1UP: Thief: Deadly Shadows

Thief: Deadly Shadows, due out from Ion Storm for the PC and Xbox later this year, is the target of some trepidation among hardcore series fans. Take a look at Deus Ex: Invisible War, they will tell you -- they tried going for a broader audience with that game, and it ended up displeasing fans of the original more than it appealed to the Xbox-owning general public. Warren Spector, producer of both Invisible War and the new Thief, is deeply aware of the risks involved with his strategy. "We have two contradictory facts to keep in mind," he said today during a Thief demo at Eidos' headquarters in San Francisco. "One, we want to respect the Thief legacy and keep the Thief narrative going, but at the same time, Thief II did just okay in the marketplace. We think both Thief and Deus Ex could have much larger appeal."

Deadly Shadows is very much like the first two games in the series: Garrett, freelance pilferer, is once again searching for the big heist that'll let him to retire from the business once and for all. This time he's pulled back into thievery by the Keepers, a mysterious group which uses magic to manipulate the affairs of the pseudo-medieval city Garrett lives in. The Keepers have in their hands a prophecy that "the brethren betrayer will bring about the end of words", and they've hired Garrett to help them investigate exactly what this means. However, thanks to a string of high-profile assassinations, Garrett himself is pegged as the "betrayer" of the prophecy, and now he's got a lot of people trying to kill him. It's your job to find the real betrayer and restore your good... er bad name in the community.

Sounds good enough. So what, then, is Spector and his crew at Ion Storm doing to make Deadly Shadows a mainstream hit? According to Spector, the team's mantra is to "stop making games for MIT grads" -- in other words, make sure the same is accessible to a wider audience than the current dedicated Thief fanbase. Basic gameplay is wholly unchanged -- Garrett still infiltrates buildings, sneaks past or dispatches any guards he runs into, uses a set of tools to bypass security, and gathers loot. However, with a dual PC and Xbox release in the cards, the structure of Deadly Shadows has undergone some major changes.

The biggest difference is in the viewpoint -- in addition to the standard first-person view used in the last two Thief games, you also have a third-person view from behind Garrett's back, meaning you actually get to see him make his rounds during the game. You can switch between either viewpoint at any time, and as Spector puts it, the game was built to be perfectly playable no matter which you use: "Third person was a little hard for me to swallow at first, but once the development team hacked that view into the game and made me play it, I found that I liked it. It was compelling, and it felt like I was really grounded in the game world."

Garrett will also be able to fight off guards in Deadly Shadows with a variety of weapons, from the basic dagger and blackjack to mines and flashbombs. This is a change of design philosophy from the last two games, where Garrett was mostly helpless against concentrated enemy attack. "You can't get through this game by killing everything," Spector says, "but when you're spotted by a guard, I wanted another option for the player besides running away and hiding for a minute and a half." This balance of weaponry rang true in the demo walkthrough we watched today -- knifing a guy to death isn't very practical (especially if the guy in question is armed himself), but it does work in a pinch.

The final major change lies in Thief's mission structure. As before, Garrett has a dozen or so major missions, each of which takes a couple hours or so to complete. However, they don't take place one after the other -- the game is spread over several days, and in between missions, Garrett has the opportunity to explore the city he lives in. There is no special mission involved in these bits; instead, you're free to break into apartments, steal loot, and get involved in people's problems. Example: Garrett lives in a small apartment, and his landlord (as you find out if you pick the lock on his door) is being blackmailed by someone. If you want to help your landlord, you can hunt out the blackmailer and dispose of him, taking any loot he's got in the process; if that sounds too risky, then you're free to ignore the affair. The idea here is to nab lotsa loot in your spare time, which can be sold to the fence for thieving tools and other helpful on-the-job accessories.

According to Spector, Deadly Shadows has just passed the alpha stage, which means that the game's complete but still needs tweaking and bug-fixing. Already the graphics look impressive -- as with DX: Invisible War, every object in the game casts realtime shadows, and there's dynamic lighting to be found everywhere. Light is a thief's worst enemy, and much of Garrett's strategy will involve extinguishing torches or other light sources with special "water arrows", making him less conspicuous in large hallways. The AI on enemies has also been refined, and Spector is proud of it -- as he puts it, there isn't a single scripted behavior in the game. Every action the guards and citizens take in Deadly Shadows is based on AI algorithms, and outfoxing them requires careful observation and deft maneuvering. One tester on the game admitted to thinking that the AI routines in one mission were broken... until he realized he had been stepping on a rat in the same place over and over again, and the resulting squeak had alerted the guards. Nasty.

In its current alpha state, the PC version looks superior in action -- it runs smoothly and quickly at all times, which is more than can be said for the Xbox port right now. Spector pointed out at the demo that the completed Xbox version will have quicker load times, larger environments, and faster framerates than the console DX: Invisible War, which should be good news for Ion Storm fans.

Thief: Deadly Shadows is due for release later this year; more preview coverage will be coming shortly.