

by Mark Barley
Eidos Montreal wants to challenge you to be a part of 'Thief'
Thief developer Eidos Montreal and the studio's boss Daniel Winfield Schmidt wanted to remake the game with the gamer in mind.
Speaking recently with CVG, Schmidt stated they're pretty confident that fans of the previous Thief titles will want to play this new remake but with new stuff but a new audience probably doesn't want to learn the franchise's advance control scheme.
“Today’s gamers are a lot less patient. They expect a lot more from the developers in terms of features and so on. Even for menus that are easy to use. For a lot of things that weren’t as extensively developed back in the day. For example: control inputs,” he said.
“It took a while to learn the complex controls. Numbers 1,2,3,4 – There were different types of peeking: peeking forward, peeking sideways, peeking upside down. They had all these things that were very complex and it worked for the hardcore gamers, but a lot of people backed off early on because it was very difficult.
“So our focus has been to say, ‘we want the same amount of challenge, but within the game and not within the inputs.’ I don’t personally have the patience to learn the super, super old games and all their fidelities and hard-learned lessons. I want it to be more streamlined.”
A lot of old school types loved the original Thief game's controls because they were so difficult to master and it truly took a bit of skill to get them down. “It took a while to learn the complex controls. Numbers 1,2,3,4 – There were different types of peeking: peeking forward, peeking sideways, peeking upside down. They had all these things that were very complex and it worked for the hardcore gamers, but a lot of people backed off early on because it was very difficult.
“So our focus has been to say, ‘we want the same amount of challenge, but within the game and not within the inputs.’ I don’t personally have the patience to learn the super, super old games and all their fidelities and hard-learned lessons. I want it to be more streamlined.”
Thief is out in 2014.