In a new Q&A session on the game’s forums, Eidos Montreal game director Nicolas Cantin and lead level designer Daniel Windfeld Schmidt have revealed that they are ditching the XP progression system for the upcoming Thief.
Cantin stated that, “At first, we wanted to outline the progression of the player with XP, but it was reducing our motivation to steal. The main goal of a thief should be to gain loot. Garrett is already the Master Thief, so we saw no need to have XP as a core mechanic,”
Schmidt also revealed that they took note of negative reactions to the XP system for the E3 demo videos. “We wanted to put emphasis on stealing things, and put the rewards on the stealing aspect. We want to allow the player to decide the ‘how to’ – we shouldn’t judge how the player wants to achieve their goal, only reward them for achieving it.”
Cantin added that, “The E3 reaction was right, rewarding killing like that was wrong for a Master Thief. It was always possible to play without using XP, like it is still possible to play through the game without killing anyone or even spending any coin,” he said.
Interestingly, there seem to be other changes afoot as the dev talked about something that they will “have to say about QTEs”. The developer also revealed that former community manager Adam Badke has left the studio, with a replacement yet to be chosen.
Thief is currently slated to release in February 2014 for PS3, PS4, Xbox 360, Xbox One and PC.