Movies are mostly settled science at this point, right? From the invention of the camera, there were decades of experimenting with what could be done on film, and eventually we arrived at feature length and a toolbox of techniques to use within it. Now and then some other innovation comes along and blows people away, but it’s not every year. Most of the time, it’s adhering mostly to a formula and tweaking it, or just telling a different story in the same constraints. Likewise, I don’t think games will ever advance as fast as they did in most of our lifetimes, but we’ll still get new stuff here and there.

As far as “AAA” goes, the AAA of Thief 1’s day is barely bigger than most indie teams today. Shareholders or not, you can’t experiment with $100M (or as high as a few billion if you’re making Grand Theft Auto VI) like you can with $1M or even $10M. As much as the author puts Thief on a pedestal, I bounced off of it for not strictly adhering to stealth, like when it takes a detour into the undead and other monsters; and for the constraints of its own technology at the time, like geometry being so simple and textures being so reused that I found the levels tedious to navigate by way of lacking identifiable landmarks. Thief 1 loaded the entire level at once because there was no asset streaming. Thief 2014 had load-bearing walls demoed in the video because they couldn’t keep up the fidelity they targeted without dynamically unloading one part of the level and loading another from a hard drive.

Anyway, Project Shadowglass looks awesome. Hopefully there are no zombies.