Beating a Dead Horse

Semi recently, the new Thief game came out on basically every system ever and PC.  I've been hearing quite mixed things about the new Thief since it's launch.  Generally speaking, all the gaming "news" sites have been giving it a good writeup, while every single old school Thief fan I've spoken to on the subject says it's a little bit shit.

Now, I've not played Thief yet, so this post is not commenting on the quality of that game but this is the most recent example of what I'm about to talk about so don't freak out if you really like the game, I'm not slagging it off (yet)

Now just in case you weren't aware, Thief (the original) was an old as fuck first person PC game released in 1998 created by Looking Glass Studio.  2 Years later it got a sequel that was quite well received and then another one popped up in 2004 which I didn't play but it I've not heard many complaints about it so it can't be that bad.

Then 2014 rolls along, it's been 10 years since the last Thief game and then BAM! New Thief game for everyone to enjoy.  Except it's not everyone who's enjoying it, is it? 

No, for all the old school Thief fans, by the sounds of things, they've been left in the dust and the game has been severely dumbed down in order to appeal to a mass market and now there is a group of players who are upset that a series they held so fondly has been fucked in the ass.

Except I haven't played Thief, so let me take another example that is more relevant to my experiences.

Silent Hill: Book of Memories is a little bit of a different category since it's not so much a reboot or a remake but rather just an absolute beating of an already very dead and very rotten horse.

For in uninformed, Silent Hill's 1-3 and to a lesser extent 4 are some of the best horror games ever made ever.  Once the original team stopped making the games and the series was over, a bunch of western teams jumped in to try and carry things on and squeeze every last dollar out of the series they possibly could. 

Book of Memories was the most stand out offensive game that ever came out though and can you guess why?  It's because it wasn't survival horror! It was a fucking Diablo style dungeon crawl and a terrible one at that.

There is absolutely ZERO reason why that game had to be called Silent Hill.  In fact, it probably would have worked in its favour to not have been called Silent Hill because even though it's not very good, people would have been a lot kinder to it if it wasn't going around spitting on everything that came before it.

It's the same with Thief, why did it have to be called Thief?!  Once you throw that name on it, all the fans of the old games are going to come into it comparing it to the originals, and then when it doesn't match up (and it never does) you end up just feeling disappointed and betrayed.

If you just called the game "Sneaky Twats Stealing Adventure" and put "Inspired by Thief" on the box, then people wouldn't be so harsh on it.  But no, all the greedy fucks that populate the games industry nowadays just want to push whatever shitty games they can by banking on brand recognition.

Basically what I'm trying to say with this post is stop "remaking" or "rebooting" things and try to use some of that actual creativity that I know is kicking around in that cesspit of an industry somewhere.  Use the old classics as inspiration for your project, but there is ZERO reason to shit all over the legacy of long standing classics just so you can make a quick buck.