Multiplayer games come in a variety of flavors. You have your co-op ones likeHelldiversandWarhammer 40kand your competitive ones like Call of Duty andAmong Us. Yet, one style of game has not been attempted successfully in this form: stealth. Fortunately, the talented team at OtherSide Entertainment got us covered withThick as Thieves.
The title was announced atThe Game Awards 2024with a slicktrailershowing off what to expect from the game. It will let players become a thief in the 1910s in an alternate reality. In a mix between stealth and action, you’ll plan and then execute a heist on a location to steal as much as you can, including the special treasure inside. You won’t be alone, however, as three other players are aiming to steal that treasure as well, creating a tense experience unlike anything you’ve played before. The game is being developed by the best and brightest in the industry, including the minds behind the originalThiefandDeus Ex.
As part of Hardcore Gamer’s preview ofThick as Thieves, we got to chat to three of the creatives at OtherSide Entertainment behind the title: Warren Spector (co-chair and CCO), Greg LoPiccolo (game director) and David McDonough (lead designer). During our discussion, we chatted about the ideation behind the project, what players can expect and what went into crafting what may be the first great stealth-based multiplayer game.
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[Hardcore Gamer] How did the concept of Thick of Thieves come together in terms of when you guys thought of the idea, how it evolved over time?
[Warren Spector - CCO & Co-Founder] Well, it started with me [laughs]. It started with us getting together with the idea of creating a studio to take the genre that we helped pioneer, the immersive sim, and take it into the future and to the next level. We didn’t want to repeat what we had done in the past; we wanted to try something new within the confines of that genre to which we’re committed. We decided that the motto of the company [OtherSide Entertainment] would be “Player-Powered,” which is all about how much can we empower players to solve problems their own way, pick their own playstyle and decide how to interact with the deeply simulated world, so we started with that in place. We thought about what would be the next logical step for that genre. We’d always done single player, you know, here come the air quotes, “boxed games” that you finished and then move on to something else and so, that naturally led us to a couple of things.
One was multiplayer. I can’t speak for Paul [co-chair of OtherSide Entertainment], though I should be able to because we talked enough about it, but I’ve been thinking about a multiplayer immersive sim for years now. One of the inspirations for the genre, in general, was tabletop role-playing games and that you don’t play a tabletop role-playing game alone; you play it with a group of friends telling stories together. The next thing was “long tail support” is what all the biz guys call it now. Gamers just call it a campaign. For a lot of people, and it probably should be for me too but it’s not, it’s probably about making a lot of money. For me, it’s about recreating that feeling of playing Dungeons and Dragons. It’s about the art form, the creativity, and not necessarily about business. That was part two: create a game where a campaign made sense, multiplayer campaign-oriented.We thought a lot about where we could best do that but came back to stealth and stealth games.
Thiefwas one of the first stealth games so let’s do a multiplayer campaign-oriented stealth game, which turned intoThick as Thieves. Once we got to that point, we thought there’s a particular kind of pacing that stealth games typically had and that it’s kind of slow and methodical. You see a challenge, look around, decide how you want to interact with it and solve that problem and make a plan and then execute the plan and see what the consequences are. It’s kind of choppy. We said let’s see if we can change that and we came up with the idea of stealth-action. We had to build a team at that point and we built one that’s headed up by the other guys on this call: Greg LoPiccolo, who was the game director on the originalThiefand representing the tradition and all the knowledge that comes along with having been the game director on the originalThief, and the new guy, David McDonough, who came to us with a lot of experience in an immersive-sim adjacent genre: real time strategy. You put them together and we thought we would get something new and innovative and that’s what happened. That’s where we got today and we just talked to them about it, not me, because they’re the ones doing all the heavy lifting (laughs).
It’s about the art form, the creativity, and not necessarily about business.
On that topic, how does one create a thievery-focused multiplayer title from a design perspective and production?
