Games Thirst – Amazing Life
“You’ll be surprised to know how often the devs go to the forum.”
Game Director Nic Cantin and Lead Level Designer Windfeld Schmidt of Eidos, confirmed that the XP system was removed from the Thief reboot during a community Q & A on the studio’s website.Cantin said:
“At first, we wanted to outline the progression of the player with XP, but it was reducing our motivation to steal. The main goal of a thief should be to gain loot. Garrett is already the Master Thief, so we saw no need to have XP as a core mechanic.”
Schmidt continued:
“We wanted to put emphasis on stealing things, and put the rewards on the stealing aspect. We want to allow the player to decide the “how to” – we shouldn’t judge how the player wants to achieve their goal, only reward them for achieving it.”
Ever since the E3 demo, which showed the Master Thief, Garrett, get XP because he scored a headshot, fan feedback has been negative.
“Fans might be surprised how often the devs go to the forum to see how things are perceived in the ‘real world’. This feedback is extremely valuable to us, so as you can imagine, the consistent reaction to the XP system was something that indicated we needed to revisit some design decisions”, said Schmidt.
Cantin added:
“It is more a design decision to add to our economy system and entice the player to steal more. But yes, the E3 reaction was right, rewarding killing like that was wrong for a Master Thief.”
It’s always good to see that developers make substantial changes to their games because of the fans.
