Blog

Thick As Thieves – Part 2

We’ve seen what the Spider can do. Now let’s see what The Chameleon is capable of (once we lower the difficulty a tad).

Streamed on my Twitch channel.

Early on, I remember being frustrated with Thick As Thieves, because I am the type of person who tends to slowly, gradually knock out every guard, and shut down every security measure, as I advance through a map. It would be normal for me to end a level in Thief with a mountain of unconscious guards in my wake.

Here, they make two very important design decisions that actively discourage and prevent that behavior.

• Guards will wake up after a few minutes of being knocked out, and there are no countermeasure against them. (We’re thieves, not murderers.) Even if we had the time to take them out, they would get back up before we were done.
  
• There is a hard time limit on the mission. Though the timer isn’t visible to us (which the devs have promised will be changed in an upcoming patch), we are only allocated a specific window of opportunity, usually around 30-45 minutes, where we will need to obtain our target loot and escape. Even if we were able to permanent incapacitate guards, there is simply not enough time to do a full sweep while still accomplishing our mission.

At first, I fought against and protested this design because it’s so antithetical to how I usually play stealth games like this, but I kept trying and retrying because despite all that it was giving me everything else I wanted.

Eventually, I found the fun. I started to appreciate those design choices for encouraging me to be more active and engaged, rather than taking my usual slow, methodical approach. As long as the player isn’t idling, there is plenty of time on the clock to located the target loot and swipe it. Yet just knowing there is a timer ticking down, having a slight amount of pressure, induced a forward momentum that I wouldn’t have otherwise had.

Admittedly, I wish I could pause the game even while playing on my own, but I’ll take what I can get. Sometimes pressure can be a good thing for gameplay.