[David McDonough - Lead Designer] So it all begins with the thief and what I call the thief fantasy. What is the moment-to-moment experience of being a thief? What was it about the classic games that you loved and that made them particular? If you have two players doing that same thing, how close to that fantasy can you still get? In what ways must it be modified or can it be improved? This is a many, many-faceted challenge. In fact, we’re still working on it. A perfect example is hiding. In classicThief, it’s systemic. If you’re in shadow, the AI can’t see you according to the rules. You could be right there and they won’t see you and so you learn to play by moving from shadow to shadow. Now, let’s imagine there’s another person with their actual eyes trying to find you. Now, what do we do? Do we keep a systemic rule and say your character is just not visible to them? Do we put the burden all on lighting and environment art and say, “Make sure the game is dark enough so that people can’t really see it?” Somewhere in the middle, something else, and sort of piece by piece, bit by bit of the fantasy, we sort of put the systems together, set them loose, and see what happens.
In the case of hiding, I’m really satisfied with the result because it came out much more organic than I think we were anticipating. As you saw in the preview gameplay, there’s a moment where there’s a thief on the other rooftop. They’re pretty hard to spot but there’s no systemic rule in place. It’s just that there’s lighting, there’s shadow, there’s their movement, their speed, and there’s how distracted or focused you are as the observer. That’s permanently dynamic. If you want to hide, go try to hide, be scared all the time. If you’re not sure if you’re dark enough and somebody can see you, be scared of moving quickly and attracting somebody’s eye because they’re attentive to the motion. Think about your tools and how noisy they are or how much light they make or how glowy or whether the window that you just opened, somebody could have heard that. Hiding between players is everything that hiding systemically was but more.
It’s lucky when that happens and it’s sort of a natural compounding effect and works better. Sometimes, we have to put up guardrails or change rules that make things that you would have done to the AI work differently because there are other players and piece by piece, we figure it out but it’s a fascinating challenge.
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[Greg LoPiccolo - Game Director] There are little moments in there that, to David’s point, we build these emergent systems and then we kind of mess with them but as you start to get more experience with the game, you start to feel sort of more and more clever. David was pointing out this thing where we have this pretty sophisticated sound model where, in some of the scenarios, it’s raining and you may hear the rain outside. It’s really loud. You come inside, you close the window and it goes away. You can be in some scenario where you hear the rain sound tick up and you know somebody opened a window, so you can infer. That’s not something that you figure out the first time you play the game. You’re like, “Hey, somebody that’s not me just opened a window and came in or went out” because you can pick up these environmental clues that match reality in ways that make the gameplay more fun.
Brewing in the Shadows
What kind of concepts and ideas were at the forefront of nailing when developing Thick as Thieves?
[Greg] Well, at the core of it, it’s like PvPvE, right? And the fact that we wanted to build this out of emergent systems, right? That we’d build these simple systems that play by their own rules and let them interact to have the more complex stories emerge out of that, specifically around the AIs but not limited to the AIs, lots of other environmental systems at play. So there’s a baseline thing, which is kind of like ClassicThieforDishonoredor a lot of other single-player games, whereas there’s emergent systems and you engage with them with your tools and your tactics and so forth and you get a lot of fun gameplay out of all the different ways that that can play out. So, that’s kind of the baseline thing.
A number of us have worked on games like that in the past. We sort of know those rules and some of that stuff we’re just essentially stealing from older games. It’s like we know how to make a guard that responds to sound and responds to light and how they should respond, and so forth. But then the PVE part, that’s well understood. Not that we don’t have new things to bring to it, but we sort of know how that works. But then the interesting part that has never really been done before is now there are human thieves and they are messing things up and the way that they smash into the systemic stuff and it ends with a lot of really interesting things emerging that we would never have scripted, right? You get into these complex behaviors.
Well, the classic one that we were talking about earlier today was “You’re in a struggle. You’re fighting another thief and a guard comes into the picture.” Now there’s this wild card. Well, who did the guard see? Did he see me or them? Because if it was them, then hooray for me! I just got a big leg up in this conflict. But it’s that kind of stuff that really makes this rich and detailed and entertaining in a completely new way. And we ain’t done. We’re still working on it. We have not solved all the problems, but when it works, it’s magical. It’s amazing.
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What aspect are you most excited for fans to see or experience when they get to play Thick as Thieves?
