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Third Thief Title Transitions To Third-Person
Thanks to GameSpot for its article revealing further details and screenshots from the third game in the Thief series, now named Thief: Deadly Shadows, which makes a change in supporting "...what publisher Eidos is calling a 'third-person cinematic action view'." The piece continues: "This new perspective will be in addition to the series' traditional first-person view, which was first created by long-defunct developer Looking Glass Studios." Blue's News also has information from the full press release, which notes: "Characters and objects cast real shadows that effect stealth gameplay, requiring the player to manipulate darkness and light to create your own shadows to hide in."
"third-person cinematic action view"
:(
ARRGH! Its been consolified!
Then I remembered that third-person view isn't a bad thing for a stealth game, since stealth games don't tend to rely on aiming ability or anything. The only real problem is that it makes the game less realistic, as you'll be able to see people around corners and behind your character's head, most likely. In exchange, you have advantages such as being able to do jumps reliably as well as judge whether or not you're in shadow better.
Rob
Soon all games will be 3rd person action adventures. Why? Beats me - people keep buying them. They're the cinematic equivalent of 2 hours explosions. I hate them with a passion.
Gamers: Stop buying them... please.
Developers: You're hurting your games by following everyone else.
I can tell this from a single screenshot. This is an absolutely useless perspective and completely unimmersive (as that's supposed to be me - but I can't see what I'm supposed to). See the knife in the player's hand? What happens when you throw it? Yeah, exactly - how the hell are you supposed to aim when you don't have a straight line of sight?
Don't give me a retarded answer like: "You'll get used to it" or "the game will aim for you".
Thanks for making Mario 64 again - the gaming world needed it. No, really.. way to keep your fanbase. I know the article says that you can play in 1st person.. but just to be completely clear to the devs (if they're reading this) understand this:
I NEVER WANT TO SEE A 3RD PERSON PERSPECTIVE WHEN I AM PLAYING YOUR GAME. OH, AND STOP MAKING CUTSCENES - THEY'RE SHIT. K? THX, BYE!
I want to bring a group of developers from the early 80's into the present and see what they could come up with. Deliberately not showing them the games that have been made since then so they wouldn't follow everyone's retarded cliches.
In come the consoles to ruin another PC game. Don't get me wrong, I love my consoles, but for the love of God, make console games or make PC games, when you make one for both you hobble it.
It's sad when choosing an installation directory on your own qualifies you as an "advanced user."
The third-person mode, by itself, is no big deal. The game already renders the player's entire body in first-person mode (meaning you can look down and see your own feet), so it was probably ridiculously simple to implement.
The problem is the levels: DX2 had horribly tiny levels to accomodate the Xbox's limited RAM, and apparently Thief 3 is going to be the same way -- apparently levels in T3 are divided into areas roughly 1/4 the size of the average level in part 2, and to access the different areas you walk into a sort of misty thing and confirm whether or not you want to leave the current area. Again this is a complete compromise to deal with the Xbox's comparatively pitiful RAM but it's almost certainly going to be carried over to the PC version -- just as it was in the PC version of DX2 -- even though my PC has eight times the RAM of the Xbox and a lot of folks have far more. In short, screw Eidos, screw Ion Storm and screw Warren Spector for his "this is how we'd be doing it even if it was PC-only" bullshit.
They did it to DeusEx 2 which couldn't hold a candle to the first and now they are doing it to the thief series..
I anticipate comments here mirroring many of the comments on the web forums discussing this, consisting mostly of the assertion that third person loses some of the immersion that first person supposedly provides. Consoles have again "ruined" what would have otherwise been a great PC title.
Now, I played Thief 1 & 2, and they're both great games, classics to be sure. Still, I can't deny that after having played Metal Gear Solid and especially Splinter Cell, there's something to be said for the third person perspective, particularly when used in stealth games. What the first person perspective may add in immersion, it detracts signficantly in peripheral view. Ok, sure, I can see around a corner that I probably wouldn't be able to see around without third person. But the fact remains that playing a game in first person is really like looking at the world through a narrow cardboard box. If someone is standing next to me as I type this, I can see them even though I'm not looking directly at them. Likewise, I can see things to the side in a third person game. Conversely, in a first person game, I can't do that. Personally, I'll take the "unrealism" of being able to see around corners over the lack of peripheral vision anyday in a stealth game. Besides, I'm not really sure how this unrealistic looking around corners really differs that much from the infamous lean keys in FPS, and more recent games (like Splinter Cell) add the cost of being seen when you peek around corners.
