A lot of the raised points ‘already existed’ within the team, but Khoury laments being restricted by marketing timetables. They ”can’t necessarily just directly spit out” what’s happening.
His other point is that everyone has their own ‘what makes Thief so special’ thread of thought, so it’s best not to get bogged down by the little details.
Joe Khoury says, first and foremost, they know ”where they’re coming from being fans ourselves, and obviously, some of the feedback that they have is valid, it’s good, and some of it we are really well aware of it. We listen a lot. There’s a lot that we know that they don’t know yet. So, some of the feedback we get back, wait until the game comes out.”
”You know, we wish we could talk about more detail”, he continued in an interview with Videogamer.
”I hope that once they get their hands-on they’ll understand that a lot of comments they were talking about have made their way to the game. And it’s not just because they’ve mentioned it, it’s because we’re aware of them and we’re working on them. It’s exciting but it’s tough, because if we could only tell them that yes, this is happening and yes, we’re doing this.”
One topic that keeps rearing its head is the new Focus ability for Garrett, which lets him boost his skills for a short while - it’s not within keeping to strict rules of the series, even if it’s entirely optional.
”We’ve mentioned over and over and over again that you can turn it off,” he says. ”So it’s interesting that there are some fans that are now saying, ‘Well, they’ve mentioned that you can turn it off numerously’. It’s almost getting to a point where a lot of people are saying, you know what, the game is so close to being released that we’ll see when it comes out.”
”There’s a general feeling of what made these games successful,” Khoury added, but asking everyone what they’d carry over from the first Thiefs, ”everybody would say something different, and in the end you might come out with a game that is basically a remake of the first game. And even then people would be like, well they didn’t innovate, they didn’t use any of the lessons learned over the past years.”
”Understanding what gave us such great memories of this game and understanding what it means to be able to bring that into this generation of gamers is where it’s important, not necessarily the micro details, or saying this colour or this character.” It’s the high level stuff that matters, argues the producer.
”That was what’s important for us to hit and that’s again some of the stuff that we can’t necessarily just directly spit out. It comes out in bits and pieces but it’s something that the player discovers playing the game, just like it was when they played the first Thief. That’s the essence of what we’re trying to bring back with this game, not necessarily picking out specific things from the first game that we wanted to say that exclusively is coming back - apart from Garrett which we thought was a character definitely worth revisiting today.”
Thief releases on PC, Xbox 360, PS3, Xbox One and PS4 February 28th.