[David] The one thing that has always primarily attracted me to the concept is just the mental game, the mind games that you can play. It’s subtle and hard to see when you’re just watching it but when you play it, you don’t realize how much is going on in your head. How tense and rich it is to just not know.Thiefis a game about very limited information and trying to survive it, pretty much, and there are infinite more dimensions when the source of that uncertainty is another person who’s actively thinking and trying to do the same thing at the same time.
Like Greg said about the window opening. Now what? Like, what do you do? Do you go after that thief? Do you attempt to hide? Do you rush to the treasure because you think they’re going to beat you to it? Do you wait and see what happens? There are so many factors, like how many tools do I have left? Am I out of ammo? What’s my health? What could their health be? How far into the match are we? How deep into the manor are we? Is there a guard walking by? Did the alarm go off? Every one of those gets triggered but none of that’s confirmed by the system. It’s just a possibility and it’s all happening in your head. So when you play the game, you’re having an incredibly rich internal story that’s many times larger than the literal game in front of you, which is really cool. It’s rare for a game to be able to do, to be more than it appears like that.
So when you play the game, you’re having an incredibly rich internal story that’s many times larger than the literal game in front of you, which is really cool.
[Warren] Let me build on that too. All of the things that David just mentioned are not all systemic, but none of them were pre-planned. None of them were scripted. They’re all coming out of the, to the air quotes again, “simulation”. They’re all natural parts of the world. That’s where the decision-making comes into play. That’s where the emergent behavior comes into play. That’s where we’re different from many to most other games. I won’t go any further than that, tempted though I am (laughs). So that’s one thing. The thing that I’m most excited about, actually, I may be more excited about what David just said now that he said it out loud [laughs], but what excites me is the opportunity for players to create their own unique experiences, minute to minute, and then mission to mission or quest to quest. One of the rules of the road for me is if two players describe the same experience of an encounter or a mission, we’ve failed. And we’ve been doing this long enough to know how to avoid that. It’s not just words.
We look back at the games that Paul and I have worked on and that Greg worked on and that David has worked on the RTS experience. No two players describe the same story. That’s really powerful. Another way to express that is my motto, “Playstyle Matters.” The thing I love about this game is it naturally supports a variety of playstyles. you may be, again, I don’t know if the team actually likes it when I say this or hates it [aughs], but you can be a ghost or a hunter and they both work naturally, not that we drive you to those. The payer can choose which tools lead to that or lead best or support best those playstyles and they both work. They’re different and they lead to unique experiences. And in another way, we support having playstyles. So, if you’re up on the rooftops, you’ll have a different experience than if you’re in the sewers and you have a different experience from those two, if you’re in the streets. You’re constantly making the decision about Who am I in this world? How do I interact with the other players? And where am I? Where do I want to be? Because what experience do I have based on where I am? It’s super powerful and unique. I can’t think of another game that does all of that in a context, I’m stealing this from you, David, sorry (laughs), that’s competitive. It’s about competing with them. You put all of that together and I can’t think of another game that does all of this. That’s what’s exciting. One of our core values at OtherSide is we make innovative games. We want players to see and do things that they don’t or can’t do in other games and Thick as Thieves expresses that in a half a dozen ways.
Thieving in Style
You guys mentioned a lot about Thief and other titles, but were there other games, movies, TV shows or anything like that, that served a lot of inspiration for the game?
[David] Well, it obviously learns from the more contemporary immersive sims so there’s been a lot and also not just in the purely stealth genre like things that are adjacent, like Deus Ex, for instance. I think that we’ve learned a lot from the extraction genre lately and the ways in which you can construct a multiplayer game where players have asymmetrical objectives and capabilities. How those games embrace concepts like that a successful run is one where you never needed to fire your weapon, which is very anti-shooter mentality of the previous generation. They coexist. We’re seeing a lot of inspiration come to us from multiplayer design across the spectrum. In terms of like the flavor of the game, you have to point to films likeOcean’s ElevenorThe Italian JoborMission Impossiblefor that kind of stylish, smirking kind of thievery. I like the phrase that the game has an “air of gleeful daring” where you’re cool, but that doesn’t mean that it’s easy what you’re doing. Other things we’ve taken direct inspiration from is the animeLupin the III, from Catwoman, fromCowboy Bebopwith how to make characters that are not necessarily good or bad guys. They’re very kind of personal agenda-driven and they exist in a world that’s nuanced. It’s full of good and bad people and their path through that world is the fun and interesting part.
