Warren Spector and Paul Neurath’s Thick as Thieves is out on PC, and it’s okay. After a rough development process, the game is near-unrecognisable from its original reveal. The game is no longer PvPvE, no longer online, and also it’s just $5.
Thick as Thieves director Jeff Hickman previously explained the game’s tiny $5 pricetag to us. That price isn’t “really about recouping costs”, we were told. Instead, that tiny price is to get “the game into players’ hands” to help inform the future of the level-based stealth game.
The new stealth game offers an “introductory campaign” with player feedback informing the game’s future. But that only leads to my biggest question. If the campaign is an introduction and player feedback is essential to the game’s future, why isn’t this an early access game?
Speaking to us prior to last week’s launch, Hickman explained that early access is “a very specific thing on Steam and behind the scenes, to be frank, they have a bunch of rules about ‘this is what early access means, this is what you have to do within early access’. And they’re a little constraining to what we want to do, to be frank”.
While early access titles have launched with less and promised more, Hickman explained that the Thick as Thieves team doesn’t currently know where the game will go. “We don’t know exactly what our roadmap looks like for the next year or two years or three years,” he said.
“We have a whole bunch of baseline plans, but none of them are set in stone.”
Thick as Thieves director Jeff Hickman
Two of the early access clauses in Steam’s current rules jump to mind. One rule says that developers should “not make specific promises about future events” which explains that players shouldn’t buy based “on promises of a future that may or may not be realised”. Another rule pushes early access launches to “set expectations properly everywhere you talk about your game”, which is hard to do when a roadmap is not currently in place.
Hickman told us that the Thick as Thieves team doesn’t want to be constrained into a roadmap of ideas. “We want to be able to pivot wherever we need to,” he said. “Do players just love solo and co-op play? Okay, great: no PvP for the future. Do players love solo and co-op, but are screaming about PvP? Oh, maybe we should do PvP. Like, we have a whole bunch of baseline plans, but none of them are set in stone.”
More confusingly, Hickman told us that Thick as Thieves’ current full release could pivot to an early access, or early access-like, release in the future. “My intent would be there will, at some point, there will be an early access,” he said. “And we probably then would open up a traditional early access sometime in the future. But this is not early access…
“I don’t want to theorise on what might or might not happen,” he continued. “Like, we could also go, ‘actually, we’re not going to go into early access. We’ve got enough from this.’ We’e just going to go straight to worldwide launch at some point in the future and never have an early access because we got so much info out of the thing that we’re shooting now.”
As it was explained to us, Thick as Thieves is a foundation for a game that could go in any direction. It’s already been through a slew of different identities. For example, at one point, players could hide bodies and break glass, two mechanics that are currently not in the game. At one point, it was an open-world. It no longer is.
Nevertheless, Thick as Thieves is out, and it’s only $5. Right now, the game is okay, but how it will evolve past its “introductory campaign” is completely unknown. The game is currently only available on PC with console ports planned for the future.
