub-missions.

Optional companion(s) to work with Garrett. The player chooses how long they stay with him (or not at all.) So you might want a specialist safecracker or rock-climber or even just someone who knows the way to wherever you're going.

Optional third person pov that can be switched easily during the game (like Fallout 4). Note that I do not like 3rd person myself but many do. And even if playing 1st person, it's sometimes handy/fun to switch back and forth to check out your armour or location.

Optional, in-game switchable difficulty level with always a super-easy level. I'm sick and tired of abandoning games that are just too hard even on so-called 'easy'. Failing that, some kind of in-game tiered hint/clue/spoiler so when you're totally stuck, you can refer to character's own notes for example. Or maybe somehow use looted gold to buy help or maybe looted magical objects that provide inspiration, guidance, whatever. Nobody should ever fail, just have different levels of success. I'd even accept a walkthrough option rather than abandon. Remember, this is all optional.

[demagogue]

I'd make the campaign I scripted out for Dark Mod.

I also think it'd be good to just make a medieval stealth game with a new protagonist, and just call it a spiritual successor.

[datiswous]

1 hour ago, demagogue said:

I'd make the campaign I scripted out for Dark Mod.

Which is?

[SeriousToni]

On 4/10/2023 at 1:44 PM, Fidcal said:

Garrett married, settled down, and mostly honest (but does the odd thieving on the side.)

I always thought he had some feelings for Victoria. How can you fall in love with another human if you did with a spirit / goddess once?

Seriously. Am I the only one who noticed some sort of.. caring.. Just before "the incident in the cathedral"?

Edited April 12, 2023 by SeriousToni

[demagogue]

19 hours ago, datiswous said:

Which is?

The current working title is just The Dark Campaign.

If you want a little backstory, the idea of this campaign was to introduce all of the major districts and factions of Bridgeport, and give a lot of lore about what's happening in the city and the world. So in that sense it's meant as a kind of ... not official campaign, but the kind of campaign laying down a lot of lore, faction, and setting information on which people can build FMs.

But then the story started taking on a life of its own. The concept is the Empire is at war with their neighbors Menoa. In this world, Menoa is an Islamic or Ottoman-like empire counterpart, the Ghazis, to the Catholic-like Builders. (I understand the more official concept of Menoa is different, but either my concept is just different or I'd pick some other empire to do the job.) At the start, the Menoans have Bridgeport surrounded in siege, with constant flaming boulders periodically raining down.

So our protagonist Khursand is Pakdamani, which is a counterpart to Persian Zoroasters, with his homeland now fully occupied & harassed by the Menoan Ghazis, although his family has already lived in Bridgeport for several generations, also harassed by Builders but at least not killed or forced to convert (yet). So he's kind of a natural opportunist, no friend of either side, but he speaks both languages of the Empire and Menoans and is willing to work with whoever pays.

So the first mission, Shadow of Opportunity, opens with the Menoan district of Bridgeport, where Khursand lives, being walled up into a kind of ghetto to contain them. You've got Menoan friends that want you to help their resistance from the inside, starting with you getting some city plans to the army outside. But as you're getting out, one of the guards they paid off double-crosses you and turns you into the Bridgeport forces. But rather than just executing you, the general gives you the alternative option to work as a double agent on their behalf to bring back intelligence on the Menoan army and do some sabotage on their behalf, which you don't have much choice but to accept. (They're also holding his uncle that raised him hostage.) The next mission has you making contact with the Menoan army and already trying to please both sides in a dangerous tightrope walk, and the story goes on from there.