One of the major criticisms faced by co-op stealth game Thick as Thieves has been its general lack of content, with only two levels and a handful of gadgets to play around with. While it could have benefited from being an Early Access release, director Jeff Hickman has revealed that the rules surrounding Early Access would have held back developer OtherSide Entertainment from accomplishing what it wanted with the game.
Speaking to FRVR, Hickman noted that Steam has quite a few rules about Early Access releases, including what exactly constitutes an “Early Access” game. He said it is “a very specific thing on Steam and behind the scenes, to be frank, they have a bunch of rules about ‘this is what early access means, this is what you have to do within early access’. And they’re a little constraining to what we want to do, to be frank”.
He went on to note that the development team didn’t want to be stuck to a content roadmap that isn’t even set in stone yet. This way, the team can change things up whenever it comes up with new ideas based on player feedback for the various aspects of Thick as Thieves, like whether they prefer single-player or co-op, or if they want a potential PvP mode.
“We want to be able to pivot wherever we need to,” Hickman explained. “Do players just love solo and co-op play? Okay, great: no PvP for the future. Do players love solo and co-op, but are screaming about PvP? Oh, maybe we should do PvP. Like, we have a whole bunch of baseline plans, but none of them are set in stone.”
Interestingly, this ability to pivot would also allow OtherSide Entertainment to switch to Early Access if the development team decided that it was the right idea.
“My intent would be there will, at some point, there will be an early access,” he said. “And we probably then would open up a traditional early access sometime in the future. But this is not early access…
“I don’t want to theorise on what might or might not happen,” he continued. “Like, we could also go, ‘actually, we’re not going to go into early access. We’ve got enough from this.’ We’re just going to go straight to worldwide launch at some point in the future and never have an early access because we got so much info out of the thing that we’re shooting now.”
In its current state, Thick as Thieves has been described as a “foundation” that could then be built upon in the future. Hickman has confirmed that the studio has already tried quite few ideas with it, and at one point during development, it even featured an open world before ultimately settling on its two levels.
Thick as Thieves is available on PC and is priced at $5. In our review, we praised its gameplay, level design, and replayability. However, the general lack of content, as well as the lack of basic features like Field of View slider, led us to ultimately give it a score of 7 out of 10.