Agreed, Starker. As a long-time fan of the franchise, with Thief 2 franchise, I can admit that this new Thief did some things well, but this article gives it more credit than it deserves.
1. Bank Mission: I'll agree, it was one of two or three missions that were Thief-like, with the rest being linear one-way tunnels from start to finish. There are 8 main missions and I liked the Bank and the Baron's estate and some parts of the Asylum were alright. 3 out of 8 is 37%. Not exactly a stellar record of okay to meh. Even at its best, Thief's missions are still tiny.
2. Like Starker, I was not pleased with the simplified mechanics. There was a point to tile floors: forcing you to plan your route with more than just light and darkness alone. And even when in total darkness, I rarely felt hidden in this new Thief game. Instead, I was hiding based on line of sight, like Dishonored, because otherwise guards would spot me from 8 to 10 feet away in pitch black, making hiding by shadow alone mostly useless.
So they took the two biggest stealth mechanics of the originals: sound and light, and gutted one and nearly did away with the other.
3. Personally, I found stealing to be a chore. I did every client and side mission and I often found myself hammering the E key, impatiently wanting Garrett to hurry it up (often resulting in me crouching alongside a desk to peek, getting myself seen in the process). I never felt that a lack of hand animations lead to lessened immersion. To the contrary, impatiently waiting for the animation to complete breaks my immersion far more than having objects vanish from my cursor ever did.
It doesn't help that, as Starker pointed out, you're collecting a lot of near-worthless junk. Aside from the big, special loot, there is little satisfaction from nabbing cutlery or purses in this game. I remember Thief 1 and 2 feeling like Garrett was stealing from haughty nobles who deserved it. Now it feels like he's robbing poor people who have literally nothing of value in their house except for that knife that I just took. I'd rather be stealing fewer, but fancier, worthwhile trinkets from people who kind of deserve to get taken down a notch by a robbery, not every gloom-infested pauper.
4. The voice actor was fine, I thought. It's the writing that made Garrett not as good.
I'll say though that their reasoning for why they didn't use Garrett--so that the new guy could voice act while he did his fancy motion capture--was ridiculous. We almost never see Garrett moving, except in cutscenes, and we never see him doing anything fancy WHILE talking. They could have easily hired a mo-cap stunt man and synced up the lips in post. And it's not like cutting out Stephen Russel only meant a lack of Garrett--it also meant no Benny and none of the other iconic voices that lent charm and personality to the original games.
To me, the far bigger issue than a change of voice actor was the removal of the game's charm. That's more an issue of direction and writing than voice acting, though.
5. Sure, this Basso was more interesting than the non-entity Basso the Boxman. But how would you say his interactions with Garrett hold up to the witty one-ups Garrett and Victoria shared, or the begrudging friendship of Garrett and Artemus? Basso was about the only character in new Thief with any personality, but unfortunately, Garrett didn't have a personality for his rugged charm to bounce off of, so the dynamic wasn't particularly interesting. If Garrett could take the shots and throw them back, like he did with Victoria in Thief 2, it maybe could have been interesting, but he didn't and it wasn't.
6. Saying the Claw was great because it gave the game verticality is like saying Super Mario World 3D is great because there's a jump button. The verticality was always there to begin with and, if anything, it's been significantly simplified.
Unlike in previous games, one cannot mantle or climb at will--only in pre-defined locations. To me, this took away a significant portion of my player agency and, as a result, my immersion. I no longer felt like a true master thief, finding opportunities in every wooden post and oversized crate. Instead I felt like a puppet, moving to the whims of the level designer, performing the precise, predetermined movements necessary to complete the level like a good little taffer fucker.
If anything, it made me appreciate the freedom of the climbing gloves of Deadly Shadows and the blink ability of Dishonored all the more. They at least allowed you to choose when and how to make use of those abilities, rather than the game literally having an arrow pointing you to what you're supposed to do.
7. This isn't even something that was "good" about Thief. You're saying that the climbing mechanics were limited and mandatory and that they could have been something neat, but they weren't. That's not "something Thief did right," that's "yet another thing Thief fucked up."
Frankly, the three third-person, Uncharted-style climbing segments were so bafflingly out of place and unnecessary, I cannot fathom why they bothered. All that stuff could have been done another way without breaking the much-touted "immersion" of always seeing Garrett's grubby hands on either side of the camera. What was the point of it? I wish they'd have cut it out entirely.
8. I will grant you this: I think the puzzle design was pretty good in this game. Better than in any other Thief game, even.
9. The difficulty selection was a wise choice. It's a clever way to throw the long-time fans a bone while simultaneously screwing up everything else that actually mattered in delivering a Thief-like experience.
10. Personally, I never purchased or needed any upgrade except for the mandatory three tools. I didn't see the point of them and gameplay wasn't particularly changed that I could tell for me not having them. The upgrades were a pointless money-sink to add the illusion of a bit more depth where there really wasn't any. Or, as most of the upgrades were combat-related, maybe it was an attempt to pose as a shooter? Whatever the case, it didn't need to be there at all. The original games had a sense of progression by giving the player access to Garrett's arsenal a little bit at a time. That did the job fine of feeling like the player was gaining more options while also not being pointless and stupid.
Honestly? Garrett is going to pay 500 coins for an x-acto knife? Why didn't he just use one of the myriad of knives he stole from all the lower class residents he robbed blind? Why would he pay another 500 for a wire cutter when tons of working-class peasants would have one?
The only one that makes a tad bit of sense is the wrench, since it could be a specialized tool that he couldn't have found anywhere else. The rest of the tools are just ridiculous and the upgrades are pointless.
Keep in mind: the above was my rebuttal to your "10 Things Thief Did Right." That's saying nothing of the many, many other things it did horribly wrong.