[Greg] I would add to that is we’ve taken a lot of inspiration in many ways. We sent the team to Edinburgh in Scotland just to take pictures and wander around, soak up the ambiance and so forth, just to be able to build a beautiful, detailed world with weather and cars and trains and machines and people walking around and so forth. It’s just like a, like a cool place to be in. It’s one of our ambitions, which I think we’re pulling off at this point. The levels, really, are a character in and of themselves and I’m being immersed in that world and it’s a huge part of the entertainment of the game, the fact that it’s so beautifully rendered. We’ve taken a lot of inspiration, certainly from other games that have done that well, but a lot of it’s from the actual environments themselves. We’re not trying to reproduce any specific city, but a lot of the architectural details are true to that time and to that place and I think it’s impactful. It really matters to the play experience.
I like the phrase that the game has an “air of gleeful daring” where you’re cool but that doesn’t mean that it’s easy what you’re doing.
How did you guys approach the level design, knowing that stealth would be at the forefront?
[David] It’s hard. So number one, understanding that the level is non-linear. Even in Thief, the levels are linear. You’re meant to go through a sequence of encounters. Multiplayer matches tend to be non-linear and symmetrical, but even that wasn’t necessarily a given. We need players to have roughly equivalent starting locations, but after that, thinking of the map as a labyrinth of opportunities and challenges, and making it so that players are encountering one or both of those with every turn. Thinking about the players and the verbs of the Thief idea: hiding, traversal, needing to be able to isolate or bypass AI and locations that could be high security where treasure will be located.
This leads to the construction of buildings and the orientation of them to each other and interstitial spaces like alleys or rooftops or sewers. There are different routes to every part of the map and they all interconnect. There are choke points, but there are also areas of broad access that are easy to escape. There are a lot of blocking objects, hiding places, observation points or perches, high security zones where guards and AI are dense, and low-security zones where the thief is safe and can gather themselves and form plans. You just try to weld all these together and then let players play it and figure out how wrong you are and then iterate. It’s very iterative. Our level designer is a hero for keeping the game playable. We playtest for two hours a week and have for a long while, and playtest the maps and see a huge amount of iteration as a result. You really cannot theorycraft your way through it. You have to put it into practice and say, “I am playing this as a Thief. Does it work?”
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[Greg] I would add a few nerdy details that are unique to stealth. One of which is if you can stay hidden, right? Like if you can stay within darkness, within shadow, you’re safe. And if you can not make noise, you’re safe. Then, that translates into a bunch of pretty specific considerations about how you lay things out. Where is it bright? Where is it dark? Where are the guards looking? Pretty quickly, people get an intuitive sense of “Okay, I can sneak through there when the guard’s moving the other way, but it’s a marble floor. What do I do about that?” Just setting up simple little emergent puzzles about how to navigate light and dark, quiet and sound. Kind of related to that is that, a lot of the time you have to make a distinction between safe space and dangerous space.
There are safe places where you can like [plan] the next rooftop. That’s a classic one for what we’re doing now. You’re on the roof next to the mansion, peering down, seeing where the guards are, seeing where the light is, and so forth. A lot of setting up places for you to be able to evaluate what your next move is going to be. We got some early feedback along those lines. Some of the early stuff was the streets were tight and labyrinthine and you couldn’t always see or you’d encounter things you didn’t expect. A lot of the thinking now is also just about sight lines, like what can you see from where and so forth.
Are you guys planning on doing beta tests for Thick as Thieves? If so, when can we generally expect that? And will they be open to the public?
[Greg] We will be doing a lot of testing. We’re pretty convinced that we need to to get this game refined. We don’t have any specifics to announce yet. We can certainly confirm that we will be doing such things, but we don’t have a timeline or any specifics.
Just as a reminder, Thick as Thieves will be available on all platforms?
[Warren] Yes. It’s for PC, PS5 and Xbox. We’ll be on consoles and we will support crossplay
