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."

Comments

That's what I thought at first

[Pluvius]

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

Re:Damnit, not again.

[Cecil]

I feel your pain. :/

All the major publishers are going console. There are a few big primarily or at least heavily PC developers left, but you have to keep your eye out for them. id Software, Valve, Bioware are a few that come to mind.

I don't think anyone disputes that games are going to get shitty in the next little while, but at least the defection of the big PC publishers and developers will leave a big opening for a lot of the stronger small studios to slide into. In my opinion, a short lull will be followed by a bunch of innovation. I'm looking forward to (read: hoping for) it.

A bland trend.

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:A bland trend.

[MWoody]

On the contrary, the third person perspective is far more realistic than first person. Once you've stopped being bothered by looking over the player's shoulder - it barely even gives me pause after hundreds of hours of GTA3 & GTA:VC - the information this view presents is far more representative of actually "being" the character. It allows a greater range of vision, avoiding the disconcerting "tunnel vision" FPS' can sometimes create, and it let's you know immediately where you're standing, if you're touching anything, what stance your body is in, etc - all things you'd know in real life, but which aren't usually communicated in first person.

Ideally, I'd like screens or headsets that finally take advantage of the full field of human vision coupled with some sort of seperate HUD detailing the current stance of the player character (assuming full-body tactile feedback and/or neural interfaces aren't feasible in the near future ^_^). Until then, I'll crank my suspension of disbelief up a notch to believe I'm the guy whose back I'm staring at, and I'll continue to enjoy being able to actually see that demon coming at me from the side.

Re:A bland trend.

[blincoln]

A few PC gamers had similar complaints about the new Legacy of Kain game (also published by Eidos).

When I see posts like this, it reminds me of the people who absolutely freaked out about the transition from 2D to 3D gaming around ten years ago. It was the same sort of mindless "I hate new things and want games to always stay the same!" mentality.

Devil May Cry was the first game I played that used a third-person cinematic perspective, and as soon as I saw it, I loved it. It allows the designers to use so many styles and tricks that have been in films for years.

Legacy of Kain: Defiance and Ico cemented that opinion for me.

And really, I can't understand why someone who doesn't like cutscenes is playing a game that clearly has a decent chunk of storytelling to do either.

If you like the 80s videogame style so much, AC, why not just keep playing them instead? New games don't mean the old ones don't exist anymore.

Re:A bland trend.

[AuMatar]

I still see 3D as a bad thing for gaming.

Why? Because it doesn't add anything to it. An rpg is the same gameplay, wether its 2 or 3 D. An rts is the same in 2 or 3D. There's very few games where the 3D actually improves gameplay over a 2D game.

At the same time, 3D is sginificantly harder to get right, introduces a lot of bugs, and isn't as graphically mature. Meaning the developers now spend most of their time on graphics and 3D physics instead of on gameplay. Ever wondered why there's so few innovative games today? Its because they don't have time to innovate after spending a year writing the damn graphics engine. Keep the 3d to the few concepts its actually used in, keep the rest 2D and start innovating again.

Third-person mode is no big deal

[Black Hitler]

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.

Re:Here we go again

[beakerMeep]

while you may have been moderated flaimbait (and maybe righlty so I dunno really) you do have a point there. Trying to port games platform to platform with a little work as possible makes for some terrible games. I dont think anyone can argue against that and I think it works both ways. But, I think there are companies out there that can port and they port well. However, Ion Storm is not one of them. But off the top of my head -- rockstar and bioware have seemed to do ok so it's not impossible.

Third person? I can handle that

[obeythefist]

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.