Thief - Interview @ OXM

OXM interviews Producer Joe Khoury for a few questions about Thief.

Do you think you've overcome fan resistance to the reboot now? To certain of the changes that you've made?

Good one! I think hopefully, our greatest sense of satisfaction will be when the game's released and that's where we'll overcome fan resistance. I think there are a lot of optimistically curious people just as there are some fans who don't know the full extent of what we're doing, so for sure they're basing their impressions on the little information that they have, and that's concerning for them.

We haven't shown everything we have in our pockets yet. And I think when the game hits the street is when there concerns will be met. We're looking forward to that day. Right now the team's working so hard to bring the game to where it is, taking into consideration everything that everybody's saying.

When I read a lot of the comments I do know where they're coming from, and I can guarantee that the team knows where they're coming from, and part of that is just 'wait and see, judge for yourself'. Hopefully it'll be good.

We're fairly confident, but then art is very delicate to judge - it's an opinion. There's a lot of people that remember things differently for the first Thief, and what they like about the first Thief games. And hopefully 15 years from now people will be talking about what they remember about this Thief, in comparison to the first Thief! We're reading what they're saying with a lot of care, the team is very aware of what's being said.

As a studio, you seem to have a very defined style now - first person, action-adventure, lots of choice. Are there any other genres you're interested in?

Yeah, sure. So far we've released those kinds of games, which I guess would lead to that impression, but there are a lot of experienced people on this team at Montreal, there's a bunch of other studios that we have back-and-forths with. We have people that we recruit from other studios, we lose people to other studios, so we have such a wealth of experience that if we wanted to venture off in another direction, we would have the means to do it.