This week: I've spent most of the week enjoying the delights of norovirus and playing comfort games while preparing for the onslaught of SGF trailers and announcements. But now I've left my sick bed to get angry about Thief.
We're in a smoky, dimly-lit boardroom. Sitting around a table are sallow-faced executives sniffing wads of cash. The cash is on fire. The videogame industry is on fire. Embracer has just made another completely ridiculous decision while it kicks the corpse of Thief, one of PC gaming's most important and influential series.
Nothing Embracer Group ever does makes a lick of sense. The Swedish holding company, formerly Nordic Games, rapidly grew between 2013 and 2023 as it gobbled up just about every stray game property it could get its hands on. And little good has come from it.
It swallowed up THQ, grabbed Deep Silver, snatched Coffee Stain Studios, and it just kept going. Studios, publishers, long-dead yet still beloved games—it was throwing money all over the place. In 2022, it made a deal with Square Enix and spent $300 million on Crystal Dynamics, Eidos-Montreal, and Square Enix Montreal.
That's how it managed to pilfer Thief.
Shortly after the Square Enix deal, Embracer got into a spot of bother. A number of its acquisitions had come to nothing, it rarely seemed to know what to do with the treasures it had looted, and a gargantuan $2 billion investment deal fell through. Its share price dropped dramatically and the restructuring began.
Cancellations, layoffs, studio closures. In just a few months, nearly 1,000 people lost their jobs. It started selling rather than buying. But, unfortunately for us, it kept Thief. And that's why, yesterday, we were treated to an ugly trailer for Thief VR: Legacy of Shadow—one of the most disappointing reveals I've had the misfortune to witness since I started writing about games.
Embracer is not the kind of company you want determining the fate of anything you care deeply about. And I care a lot about Thief. It was a formative game for wee Fraser, and while its glory days are firmly in the past (25 or 21 years back, depending on how you feel about the actually extremely good Thief: Deadly Shadows), the impact it had on game development was gargantuan.
Look, you might not really care about immersive sims. Most people don't, judging by how poorly they tend to sell. But nothing encapsulates the giddy brilliance of gaming, and especially PC gaming, like these ridiculous creations. And from Thief we got some truly incredible, ambitious, uncompromising games: Arx Fatalis, Dark Messiah of Might & Magic, Deus Ex, Dishonored—the GOATs.
And let's not forget its influence on stealth games: pretty much all of them. It's really where the genre properly began. And when you get excited about being able to do stuff like snuffing out a light in Assassin's Creed Shadows, you've got Thief to thank for it.
Since sneaky immersive sims aren't huge money-makers these days, it's often smaller studios taking on the risk, which is great, but I'm gonna be straight with you: I would rather have something a bit more polished, a bit easier on the eyes, and with some fancy tech to back it up. I want my cake and to eat it too.
A new Thief, then, obviously piqued my interest. Thief 4 was disappointing, and also more than a decade ago. I'm ready for someone to take another crack at it. But this? A fucking VR game? Come the hell on.
Look, VR is a gimmick. It's always a gimmick. It promises everything and delivers nothing. It was like this when I was a kid and it was the hot new thing, and this time around nothing has changed. Occasionally something kinda cool appears. Like Half-Life: Alyx. But I ain't restructuring my entire living room and strapping an uncomfortable headset on for the promise of a tiny handful of decent games that, frankly, still ain't all that.
And beyond the fact that it's a real bummer that I'd need to shell out for a niche bit of hardware to enjoy the new Thief, the really disappointing thing is that it just looks kinda rubbish. A large part of that, I'll it, is just seeing those awful disembodied hands. It will never not look ridiculous. VR pretends that it's all about next-level immersion, but all the ways the vast majority of VR games have you interacting with the world—whether it's the tactile, fiddly things, or simple traversal—takes me right out of the game.
But there's also just the lack of any novelties on display. Using your rope arrow to climb up buildings or snuffing out light sources is classic Thief, so that's not the problem, but I can do that in any Thief game. What justifies this being imprisoned on VR headsets? What's the big idea? How is this pushing stealth forward in the way the classics did?
The answer, probably, is that it isn't. The hook is that it's a VR game. That's it. And that's a bloody terrible hook. It immediately massively limits who can enjoy the game and, let's face it, limits what it can really do. VR games by their nature are games full of sacrifices and concessions.
It's just another baffling call that suggests the people making these decisions don't really understand Thief, or care to understand it. There's just this property that they have lying around, doing nothing, so why not waste it on a VR game, long after most people stopped giving a shit about VR?
When your company is on fire and you've either laid off or sold off almost half of your nearly 16,000 employees, what's one more little cock-up? But as someone who actually loves Thief, and a lot of the games Embracer now controls, I'm pleading with it: stop. Just stop messing with games. Make terrible cars or something instead. Sell everything, get out of the industry, and please just leave us alone.
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