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:That's what I thought at first

[neostorm]

I think the largest factor in people being upset with this move is that it signals a similar direction that Deus Ex 2 took. Having a third person option isn't all that bad on it's own, but the potential reasons behind it and more recent releases from the same studio make me really stop looking forward to this game.

As long as the player has the option to be in first person it should be ok, but this game is really being weighed against a hefty legacy and I myself am a huge Thief fan that recoils in pain at this news. I just don't want to be let down.

Re:That's what I thought at first

[Babbster]

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.

Does it really make it that much more unrealistic than a first-person shooter? In real life, I always know exactly where every part of my body is (unless I'm "impaired"), I can stick just my head and eyes past a wall in order to see around (with a concomitent reduction in counter-detection), I have peripheral vision and I can turn my head without turning my entire body - all things the first-person perspective in video games traditionally has trouble with.

Whining about this news (and there's a LOT of whining posted here so far, though not in your post) is a knee-jerk FPS-centric reaction considering nobody here has played even a minute of the game. I guess it's just the double-edged sword of hype in that a game can have interest stoked well in advance of release, and/or a game can be raked over the coals without ever having been seen or played.

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.

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:Third-person mode is no big deal

[Babbster]

Morrowind for Xbox managed to make very quick load transitions that gave the illusion of one huge, seamless world. Don't blame it entirely on the RAM - blame it on developers who don't want to do the extra work.

Peripheral Vision & the Console Market

[superultra]

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.

I call it 'Consolidation'

[meowsqueak]

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.

Re:Peripheral Vision & the Console Market

[Babbster]

Thief and Thief 2 may be considered "classics" now but the PC gaming crowd didn't buy them in large numbers the first time around. Why should a developer believe that the third iteration is going to break through in any significant fashion by sticking with the same formula?

There's a reason Looking Glass is out of business: As brilliant as their games were, nobody was buying them.