Comment on Thief 1 & 2, the grandfather of the stealth genre
TommySoda@lemmy.world 3 days ago
I’ve never been able to enjoy any other stealth game because of Thief 1 + 2. I played them back in the early 2000s and they were the very first stealth games I ever played. I think because they are the grandfather of stealth games and are, in my opinion, the peak of stealth games, I ended up setting my expectations too high for other games and always left them slightly or even massively disappointed. Even the shitty parts of Thief 1 where it feels more like a barely even like a stealth game, they are still better than games that call themselves stealth games like Assassin’s Creed.
In modern stealth games it doesn’t really punish you for being clumsy or getting caught. In most of those circumstances it just turns into an action game. Even some of the good stealth games like Dishonered very rarely punish you. In Thief if you get caught 7 out of 10 times you are just screwed. Garrett isn’t a strong and well trained fighter like you are in most games, he’s just a Thief and that’s what he’s best at. Combat is never the smart or reliable option. And in harder difficulties you straight up fail the mission if you kill anyone.
Another thing that sets Thief apart is that it treats you like a regular dude and not some badass super human that always has all the info you need for a mission. Sometimes you get incomplete maps that you have to take notes on yourself. Sometimes you don’t even get a map that is reliable and you have to use it based on vibes. Sometimes you get thrown into a mission completely unprepared go up against enemies and situations that are extremely difficult. Sometimes you get missions that are super straight forward and easy if you know how to be a thief.
All in all, these games are definitely peak stealth games. The first one is waaay more manly and some of the missions are just awful. But the good ones stand out and you definitely feel relieved when you get to them. The second game is 10x better than the first and has a lot less bullshit and a lot more stealth. Plus you get all kinds of cooler stuff because of lore reasons and it just makes it so much more enjoyable. I highly recommend to anyone that truly likes stealth games to play them if you haven’t. Thief 1 is a decent 8/10 for me and Thief 2 is an easy 10/10, especially for the stealth genre.
Yeah, the biggest problem in my opinion is that they don’t commit to stealth, because they think the fan base is too small. So everything has to be solvable by violence as well. Which in turn leads to a worse experience than if they focused fully on that.
Which is why I’m so surprised that the indie Retro wave hasn’t yet created something like Thief with a new story/world. Should be easier nowadays with game engines and editors and I think there is no real competition there yet.
I guess there’s The Dark Mod to scratch that itch. It’s a completely community made stealth game using the Doom 3 engine. It pretty much feels the same as the first two Thief games.
Even some of the good stealth games like Dishonered very rarely punish you.
I guess this is one of those things where Thief and Splinter Cell have just trained me to want that ghost playthrough and enforce it myself. I’m aware you can do pitched combat in Dishonored but I really don’t get why a player would be interested. There’s action games for that itch. For me, stealth is pretty strongly focused on cultivating that feeling of besting a superior force through knowledge (of place, timings, toolkits etc.) and I definitely love Thief and particularly The Metal Age (my first exposure to the series) for their approaches to that.
In games like Dishonored, playing on the highest difficulty setting mitigated that problem of discovery being insufficiently punishing.
YtA4QCam2A9j7EfTgHrH@infosec.pub 3 days ago
I have the same problem. Thief is the absolute pinnacle of the genre and nothing has even come close