Thick as Thieves - multiplayer stealth game set in a low fantasy early 20th century metropolis from Warren Spector's OtherSide Entertainment

[kangaxx]

As an Imm Sim enjoyer, all I can say is:

 

[ciox]

Pretty bold move making it look like Underworld Ascendant.
PvPvE probably means that the players are all thieves and the guards are NPCs. No playing as a guard like in ThieveryUT.

 

[Ash]

I get sickly bittersweet satisfaction that the retarded rush for graphics that gamers/journos/devs begged and salivated for, at the expense of all other aspects of design, resulted in 70% of modern games looking like this abomination aesthetically

No comment on the gameplay. Aside from the fact that no multiplayer is ever going to qualify as an immersive sim...and that interacting with other gamers is often a tiresome task, I don't want to involve them in my precious gaming time.

 

[sosmoflux]

The real problem is even if it's actually good nobody is gonna be playing it

 

[ADL]

The real problem is even if it's actually good nobody is gonna be playing it

It's an immersive sim. Of course they wont. It's a cursed genre. Not only do people not buy imsims, immersive sim fans don't either. Maybe capeshit (Blade) is what it takes for one of these games to be successful.

 

[Ash]

Lol. All you need is marketing. The plebs will eat literal shit on a plate if the marketing spam told them to. Immersive Sims just never got that investment, except Dishonored perhaps after Todd Howard deemed it dumbed down enough to "risk". And Immersive Sims are highly marketable inherently as they are cool asf. We just need a publisher with deep pockets to actually have balls and integrity to give it a shot, but they see the complexity and flee, lowball or otherwise force the game to be dumb by design (Bioshock/Dishonored/Prey etc).

 

[Butter]

A lot of people seemed to love how reactive BG3 was. If your market your game as being along those lines, but in first person, I can't see how people wouldn't be interested.

 

[Ash]

Yeah and now imagine swapping all the woke degen shit with 90s badassery, should be even more marketable. Then again...modern clown world and 95% of people with terrible taste. Maybe we need to make Immersive Sims more woke at first glance, but that didn't go well for Deathcuck and Prey actually. Scrap that.

 

[toro]

The real problem is even if it's actually good nobody is gonna be playing it

It's an immersive sim. Of course they wont. It's a cursed genre. Not only do people not buy imsims, immersive sim fans don't either. Maybe capeshit (Blade) is what it takes for one of these games to be successful.

The genre is booming in the indie scene.

 

[toro]

Co-Op? It's not from what I got.
I would not think AI will be fun enough for offline.
Also, hardly a story coming for that.

It's an extraction immersive sim live service.

 

[Morgoth]

'I've spent my entire career trying to recreate the feeling I had when I played D&D for the first time,' says immersive sim godfather Warren Spector, with new game Thick as Thieves going multiplayer because 'you don't play D&D alone'​

By Ted Litchfield
published 7 hours ago

Spector described wanting to push the genre in new and interesting directions.

As part of a larger interview and preview of OtherSide Entertainment's upcoming multiplayer sneaker Thick as Thieves with PC Gamer strategic director Evan Lahti, company co-founder and immersive sim OG Warren Spector explained some of the studio's reasoning for splicing the classically single-player genre into a live service PvPvE multiplayer game.

"For years, I've been thinking the next logical step [for immersive sims] was multiplayer," Spector said. "I've said this before: I've spent my entire career trying to recreate the feeling I had when I played D&D for the first time. Though there are solo adventures, typically, you don't play D&D alone."

"Tabletop role playing games are a group of friends telling stories with each other, telling stories together. So multiplayer was logical then, we had to do it. We've been kind of building towards that for a while."

I gotta say, as a crusty single player guy who doesn't usually go for live service, I find that angle pretty compelling. Spector also had further words for the live service-skeptical, speaking as one himself. "I initially resisted that⁠—I'm a story guy, I like games that you finish and move on to something else," he said. "But one of my designers said something that completely turned me around. He said, 'Warren, you know, this is just the D&D model.'

"So the other logical step is, let's make it even more like a tabletop game, and have an ongoing game that has a life beyond its initial release."

And we've seen a recent demonstration of how much of an appetite there is for multiplayer with immersive sim characteristics in Baldur's Gate 3. Though primarily a CRPG, BG3 had all of the open-ended, systemic, surprising interactions you'd expect of an immersive sim, leading to its neverending bounty of "did that really just happen?" moments like the Owlbear from the top rope. Even after decades of videogames' evolution as a medium, it feels like the dream of "tabletop roleplaying freedom and malleability with the immersion of a digital world" is something we've only just scratched the surface of.

Immersive sims' capacity for surprising, emergent stories is something the OtherSide team seems keen to emphasize in Thick as Thieves. "One of the other things that I love about immersive sims is surprise. I love it when players are clever and smart and use their wits and solve problems in unpredictable ways that surprise them⁠: 'Hey, that worked!' Or if they fail, they understand why they failed," Spector explained. "But where it really becomes magical⁠, to [Thick as Thieves project lead Greg LoPiccolo's] point, is when they surprise [the developers], when they do things that we didn't know were possible, which happens all the time in these games."

Given Thick as Thieves' game design pedigree, I'm almost not even worried that the multiplayer stealth experience will be everything Spector and his OtherSide colleagues LoPiccolo and lead designer David McDonough outlined to Evan. I think the real test will be maintaining the pace of support required for a live service game, and securing a confident, engaged playerbase to populate these multiplayer heists⁠—two factors that many single-player oriented developers have struggled with when making live service games.

An extremely encouraging sign for Thick as Thieves is that its live service structure is clearly downstream of OtherSides' game design ambitions, rather than the confused, seemingly half-willing efforts of games like Anthem, Redfall, or Suicide Squad. Thick as Thieves currently has no set release date, but you can wishlist it over on Steam or Epic.

 

[sosmoflux]

To his credit I never thought Warren would dare put his name on another video game after Underworld Ascendant
He's either going senile or is extremely confident the game's actually good

 

[Morgoth]

To his credit I never thought Warren would dare put his name on another video game after Underworld Ascendant
He's either going senile or is extremely confident the game's actually good

Is it even his game though? I thought Warren was working on this Argonauts Something thingy.... guess they either crowned him Project Lead on this too, or it's just another marketing ploy.

 

[Avonaeon]

After Underworld Ascendant I have zero enthusiasm for anything they produce. It was one of the biggest turd I've ever played.