Features// When Realism and Video Games Collide

One solution would be to make games so damn good that you could use every element of the environment in just the way you might in the real world with control schemes that have the fidelity to match. Maybe we can come back to that in a decade or two when Oculus Rift's been around for a dog age, we have haptic feedback suits suspended in gyroscopic rigs and processing power that's multiplied a bunch of times over. But it's not happening in time for Thief 2.

The other is to make games so self-evidently game-y that our expectations aren't led in the direction of realism. No-one bats an eye, for example, when the physics in Mario Galaxy are bonkers or when Iron Man can't walk through a certain door in LEGO Marvel Super Heroes. Nothing about those games makes you expect anything other than the sort of game design conventions we've grown up with. A game doesn't have to be cartoonish through and through to do this - Saints Row IV is a great example of a big 3D game that wants you to buy into its world while still giving us plentiful nods to the fact that it's one of them 'puter games. With a sly wink it gives itself license to behave like what it is - a pre-fabricated world designed to make you do certain things.

There is, of course, no easy answer here. I dare say Square Enix could have chucked sufficient resources at Thief to have smarter AI, a more seamless world and no jarring restrictions to your movement. And yes, I suppose smarter design choices could have been made on certain aspects of the game at little extra cost (I've not even touched on sometimes-clunky narrative design and incongruous elements of world building here). But, on the resource front at least, I'm not sure it would have been worth it.

Square has its budgets. It's been at this games malarkey a while and I'm sure there's a pretty good spreadsheet somewhere telling the bods in charge what sort of comeback they can expect from certain levels of investment. And no-one expects publishers to stop putting out games that strive for realism any time soon, do they? Nor do I think they should. These sorts of flaws are, I think, something we're just going to have to take on the chin for a while.

(For the record, while I've been picking away at Thief's flaws for hundreds of words here, I don't think it's a bad game. A lot of its seams are showing and there are some ropey choices in terms of narrative and world design, but it has some solid stealth mechanics and great aesthetic.)