Thief and The City – ripe for the plunder

Square Enix and Eidos-Montréal have released the first trailer in a new series of stylized videos that will focus on the revitalised Thief game, its characters, and The City (a character in its own right).

Each trailer in the series tells the story of The City from the perspective of a different character in Thief’s narrative, describing what life is like in the broken, repressed City that is being ravaged by the evil Baron Northcrest and the mysterious sickness known as “The Gloom”.

The first trailer introduces Basso, a former boxman (safe-cracker) turned fence, who uses his vast connections to The City’s underworld to organize thieving jobs for Garrett.

He owns an intelligent, but bad tempered magpie called Jenivere who delivers messages for him. Garrett might consider himself a loner, but Basso is the nearest thing he has to a friend – and whether he readily admits it or not; he rather likes the fellow.

Thief is shaping up quite nicely, and as we lead up the the game’s launch, we are getting more screenshots and gameplay trailers to ogle.

Eidos-Montréal has assured that keyboard and mouse enthusiasts will not get a simple port.

“No doubt on our side the PC version is extremely important,” said producer Stephane Roy. “Just playing Thief with a keyboard and mouse it’s different so we must make sure we support that well.”

“For making the PC version we think like a PC gamer, for consoles it’s a different type of beast. It’s one of our goals to make sure that the PC version isn’t just a copy of the console version.”

Although Roy was referring to the control scheme, it’s safe to assume that Thief will receive some special PC features, as seen with Square Enix’s PC support on Tomb Raider, Sleeping Dogs and Eidos Montreal’s own Deus Ex: Human Revolution.

Below is a gameplay trailer that shows detailed touches the game has to offer, including dynamic lighting, great animations, and environmental elements.

The video also shows the instinct abilities that Garrett uses, including the ability to see important pieces in the environment and slow down time.