Since its original announcement at the end of 2024, Thick As Thieves had gone through some changes behind the shadows. Billed as a new first-person immersive stealth game from Otherside Entertainment — headed by Warren Spector, who first coined the term 'immersive sim' that describes acclaimed series like Thief, Deus Ex, and Dishonored — its headline attraction was that it would be a PvPvE heist action multiplayer where you would be competing against other thieves as you infiltrate, steal, and escape with valuable treasure.

The major difference from this original vision to what we'll experience at launch is that the competitive PvP element has been dropped in favor of missions that can be played in single-player or with another player in co-op. While it sounds like a dramatic change, game director Jeff Hickman says that this decision had come into effect last July.

"We had just come off of all the summer tours, getting feedback from players, and it was pretty apparent to us that there was a small group of people that really liked PvP," he says. "But as we started to experiment more with solo and co-op play, it was really obvious that solo and especially co-op play was the sweet spot, not only for fun, but for the breadth of audience."

Another reason stems from the implications of a competitive game, as having players tussling with each other for loot also risked breaking from the game's core stealth gameplay. Even though the original trailer avoided depicting direct confrontations, Hickman admits it was nonetheless something the team was struggling with during development.

"Thick of Thieves was never supposed to be a fighting game, it's a game of stealth, it's a game about using shadows and light, it's a game about hiding from the guards and the other security devices and also tricking them, distracting them, all sorts of manipulation of the environment," he says. "When you put another thief in there in PvP with you, it sometimes turns into a fighting game and that's not what we want."

Indeed, the only form of combat you have at your disposal is to choke out guards from behind — which is also only effective for a short period before they regain consciousness — while your gear is primarily for traversal or causing distractions.

Conversely, having another thief cooperating with you better highlighted the kind of stealthy light and shadow interplay the team had envisioned, making it easier to take scope of the map you're in, stopping to discuss whether you should together or split up to cover more ground, while also taking off the pressure of rushing in to grab the loot if you were competing with another thief. And if there's one thing that Hickman emphasizes, it's that you really shouldn't run in this game.

"Our game punishes you if you're not stealthy, if you don't use the tools to play the game as a stealth game," he explains. "If you just run through our level, it's quite dangerous. Sprinting is really loud, so if you sprint away from a guard and you just happen to get heard by another guard, another guard will start to chase you. So you just need to be really thoughtful about how you escape."

Not that there isn't some time pressure involved. A match lasts a maximum of 45 minutes, but once you have grabbed the target treasure, you have eight minutes to exit the map. In co-op, it's imperative that both you and your partner escape successfully. There is then a deliberate tension between trying to reach the exit quickly, but also being slow and careful without alerting nearby guards or security systems.

Unlocking Kilcairn

Nonetheless, the change to co-op instead of competitive hasn't been hugely dramatic in how you approach the gameplay. There are still different playable thieves with unique abilities — you'll begin as the Spider, who can reach higher ground with her Zipwire, before unlocking the Chameleon, whose Glamour allows him to disguise himself as other NPCs. Then of course there is the world of Kilcairn itself, an alternative history twist on Edinburgh.

"It's the 1910s, where old fey magic from centuries in the past meets turn-of-the-century technology," Hickman explains. "It's not wizard's magic. It's magic that is derived from sources that humans now use as tools, basically."

That manifests in the tools you encounter in the game. For instance, some of the gear you can unlock includes an Insult Fairy, a teethy mouth with wings that when thrown starts yelling insults, causing nearby guards to give chase. Then of course, you're also up against that technology, such as floating magic eye sentries which project a bright purple light beam to search for intruders.

Although what you'll see of Kilcairn is limited to the specific map locations for the heist, while you will always return to your hub the Thieves' Den before picking another mission from your table map of the city, Hickman also teases more of the fiction of this world: "The Aztec Empire literally still exists because their magic was so powerful that they repelled the Spanish conquistadors when they were trying to invade, England is a highly magical realm, while Germany is anti-magic. We've been talking about how we reveal the lore of the world as much as we possibly can, especially a short-form factor type game that we're doing. So some of it comes out in the contracts and our missions.

"As a new thief, you've come to Kilcairn to join the Thief's Guild to become a master thief. But you quickly get involved in not just the intrigue of Kilcairn and its old families, but you quickly become involved in world politics. I'm not going to spoil anything, but it reveals a lot of the stuff that's going on in the world around you. And we will continue to do that as we move forward."

Calling Card

Thick of Thieves' launch actually serves as an introduction to Kilcairn, at the exceptionally low price of $4.99. It's an unusual price point, sitting between early access where at a lower price, you get to play an unfinished version with the promise of future content, but still at a value that distinguishes itself from free-to-play live-service. Hickman wants to be clear that it is neither early access nor, specifically, live-service: "In other words, we're not intending to have microtransactions. That is not our model."

For that price of admission, it's actually quite substantial, featuring 16 contract missions spread across two maps — Constables' Guildhall and Elway Manor, two playable characters, as well as six different pieces of gear to unlock. Although the developer estimates this introductory campaign as being at least four hours' gameplay, Hickman believes it is far more replayable than that.

"Somebody could play through all 16 missions as fast as they possibly could, but the chances that somebody is going to play every contract in 15 minutes, and that's all they're going to do, is very low," he explains. "The replayability is quite high. There's a lot of stuff to do, especially in co-op. We've got 25 player levels in the game, which unlock rewards."

You'll also only start the game at the lowest difficulty Novice, which is also intentional for easing players into a world where the guards can be easily alerted and other random factors can change the map each time.

"This is not like a normal action game or a fighting game, so we want to welcome you to our game, lowering the difficulty, as we teach you how to do things," Hickman explains. "As you then increase your level to Thief and then Master Thief, the guard and security layouts change. You will see very few repeated patterns, and we also change the way you can approach the level itself. There'll be a wall where there wasn't a wall, there'll be a window you could open that will be boarded up this time."

The launch campaign's contracts will also introduce you to the three mission types available. There's the vault heist, which involves stealing a particular treasure in a vault — and figuring out how to open it as you do, another where you have to loot as much treasure in the location and reach the target value, as well as one that requires collecting and combining multiple parts into the item you're after before escaping. The conditions of these will also be random.

"Take the vault mission, there's three vaults, so when you play the game, you've got to figure out through a clue system which vault it is in, so that then you can find the key to the right vault," Hickman says. "Loot the room is quite easy in Novice but when you move into Thief or Master Thief, the amount you have to loot is quite large, so you really need to explore the level."

In other words, there's enough variables that make the available missions replayable and not something you can quickly master to simply speedrun. Again, this isn't a game where you should be running.

This introductory campaign and price does however raise questions as to what comes after. For players instantly hooked on Thick As Thieves and its world, will it mean a long wait for more content to arrive, and will that be as a cadence of updates or the full game dropping, and at what additional cost? Having worked on MMORPGs like Star Wars: The Old Republic and Ultimate Online, Hickman is no stranger to handling regular updates or episodic content. But while he assures me there are plans in place, those plans are staying in the shadows, for now.

"I think we have a very unique game and a very unique situation," he says. "We have a couple of different options. But what we're focused on now is to get this thing out into players' hands, focus on their feedback, see what they think. The more positive feedback we get, the better chances we have of doing really cool things for the future. The world is our oyster, as long as what we're doing now is a winner."

Thick As Thieves sneaks onto the Epic Games Store later this month.