Eidos Montreal has officially scrapped the XP System from their upcoming game Thief after hearing negative fan feedback.
The change was announced by game director Nic Cantin and lead level designer Daniel Windfeld Schmidt in a community Q&A posted on their official blog.
“At first, we wanted to outline the progression of the player with XP, but it was reducing out 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,” Cantin explained their reason behind the decision.
“We wanted to put emphasis on stealing things, and put the rewards on the stealing aspect,” Schmidt added.
The developers also cited negative feedback from forums and the ‘Headshot XP’ pop-up during E3.
“Fans might be surprised how often the devs go to the forum to see how things are perceived in the ‘real world.’ This feedback is extremely valuable to us, so you can imagine, the consistent reaction to the XP system was something that indicated we needed to revisit some design decisions,” said Schmidt.
“It is more a design decision to add our economy system and entice the player to steal more. But yes, the E3 reaction was right, rewarding killing like that was wrong for a Master Thief,” added Cantin.
Cantin also mentioned that gold or the loot will take the place of XP in terms of progression. “The goal is to use gold to buy elements to progress, to encourage the player to steal,” he explained.
Eidos Montreal was able to show gameplay footage of Thief without the XP system during this year’s New York Comic Con.
Thief will be released for the Microsoft Windows, PS3, PS4, Xbox 360, and Xbox One platforms on February 25, 2014 in North America and February 28, 2014 elsewhere.
