Thick as Thieves is getting patched, but the most frustrating timer stays untouched

OtherSide Entertainment has promised a second Thick as Thieves patch arriving sometime in the middle of next week — and while it brings some genuinely useful fixes, the mechanic that's actually driving players away remains untouched.

The headline addition is key rebinding, which is basically mandatory in any stealth game — anyone who's played Thief: The Dark Project knows remapping keys is the first thing you do. The first patch already added an FOV slider, a motion blur toggle, and a handful of settings tweaks. The new update also makes the mission timer visible at all times when you open the map with Tab, fixing a frustrating issue where the longer overall countdown was invisible until it was nearly expired.

But the real problem is still there. The moment you complete any objective — even accidentally, like picking up one too many valuables and triggering a secondary loot goal — an eight-minute countdown kicks off. If you don't find the exit door, which spawns randomly at that exact moment, you fail the mission. Worse, if you only grabbed one item from a three-part objective during those eight minutes, you'll have to steal those items all over again on your next run. There's no mid-mission saving either, because Thick as Thieves started life as a multiplayer game.

Players were hoping OtherSide would make that eight-minute timer adjustable or optional — the same way FOV is now a slider rather than a locked value. That's not in the patch, and the silence around it raises a real concern: the developers might consider this timer core to the design rather than a rough edge worth smoothing. Until that changes, the patch won't be enough to bring frustrated players back.