With regards to the belief that consoles have ruined yet another title, I think that the PC industry (consumers and publishers alike) needs a good long introspect look at itself. The fact that we're sitting close to the end of this console lifespan and yet I have yet to see graphics, and far more importantly *good* gameplay, truly exceed that of what exists on my consoles as they once did at this point in the Playstation lifecycle is significant. Moreover, PC game piracy, both pre-release (i.e. HL2) and after is at least as rampant as it ever is if not much more so. The charts are dominated by The Sims, and yet PC publishers think that the market with the money will orgasm over a monthly screenshoot of Doom III with super-vexal-triple-z-buffer-120fps screenshoots. I remember when this all started at the beginning of this console cycle, and all the PC gaming magazines said it wouldn't last. Well, it's obviously lasted, and I personally think that it'll only get "worse."
Basically, this: stop bitching about Ion Storm and kin making console games and stop pirating. Moreover, petition (and demonstrate appropriate patronage, or the lack thereof, towards) companies to release final products that don't require 4 years of IT certification to install and get operational (obviously including Ion Storm). In relation to the PC market, the console maret is merely the path of least resistance, both consumer and publisher wise. We're in a (generally) free market, and by and large companies, who are in business to make money, will go where the making money is good. If that's not in happy utopia PC land, we have only ourselves to blame.
Who was expecting anything different? *sigh*
What did Warren Spector do to become allowed to ruin such series?
Ok, you make some good points. But how are PC game sales going to improve when companies like Ion Storm take games that should be instant classics like their predecessors, and turn them into console-ish abortions that no self-respecting PC gamer would soil his hard drive with? Looks like Thief is heading in the same direction, and not because of the 3rd person view addition. I'm betting that the interface will suck as bad as DX2, and the level sizes will be tiny compared to the previous Thief games.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
Eidos today stated:"Yeah, we'd quite like Metal Gear Solid sales figures. Here's a bastardised sequel"
The site you link to in your .sig is begging for an RSS feed. Looks like the series is gonna be an Asia/South America series this season...
Oh, and I wouldn't have noticed your sig if I weren't reading some posts that I agree with to find discussion about 3rd person view. Lame console crap.
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
X does not follow Y. Deus Ex 2 (and presumably Thief 3) sucked. It sucked because of what Ion Storm did. As others have pointed out, it is possible to make a release for both the Xbox and PCs that doesn't suck. Therefore, if it sucks, it must be Ion Storm's fault.
I'm not sure how pirating comes from any of your discussion.
Hmm, upon reading your last paragraph, I can't help but wonder if you are a troll. Paraphrased:
Don't bitch about the companies, suck it up and buy the games. Installation is the reason PC games suck. Companies are in the business of shovelware. If you don't like it, it's your problem.
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
According to my dictionary (and I do mean *my* dictionary):
Consolidation \Con*sol`i*da"tion\, n. [L. consolidatio a
confirming: cf. F. consolidation.]
The act of removing enjoyable and involving gameplay from a promising video game in order to accommodate the less mature and undiscerning tastes of 14 year olds for the purposes of selling more units sooner. For unfortunate examples see: Deus Ex: Invisible War, Halo: Combat Evolved. It usually involves 640x480 title screens too.
A consolidated game is pretty much guaranteed to be crap.
Okay, so everyone is complaining about third person perspective. I don't have a problem with this. Third person is excellent for an action game with a lot of melee. A good swordsman knows where his body is and is pretty aware of opponents all around him. Third person perspective fits this very well. For example, Jedi Knight II and Jedi Academy give you a first person view when shooting ranged weapons (also sensible), and a third person view when swordfighting. These games have been incredibly successful! And less successful on consoles. (Probably because you had to do adult things, like aim, think, and use more than just the fire button).
But seriously, I agree with what everyone else has been saying about consoles and worsening games. I couldn't believe the reviews of DX2, given that DX was one of the best games in recent years to grace the PC. But yes, DX2 was atrocious. The graphics weren't optimised at all, they were clunkier in a lot of ways compared with the original DX. I couldn't even bring myself to play it long enough to get out of the first area, it was just too clunky (even after using all the third party tweak patches!).
