Thick as Thieves is making changes, but not the one I think matters most

"While we are quite pleased with your thieving prowess and how much you are enjoying the game," say Thick as Thieves developers OtherSide Entertainment, "we also know that there is continued room for improvement and we intend to keep serving that up."

Following a first patch that added an FOV slider, an option to disable motion blur, and a few other valuable settings tweaks, a second update has been promised "sometime in the middle of next week." And while it does include stuff I'm all in favor of, like the ability to rebind your keys—essential in a stealth game, rebinding the keys is the first thing everyone does in Thief: The Dark Project—there's a gaping hole where some variation on "timers to be made adjustable or optional" should be.

Thick as Thieves is a classic vent-crawler you can play solo or in co-op, infiltrating buildings to get loot and get out. Each mission has an overall time limit, usually 45 or 30 minutes, but that's not the real problem. As soon as you tick off any of the objectives on your list of goals for a given map—even if it's just stealing one of a three-item set, or a secondary objective like "collect X amount of loot" easily triggered by accidentally picking up one too many valuables—an eight-minute countdown begins.

If the countdown ends before you find the magic exit door that randomly spawns at the moment the countdown begins, you fail the mission. And if you don't complete the other two steps of that three-step job first, you'll have to do the whole thing again on your next trip. It's infuriating to learn the hard way that, no matter how efficiently you play before that moment, you might be screwed over by a particularly rough exit location after all the hard work you put in. And since Thick as Thieves began life as a multiplayer game, of course there's no mid-mission saving.

Thick as Thieves is making the mission timer visible, at least. Previously, while the eight-minute countdown showed up at the top of the screen, the longer one was invisible until it was nearly over. Now, it'll be there whenever you press tab to open the map.

Which is a good change. It's just not the change that'll bring me back, and it has me worried that the annoying eight-minute timer—and the way items have to be stolen again if they were part of an incomplete three-item objective you can only grab during those eight minutes—is something the developers consider essential to the design, rather than something we should be able to adjust like the FOV.

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