Some new footage from the PS4 version of Square Enix’s upcoming Thief revival have surfaced, and I have to say, despite rumors that the game’s development has been stifled by office politics and internal disputes, the new Thief looks pretty promising.
The footage comes from a live, onstage demonstration given by the game’s producer, Stefane Roy, at Sony’s booth at E3. The ten minutes of gameplay footage from the video gives us a pretty good idea of what we can expect from Thief’s gameplay: just like the original Thief games, hiding in the shadows is a central part of the game’s stealth mechanic, and just like the old games, a crystal on your HUD lets you know how visible Garret is. Garret still carries a variety of elementally infused arrows with him, and you can use those to interact with the environment: you can use water arrows to extinguish flames and create more shadows to hide in, and you can set patches of oil ablaze with fire arrows.
There’s been a lot of people comparing the new Thief game to Arkane Studios’ Dishonored, which is kind of funny when you were really think about it, since Dishonored (and a lot of other stealth games, really) were obviously heavily influenced by the original two Thief games. With that said, I don’t think the gameplay in this trailer makes the new Thief look as good as Dishonored did (the graphics are alright but the actual gameplay seems a fair bit more stiff and mechanical than Dishonored’s,) so perhaps Dishonored has already managed to out-Thief the new Thief. Of course, the game isn’t done yet and won’t be released until 2014, so the team at Eidos Montreal still have plenty of time to polish it up. At the very least, the game looks like a proper follow-up to the legendary first two Thief games, and thankfully doesn’t take after the 2004’s disappointing Thief: Deadly Shadows.
Source: Games HQ
