The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly

Kotaku recently wrote that Eidos had officially announced Thief 4, the long awaited sequel to the popular stealth series. Kotaku then proceeded to denounce publisher Eidos for not providing enough details about the game.

This all seems a bit strange, seeing as how Kotaku has posted not one, not two, not three, but a total of four stories about Thief 4 – and they even linked to an IGN article about it, too. Oh, and this was all done within the past month.

Why is it then, that Luke Plunkett sees fit to cry foul at Eidos for not giving enough information about the title, citing that there’s “nothing on its setting, no screenshots, nothing on its protagonists, nothing on a release window, nothing on the game's design, nothing on...well, anything.” Strange, considering that there must’ve been enough information for you to publish four separate stories on it?

This verbal bashing doesn’t seem to take into account what a lot of companies do when announcing games. Take a heavy-hitter like Blizzard for example, who frequently announce games without so much as a whimper about anything other than a big piece of title art that confirms nothing more than that someone might have thought about it (I’m looking at you, Diablo III). Developer Valve also has a nasty habit of not announcing release dates for games and letting details come out at a snail’s pace (where’s my HL2 Episode 3, huh?).

Plunkett closed his article by saying “Eidos: this is not how you announce a product”. Really, considering they’ve still somehow managed to get four fucking stories about it on your site alone, it seems that their announcement is going pretty well to me. Also, it’s not like Eidos Montreal general manager Stephane D'Astous simply ran out into a room and yelled “Thief 4!” at the top of his lungs before scurrying back under a rock. He offered perfectly good reasoning as to why nothing has been announced. “We're going to wait a couple of months to announce more” said D’Astous in regards to the title, “we don't know exactly the window of release and we don't know the first-party strategy”.

The bottom line is we know enough about it for right now. We know it’s being developed by Eidos Montreal, and we know it’s a Thief game. I’m not saying it wouldn’t be nice to know more about the title, but it’s better than getting no announcement at all. So, the moral of the story here is to get off your fucking high horse and not to bite the hand that feeds.