Thief (2014)

[Thomas Cardew]

So apparently it's Square Enix weekend on steam and Theif (2014) is on sale at 85% off. Is it worth picking up? I'm a big fan of stealth games in the old Splinter Cell style, how does this compare?

[Giggling Ghast]

Speaking as someone who played this game but not the original Thief series, it was about a 5.5/10. Not very good, but not a bad game either.

I’m not a stealth-lover, but the stealth mechanics in Thief (2014) worked pretty well as far as I could tell. This is a “throw bottle and sneak past enemies” type of stealth game versus a “sneak up and slit the guard’s throat” game; in fact, Garrett dislikes killing.

The story is just so-so, but there are some genuinely scary bits and one or two good laughs to be had if you do some of the side missions.

Keep in mind this is a steampunk fantasy setting, not a modern game like Splinter Cell. Also, there is a brothel level with a fair bit of nudity, so maybe don’t play through it with your kids/parents in the room.

[Winthur]

It's crap compared to the previous games in the series and that's pretty much agreed upon everywhere. You're better off playing the originals or Deadly Shadows even. The player agency in Thi4f is limited, the sound system is nowhere near as responsive to what you do as in the previous games, and there is also it's most annoying flaw:
1) Loot is much more numerous compared to anything else. You collect a ton of stuff, somewhat akin to a TES game. Some of the stuff you collect has dubious value even to a thief, let alone a Master Thief you're purported to be.
2) You now have an "immersive" animation for every single piece of loot you come across, where your character walks up to it, checks it out for a little bit, and shoves it inside his purse.
3) As a result, here's what happens when you walk to, for instance, a bedroom full of little closets and drawers. Old Thief - you open them all instantly, check yourself for what's inside, and pick everything up in an instant. New Thief - your character takes 1-2 seconds to open it, examine it, pick up the item - very often something like brass scissors or other stuff you really don't care about - and it's looted. Rinse, repeat for everything you find in the game.

The game is somewhat pretty, and I suppose you could get some value out of it if you turned off all the hints and help it throws towards you (which mostly serves to compound how linear it is), but frankly, it's mediocre at best and no one really cares about it. For the price it's currently at, it's probably worth a single playthrough somewhat, but there are better games to get back into the stealth genre with.

Generally around 2012-2016 was Squeenix's heyday of mishandling its western properties (Thi4f was atrocious and nobody liked it, Hitman Absolution sold well in spite of being the least liked game in the series but still not well enough to satisfy Squeenix's overblown corporate demands, Deus Ex: Manhandled was given an atrocious marketing campaign and the game was cut into 1/3 its size in expectation to sell the same game three times , and, Hitman 2016 was meddled in and then the property abandoned when, again, it was a success, but not enough of a success for Squeenix). Squeenix generally somehow manages to hemorrhage money but still is kept afloat due to the few guaranteed successes they still have, like Final Fantasy, and major cuts to the studios they don't care about.

If you want a modern stealth game that would fit your sensibilities, you could try Splinter Cell: Blacklist, which isn't fantastic and doesn't have Michael Ironside as Sam Fisher, but it's at least a competently made game. Other good games are Dishonored (which is a better Thi4f than Thi4f could ever hope to be), Styx: Master of Shadows, and potentially Hitman 2016.

If you want a modern Thief game that's good, play The Dark Mod (http://www.thedarkmod.com/main/), which is completely free to play and runs on Doom 3 engine. Old Thief games are also still solid and can be brought up to speed with a patch, it's only up to whether you can stomach them. Thief games in general also have a ton of custom levels.

If you want a game from the Squeenix sale that's cheap and will actually remind you of Splinter Cell, get Hitman: Absolution. Hitman community generally had very mixed reception to that game at release because it was "too much like Splinter Cell Conviction", and yeah, it does have plenty of linear cover stealth elements, but it executes them somewhat well. It has the classic Hitman disguise system, but the system is unwieldy (based on a type of "mana" that blows your cover when it runs out), so a lot of people just use the disguises as a crutch to help move around but ultimately rely on cover stealth. The game has decent gunplay. The story isn't even a globetrotting assassination sandbox, but a Tarantinoesque gritty spy thriller, so you might enjoy those trappings somewhat more.

Mind you, I don't think Absolution is "fantastic", but it's cheap and overall a better game than Thi4f, even if I don't believe personally that it's a particularly high mark. Absolution actually has plenty of "post-game" content in the form of player-made contracts and managed to keep a handful of sandbox levels where you have freedom of approach, so even though I don't particularly [I]love it, it still has more replayability than Thi4f in my opinion.
Of course, ideally I'd recommend you to pick up Hitman Contracts (which should remind you very strongly of Chaos Theory, being released virtually in the same time and having a similar control scheme), Hitman Blood Money or H2016 instead, but the former two aren't exactly "modern" anymore and H2016 is expensive (though the demo + 1st chapter are free to play, so try it out). EDIT: Completely forgot Squeenix abandoned the Hitman franchise altogether and is no longer the publisher for Io-Interactive, so Hitman games are not on Squeenix sale. Whoops!

[factotum]

Yeah, what Winthur says. The Thief series runs pretty much like this:

Thief 2: Excellent, by far and away the best stealth game ever made, not just the best in the Thief series.
Thief 1: Good, worth a play for definite.
Thief 3: OK. It has some memorable moments (the Shalebridge Cradle is undoubtedly the most pants-wettingly scary level ever found in something that isn't an out-and-out horror game), but not a must play by any means.
Thief Reboot aka Thief 4: They should be paying *you* to play this garbage. Avoid.

[Thomas Cardew]

Thanks. Kinda what I figured. The 'immersion' animation sounds absolutely atrocious. I'll check out the dark mod, that sounds promising. How does Black List compare to Pandora Tomorrow or Chaos Theory? Conviction lost me because they made it so much easier to just kill everyone, it wasn't the ghost gameplay of the early games. Well that and Uplay...

[Winthur]

How does Black List compare to Pandora Tomorrow or Chaos Theory?
It continues the trend of allowing for more action-focused gameplay compared to the classics, sadly uses UPlay, and it has no original actor for Sam, but it also has pretty good AI, allows for a fairly freeform mode of approach, people seem to still play it online, and it doesn't necessarily force you to ever kill anyone, or even incentivize going guns blazing that much. Going non-lethal in perfectionist mode is fun, and you get to customize your approach nicely. If you really disliked Conviction take a look at some videos of a solid non-lethal playthrough on Youtube and figure out if you like the options it has in comparison, but if it still doesn't exactly "click", just drop it.

I'd wholeheartedly recommend to try out the Hitman franchise (Blood Money followed by Contracts is generally considered the best/most accessible, Absolution is a highly contested sequel with a lot of problems and I have lots of vitriol for it but I'd say it's not as atrocious as Thi4f was, and H2016 was a return to form), The Dark Mod (and definitely older Thief games if you are willing to excuse the old graphics; however, the art direction is absolutely exquisite and I'd recommend it any day), Dishonored and Styx: Master of Shadows. I haven't played any Metal Gear Solid, including the 5th game that's available on PC; people seem to like it for its sandbox qualities, but idk much about it.