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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."
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.
Random and weird software I've written.
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.
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.
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.
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.