News

The developers of Thief, the upcoming sequel-slash-reboot of Eidos' seminal first-person stealth series, have ditched a planned XP system after negative reactions from fans online. The announcement was made as part of a Q&A session on the official forums.

Of particular concern for fans was the way XP was handed out for completing tasks in specific ways, which was felt would discourage players from experimenting with their skills. "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," game director Nicolas Cantin said. "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."

A video released at E3 earlier in the year showed main character Garrett being rewarded with XP for killing enemies with head shots, something that went down particularly badly with those who believe that the truly expert Thief players should leave no dead bodies in their wake. "The E3 reaction was right," confessed lead level designer Daniel Windfeld Schmidt. "Rewarding killing like that was wrong for a Master Thief."

Thief is set for release in February 2014 for PC, PlayStation 3, PS4, Xbox 360 and Xbox One.