Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Third Thief Title Transitions To Third-Person

Posted by simoniker on from the alliteration-awfully-alluring dept.

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."

1 of 81 comments (clear)

  1. Third-person mode is no big deal by Black+Hitler · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.