I grieve for the Thief franchise. I grieve for us all. The loss of great quality games on the PC lessens us all. With consoles there can be no new revolutions. There will be no "shareware" DooMs anymore, no OpenGL Quakes, no mod communities. We can't avoid change, but it is unusual in the IT world that any change brought by new technology takes so much away from us all.
I am government man, come from the government. The government has sent me. -- G.I.R.
I'm not sure how pirating comes from any of your discussion.
Piracy is part of why console games are more profitable, which is (presumably) why IS included the Xbox in their plans from the beginning. And that caused much of the current situation.
I think piracy causes natural selection for PC games to be much harder than it used to be. How many people confine themselves to only buying the best games while downloading the ones that aren't utterly great? I bet a big part of the first-world freeloaders do actually buy titles the likes of what Half-Life 2 promises to be. But for all those merely good titles an ISO is enough...
There's a reason Looking Glass is out of business: As brilliant as their games were, nobody was buying them.
Boy, with all these knees jerking and obscuring the view of your monitors, I guess nobody can see the part of the original post where it said:
"This new perspective will be in addition to the series' traditional first-person view, which was first created by long-defunct developer Looking Glass Studios." So they added third-person mode, big whoop. It's not the end of the world.
If you follow the link, you'll see that the third person view is IN ADDITION to the first person view.
If the engine is good, it just means adding a camera viewpoint.
That said, I am going to play this in first-person mode.
I always move with the cursor keys and look with the mouse. That way I can look in any direction I want to. No need for peripheral vision. By default the Thief games are configured differently, but with a bit of control meddling you can get them to respond right.
That said, what we are probably going to miss in Thief 3 is the "lean" option, which makes looking around corners from a first-person perspective a lot less viable. They scrapped it from Deus Ex:IW because it's too difficult for the console. If third-person is their "solution", I hope they scrap the game before we get another disappointment.
I guess PC gaming will be doomed to lame console ports and the few cool games that small developers manage to put out. Much like the old days. I'm not entirely sure that's a bad thing, but it is kind of sad that truly good games don't get the attention or sales that they really deserve, and yet so many console games that are complete crap manage to sell so many copies. Guess it's the same reason there's so much crap on TV.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
I think you've hit the nail on the head.
PC gamers are approaching a cult level of devotion to what they expect out of a game, and any deviation from it is unacceptable.
I've played PC games for almost twenty years, but two years ago I started switching to consoles because that's where all the innovation in terms of gameplay and UI is happening.
My prediction is that in a few years, there will be three types of PC game left - the FPS, the RTS, and the MMORPG. PC gamers just don't seem to be willing to support anything else.
"...always new atoms but always doing the same dance, remembering what the dance was yesterday." -Richard Feynman
You have to admit that little 'lightness' jewel in the HUD wasn't exactly the greatest immersion tool. 3rd person, so long as its optional (as they seem to suggest it is), could only be a potential improvement. if it sucks, you never have to use it. I'll go so far as to suggest it would be an improvement. How can you convey visibly some of the more interesting 'sneaky' moves with a first person-only camera?
propping yourself between the walls above a hallway, hanging from a chandelier, pressing up against a wall, swinging from a rope, hanging off a ledge, etc?
Splinter Cell has a predominantly 3rd person camera view primarily to facilitate many of these features. Features that are prominantly mentioned when it's hailed as the greatest of such games in the last few years.
Console games are not necessarily dumbed-down or crappy. Heck have you seen half the titles on the shelf? There's no qualitative boundary between console titles and PC titles. Most is dreck, and if either side has a hit, it's invariably ported to the other.
If you think Deus Ex 2 suffered because it was refined for the console you're just being elitist. The game wasn't harmed, and the changes didn't adversely effect the story, so who cares? Name one 'involved' gameplay element they removed? I'll sympathize with many of the technical problems that were on the PC (sluggish UI, blossom lighting, etc) - but downloading that 1.1 patch to be able to play a new game is the calling card of PC gaming. You can't exactly blame the developers for maintaining status quo.
It sounds to me like once again the primary pc vs console rift is forming because of the loss of keyboard/mouse aiming. 3rd person angles removes the advantage of keyboard/mouse precision. Using a control pad obviates the precision advantage as well. playing on a TV removes the advantage of high resolutions on aiming. Yes, resolutions are nice - but they are not the end-all. I've yet to see a game where having PC resolutions was a requisite for the gameplay.
