Thick as Thieves reimagines Thief as a multiplayer immersive sim

digitaltrends.com:

Thief is getting a spiritual successor in the form of Thick as Thieves. The project, which is being developed by an all-star team that includes genre legend Warren Spector, is a multiplayer immersive sim scheduled to launch in 2026 on the PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC.

Revealed at the 2024 Game Awards with a trailer,Thick as Thieves takes the basic principles of Thief, a landmark stealth series, but shuffles them into a four-player PvPvE game. It’s a stealth-action game where four thieves all hop into one mission and compete to pull off a loot heist first. While it’s not officially a Thief game, the project is being directed by Greg LoPiccolo, the director of 1998’s Thief: The Dark Project, at Otherside, a studio co-founded by Spector. That makes the project an evolution of the immersive sim created by some of the genre’s most influential names.

Ahead of its reveal, Digital Trends got a behind-the-scenes look at Thick as Thieves, which included a five-minute gameplay reel not shown at The Game Awards. The presentation highlighted how Otherside is looking to push the genre forward by combining a classic genre with modern ideas inspired by multiplayer genres like the extraction shooter. There’s a good reason for that too, as Spector told Digital Trends during an interview.

“My secret goal is that I want to make sure that immersive sims keep going and keep making progress long after I’m gone.”

Thief vs. thief

Thick as Thieves is a bit of a dream project for Spector, who says he has dreamed of making a multiplayer immersive sim like this for decades. There’s perhaps a reason it hasn’t happened until now: The two genres seemed incompatible at a surface glance. Even Spector, an industry veteran who worked on several influential games, admits that he was out of his depth at first.

“I have