Of the many remarkable abilities possessed by Dishonored hero Corvo Attano, perhaps the most remarkable is, well, possession: Corvo can possess creatures, most famously the game's plentiful rats, to get up to all sorts of trouble, including accessing locations that would be inaccessible to his full-sized body. As it turns out, this wasn't an entirely original idea. More than a decade earlier it had been considered for use in Dishonored's masterpiece progenitor, Thief: The Dark Project.

Thief basically is Dishonored, speaking very broadly: A guy who's good at sneaking around gets caught up in a bunch of political nonsense he'd really rather avoid because of a woman he can't admit to being in love with because it'd be weird. One chief difference is that Garrett, the titular thief of the Thief games (the ones that matter, anyway) doesn't have any powers.

He almost did, though. In a 2018 PC Gamer magazine interview marking the 20^th anniversary of Thief's debut, lead designer Tim Stellmach said Looking Glass Studios had pondered giving Garrett the ability to shrink himself and travel through small passageways like drains. The idea was ultimately dropped, though, for eminently practical reasons.

"We just decided it was gonna be way too much work to do it right," Stellmach explained. And, maybe more importantly: "It started raising questions that we didn't want to answer."

Stellmach didn't expand on the nature of those questions, but it's not too difficult to guess. As a pure stealth game (another big difference between Thief and Dishonored: Garrett is not great in a fight), getting from point A to point B without being seen is central to the experience: Being able to transform into a small, innocuous rodent might make traversing Soulforge less of a brain-crushing grind, but it'd also suck the fun out of the whole thing, right?

Thief is, in many ways, an unforgiving experience, and as we noted a few years back, many of its innovations have been left behind in favor of mainstream accessibility. Stealth is an option in games like Dishonored, but there's always a Plan B of 'kill everyone' if you blow it or just get bored of sneaking around. That's just not an option in Thief, where Garrett can generally handle one guy at a time but no more than that. But it worked: As Richard Cobbett wrote in his own retrospective on how Thief defined the stealth genre, the game's singular focus resulted in a singular immersive sim experience.

Thief is back in the news these days thanks to the Nightdive remaster announced at the PC Gaming Show in June, which despite being called Thief: The Dark Project Remastered will also include the additional missions from Thief Gold, along with a beefy slate of other improvements and upgrades. To ensure it's done right, Nightdive has brought back Thief artist Daniel Thron to help revamp the game's cutscenes, a vital part of any serious Thief reconstruction effort.

There's still no release date on the remaster but as PC Gamer immsim weirdo Joshua Wolens correctly stated when the game was revealed, "Oh hell yes."

Well, it turns out that Bethesda's executive producer Todd Howard and I have at least two things in common—we're both roughly 5 feet 6 inches tall, and we're both chronic Reddit lurkers. Admittedly, I only have IMDB to go by when it comes to the height thing. Maybe it's wrong! But the Reddit thing is 100% true, because he went ahead and said it himself.

Howard gave the folks of r/Games a surprise jumpscare last week, making only his second public comment on the site in the last three years. It was, unsurprisingly, under a post sharing Bethesda essentially vomiting out every single thing it's currently working on, which came shortly after the announcement of parent owner Xbox's catastrophic layoffs.

"Hey Reddit. I'm a professional lurker and read your comments all the time. Many here do and we deeply appreciate the passion for our work," Howard wrote. "I know I don't really post, and we're usually very quiet. Today's info was an attempt at changing that and letting everyone know what we've been working on the past several years, and a look at what's coming. So know we're constantly listening and keep telling us how to be even better."

Howard then goes on to say: "You'd be surprised how many great ideas I get from Reddit. So upvote and we'll do it. Maybe." Well, huh. I do have to wonder if Howard is taking screenshots of comments and projecting them onto the wall during meetings, or simply jotting down little comments he reads here and there. I wonder what ideas Reddit is churning out that were so smart Howard felt the need to take note of them in the first place.

More importantly, what subreddits is our man lurking in? Does he just cycle through all the Bethesda-relevant ones? Is he sneaking looks at what people think of the competition? Is he also getting fed posts for subreddits he's never even heard of, like r/GirlDinnerDiaries? Seriously, why am I getting so many r/GirlDinnerDiaries posts in my feed?

Whatever he's getting up to over there—and whatever calculated business decision was behind him cropping up in the comments of a random Reddit post to begin with—is a secret that will remain between him and his Google Chrome history, I suppose.