What enjoyable or involving gameplay has been removed from a game to accomodate consoles?
// "Can't clowns and pirates just -try- to get along?"
X does not follow Y. Deus Ex 2 (and presumably Thief 3) sucked. It sucked because of what Ion Storm did. As others have pointed out, it is possible to make a release for both the Xbox and PCs that doesn't suck. Therefore, if it sucks, it must be Ion Storm's fault.
Of course it is Ion Storm's fault. But why the change of heart in Ion Storm? Why the sudden love for the console market, represented on a symbolic level, perhaps, by the shift of perspective from first (traditionally PC) to third (traditionally console)? That's what I'm attempting to address here. KOTOR will be, no doubt, the shining example for your statement. And yet, it was released first for the Xbox. Moreover, Bioware's next game is Xbox exclusive, and this is one example among denizens. I would also assert that the exceptions, Half Life 2 and Doom III, are being made for the PC largely out of nostalgia or loyalty on behalf to the PC. Even companies that are capable of made excellent PC/Console games are focusing on the console.
Pirating "comes from any of" my discussion [sic] because I believe it's a significant reason why the PC industry is hurting. Actually, I didn't say "suck it up and buy the games." I said don't pirate, and don't buy games that require complicated patches and installations (which to say, nearly all PC games save the Sims; coicindence that it's a regular top ranking seller on the PC charts? I don't think so). Companies are in business to make money, and good games (usually) make money; at this point though, those good games are being made for the console instead of the PC because that's where the money is. While there is a dynamic between the consumer and the publisher, like any industry, it is mostly driven by how we spend our money (or don't). Inevitably, we shape it with the monies we spend. This is a Frankenstein we've created; this pirating, patching beast that lumbers into walls (and, most likely, crates) while a speedy Sonic/Mario/Crash zooms by, collecting floating dollar bills that could have been our's.
If it isn't our fault as consumers, for pirating and allowing (and more importantly, buying) unfinished products, then why the mass exodus to the console industry? I personally think that this is a good thing as I hope we'll see the burgeoning indie PC market thrive, and what all this will eventually mean though is far less flashy productions ala Blizzard and Valve. I'll save that, though, for another post.
You know, I'm really going to have to disagree with you here.
/. a few times, you'll see that the majority of those that own console systems are in their mid twenties to early thirties, not teenagers.
"...in order to accommodate the less mature and undiscerning tastes of 14 year olds..."
Now, besides that sentance being a bit imature itself, I think it's backwards.
I've been playing games since I was very young (atari 2600). As soon as my family got our first 386 I switch to playing PC games almost exclusively. And for years I did that. Why? Well, because back then each new game didn't require a major hardware upgrade. And honestly, if it did, I often had the computer to play it on since my dad enjoyed upgrading the computer.
But now, as an adult, I don't have nearly as much time to play games as I used to. This makes upgrading my PC to the absolute latest and greatest less worthwhile. It's also amazingly expensive and I have things like rent to pay. So whilst you say that only 14 year olds play console games, for me it's been the other way around. With a console I know that my $300 investment in the xbox is going to pay of over the course of many years. And I'm not going to have to upgrade aside from the purchase of a new controller or perhaps xbox live. A better bang for the buck if you ask me.
So please, remember that the reason that developers are flocking to consoles is because gamers are flocking to them in droves. And if you look at the latest numbers, shown here on
Either way I cannot wait for this game, and I hope you can put your dislike for consoles aside for a moment and give the game a chance.
Go here for teh [sic] funny.
NO! The reason Looking Glass is out of business is because Eidos siphoned money from them into Ion Storm to save the company during and after the debacle that was Ion Storm.
All of Looking Glasses games (or at least the majority) were profitible.
That is all.
C'mon, we all saw this coming.
Deus Ex 2 was a pile of steaming butt nuggets. The unified ammo, lack of localized damage, console interface, grade-school voice acting and cartoon physics were all foreshadowing the fscking Ion Storm was preparing for Thief-genre fanatics. Don't forget that at some point Warren Specter was quoted as saying that he "didn't get it" referring to the Thief genre of stealth over combat.
Somewhere, in some country, it was finally realized that "Ion Storm" could be translated to "incompetent sellouts"
The Thief games sold very well - read Reasons for the Fall: A Post-Mortem On Looking Glass Studios by James Sterrett for detailed reasons for why LGS went under. The "they didn't sell well" argument is a myth.