Nightdive’s Thief remaster is adding a weapon wheel and other UI changes, ‘but we’re not forcing you to use it’

Partway through Nightdive’s video about remastering Thief: The Dark Project, producer Daniel Grayshon casually mentions that in the original you pressed 4 to bring up the water arrows and I realized I still remember a bunch of the keybinds for Thief’s arsenal of items. The trusty blackjack was 2, rope arrows were 8, the get-out-of-jail-free flash bomb on F6, and so on.

“As with a lot of Nightdive games in the past we’re not looking to change the core experience of the game,” Grayshon says, something studio head Stephen Kick reiterates at another point when he explains they take all the comments on the trailer insisting they haven’t changed anything as a compliment. If it looks the way you remember it looking, Nightdive considers that a success.

But Thief’s controls were definitely in need of improvement. “The first thing that I wanted to do for the game was introduce a weapon wheel,” Grayshon says. In the original I cycled through my collection of tools by pressing tab on the occasions when I couldn’t remember the shortcut for gas mines or whatever, and a wheel would definitely help there.

“I think that will make a great deal of difference when it comes to playing the game,” Grayhson says, “and getting through those tricky situations where you’re being approached by someone and you’ve gotta lockpick through a door really quickly, but you don’t have to cycle through your pockets to find your square-toothed lockpick or your triangle-toothed lockpick. You quickly open the weapon wheel, you throw the mouse to the left to get the square lockpick or you throw it to the right to get the triangle lockpick.”

Kick jokingly plays the contrarian, miming a desperate search for the right equipment while asking, “Did you think for a moment that that was part of the original design, that as a thief you’d have this bag of just stuff?”

“If you want to do that you can totally do that if you want,” Grayshon replies. “Not taking anything away. If you fancy the convenience it’s there for you, but we’re not forcing you to use it.”

Which is exactly what you want to hear. I’m glad the option will be there when I can’t remember which key brings up the moss arrows and don’t want to accidentally equip a brightly burning fire arrow and give away my position, but I’ll still be pressing 4 to whip out the water arrows because apparently that’s permanent muscle memory now and I’ll still be able to recall it long after I’ve forgotten the names of all my loved ones.

• We’re keeping track of all the Amazon Prime Day PC gaming deals here