What if you could pull off grand heists while facing off against other thieves and security guards? What if the scope of the game was massive and contained a main storyline, plus side objectives? Those are the questions that OtherSide Entertainment studio co-founder and chief creative officer Warren Spector and his co-founder Paul Neurath are asking with the announcement of their new game Thick As Thieves, slated for 2026.
The developers envisioned a tabletop-inspired game that is truly multiplayer, focused on telling each player’s stories and how they affect each other. The result is a four-person game that will simultaneously launch on PC and console. The version shown to Inverse during the Game Awards was a pre-alpha build, tested mainly by studio employees and not viewed by the outside world.
You play as an agent of the thieves’ guild and each night you can choose to focus on your main mission, scoring treasure for the guild, or to complete side quests. The game is set in the northern United Kingdom during the Jazz Age.
In the preview, I got to see a thief competently jump and grapple across rooftops, enter into a building and takedown a guard and a rival thief, before making off with the stolen loot. Just moments before the protagonist thief made her daring escape, another unsuspecting guard walked by and had a small reaction of surprise but didn’t stop her. It was a clean victory, performed under a few minutes.
“Why didn’t the guard stop her?” I ask. McDonough explained to me that to the guard, the player looked like just another ordinary civilian. Players can pass by inconspicuously if they keep their tools out of sight, but the tradeoff is that they won’t be able to fight off other competitors if the occasion arises.
“It’s not just a longtail way to make money but a creative decision to make a tabletop role-playing game,” Spector says, “Picking up the pace, as stealth games can be kind of slow.”
Thick as Thieves marks a departure in genre for the longtime gaming veterans, but it’s not quite as large of a departure as one might think. The game combines the 4X knowledge of David McDonough and the Thief expertise from Warren Spector and Paul Neurath.
Personally, I’m a huge fan of going rogue in role-playing games, so I see no reason why getting about 100 of those thieves (“something like that,” McDonough offers) won’t ramp up the fun. At a glance, the game reminds me of Valorant but everyone is playing my favorite class, and getting to explore a plethora of play styles, from jumping across rooftops to navigating sewers, from stealth take downs to outright combat. There are also lock picking mini-games and codes to decipher. But again, we are getting the earliest possible look at this game, so it remains to be seen what actually happens once you get tons of players in to duke it out.
“We don’t really know what we have to do until a number of people have tried to break it and so forth,” Neurath says.
