Inspired by Thief 2 re-dub, I decided to make this essay about my thoughts on the sound design of Thief in more detail.
What makes Thief and its sound design unique doesn't so much lay in the fact that the sounds themselves are unique, but in the fact that Thief places an extraordinary amount of emphasis on its sounds, and through that they are transmogrified from simple background noises to essential elements of the gameplay experience. Thief belongs to a sub-genre of games called “immersive sims”. These games, started by developer Looking Glass Studios in the 90’s, placed emphasis on immersing the player in the world through story and mechanics. This sub-genre was a far cry from other first person games of the time (i.e Doom, Quake) that focused on arcadey action and high scores. Immersive sims prefered to immerse the player’s into the world of the game through mechanics and story. The idea of it was to get players “thinking” like the characters they controlled in a realistic manner. Thief accomplishes this through a variety of ways, but for the purposes of this essay, we will be focusing on it’s sound design and how it facilitates player immersion.
The mix of sounds the player encounters in the world creates a rich atmosphere that wasn't often seen in that time. Doom, for instance, was a pure sensory experience. Player’s blasted demons with a pew, picked up health and ammo to the sounds of beeps and boobs, all while enjoying rock tunes. Thief though, went for a more diegetic direction. When players are scrolling through the inventory, rather than hearing artificial beeps as icons change, players instead hear the sounds of keys jingling and coins being tossed around, as if the player character have a hand in their pocket. Footsteps make accurate noises to whatever surface the player is standing on, for both enemies and players. And instead of music constantly blaring, Thief takes a subtler, more diegetic move, saving music mainly for cutscenes and specific sections. This is also extended to the world itself and is used to help set the tone of the experience. In Thief 2, the player finds themselves searching a castle for loot. Coming in from the outside, players travel down an incomplete hallway starting from one end that is mainly dirt and coming onto the other side that is plastered and paved. Halfway into the hallway, the sound of a screeching, mechanical elevator occurs. This section, by starting out with cricket chirps and grass footsteps, and slowly switching those out to reverberating hallways and scenes of crude machinery, paints a sound collage of a world fast industrializing, but yet still has a foot firmly planted in the past. This focus on diegetic sounds allows sounds and their interactions tell stories which hadn't been experienced before in the medium of games.
Compared to Thief, many modern stealth games focus more on mechanics such as line of sight and light levels rather than sound for gameplay. That’s not to say that the sounds themselves can't be richly detailed and interesting to listen to, but that they are often used as an afterthought. Having A.I controlled guards cough, grumble, and make loud footsteps are all common tropes found within the genre, and are about the extent to which sound is used as a gameplay tool. What makes this frustrating is that Thief itself originated these tropes, and used them as a core gameplay pillar. In order to excel at the Thief series of games, player’s both have to listen to the sound produced by enemies and the environment, but to also be constantly listening to the sounds they themselves are producing. Thief contains a simple yet complex player noise system; the footsteps made by running, walking, and moving slowly are all changed depending on whether or not the player is crouching and what kind of surface they are standing on. Due to this, player’s begin to form simple matrices in their heads of the various textures and the noise levels they produce. This is fairly unique nowadays. Whereas the inner monologue of someone playing Dishonored might go something like “I am running, therefore I am being loud, thus I am going to be seen” the monologue of a Thief player would probably go “I’m walking on grass which is fine, I’m not making any noise, but if I run I might be detected, ” This way of play encourages the player to be much more conscious of their environment and hear the world rather than solely look at it.
