van_HellSing PL
04-30-2004, 02:44 PM
http://forums.ionstorm.com/index.php?showtopic=209874&view=findpost&p=305505
"The Thief: Deadly Shadows team is in the final days of development. And thanks to some insanely hard work by an insanely dedicated team, it looks like we're on-track to make a simultaneous release on Xbox and PC, in English, French, Italian and German!
Bugs are getting whacked right and left. The occasional last-second feature sneaks in (to the chagrin of the producers!). The final versions of our cinematics are in. More playthroughs get logged and evaluated daily. And, man, the game gets more and more fun all the time!
I wish I could say I'd completed Deadly Shadows a dozen times already but, honestly, I just finished my first start-to-finish playthrough the other day (and I'm nearly done with my second...).
I'd played through most of the missions individually before but that first time through gave me a good sense of the whole of the game. Given that one of the cool new things in the game is a persistent economy (rather than the per mission loadouts of earlier Thief games), complete playthroughs take on extra significance.
All I can say is I had a blast.
I truly felt like the master thief the game allowed me to be. If I took my time in the freeform city sections, breaking and entering and mugging and so on, I could fill my pockets with loot I could sell to fences scattered throughout the city... I could spend my cash on all sorts of goodies I could use to make nabbing more loot even easier. I was a stud....
Until the game threw me a curveball, took me down a peg, sent me into a situation that drained my resources to the minimum -- which it did on a regular basis. (You haven't lived until you're deep in dangerous territory with only one health potion to your name and with a quiver nearly empty of useful arrows! Thank goodness for those shadows!)
On the design side, then, the game works. But I'd be remiss if I didn't mention how amazing the shadows look in Deadly Shadows. Some of you got a hint of what our tech could do in Deus Ex: Invisible War but it really was just a hint. Personally, I think Thief takes things to a whole new level. The artists have taken our tech group's work and crafted something that looks terrific -- the graphics are as unique as the gameplay. And the game-side coders have done a terrific job, too. The AI is lifelike and the NPC's do some very cool stuff that you'll just have to see for yourselves.
Oh, and to all you first-person fans who cringe when you hear the words "console" and "third-person," I think you'll be pleased...
Deadly Shadows provides a totally Thiefy experience. It's a little (and I DO mean a LITTLE!) more "actiony" than the first two games in the series... If you get into combat, you have a better chance of surviving and some of our QA guys are proficient enough with a bow and broadhead arrows that it sometimes looks like a medieval fps!
But, for mere mortals, like me, Thief remains a game where you're constantly holding your breath (rather than running around breathless); it's a game where the shadows are your salvation (whether those shadows were created by a designer's clever use of light and geometry or by the player pinching out candles or dousing torches with water arrows); it's a game where a single, unarmed civilian is as frightening as a horde of marauding monstrosities from outer space ("please don't turn around... please don't turn around... whew!").
In other words, for me at least, Deadly Shadows delivers on its early design goals -- it honors the legacy of the earlier games, adds some new and interesting touches and reaches out to newbies as well as experienced pros.
As the guy running the studio, I couldn't have asked for more.
That's my view of Thief: Deadly Shadows. I'm really hoping to collar some other team members to give you their thoughts on the game here in the forums.
Keep watching this space.
Warren Spector
Studio Director, Ion Storm "
"The Thief: Deadly Shadows team is in the final days of development. And thanks to some insanely hard work by an insanely dedicated team, it looks like we're on-track to make a simultaneous release on Xbox and PC, in English, French, Italian and German!
Bugs are getting whacked right and left. The occasional last-second feature sneaks in (to the chagrin of the producers!). The final versions of our cinematics are in. More playthroughs get logged and evaluated daily. And, man, the game gets more and more fun all the time!
I wish I could say I'd completed Deadly Shadows a dozen times already but, honestly, I just finished my first start-to-finish playthrough the other day (and I'm nearly done with my second...).
I'd played through most of the missions individually before but that first time through gave me a good sense of the whole of the game. Given that one of the cool new things in the game is a persistent economy (rather than the per mission loadouts of earlier Thief games), complete playthroughs take on extra significance.
All I can say is I had a blast.
I truly felt like the master thief the game allowed me to be. If I took my time in the freeform city sections, breaking and entering and mugging and so on, I could fill my pockets with loot I could sell to fences scattered throughout the city... I could spend my cash on all sorts of goodies I could use to make nabbing more loot even easier. I was a stud....
Until the game threw me a curveball, took me down a peg, sent me into a situation that drained my resources to the minimum -- which it did on a regular basis. (You haven't lived until you're deep in dangerous territory with only one health potion to your name and with a quiver nearly empty of useful arrows! Thank goodness for those shadows!)
On the design side, then, the game works. But I'd be remiss if I didn't mention how amazing the shadows look in Deadly Shadows. Some of you got a hint of what our tech could do in Deus Ex: Invisible War but it really was just a hint. Personally, I think Thief takes things to a whole new level. The artists have taken our tech group's work and crafted something that looks terrific -- the graphics are as unique as the gameplay. And the game-side coders have done a terrific job, too. The AI is lifelike and the NPC's do some very cool stuff that you'll just have to see for yourselves.
Oh, and to all you first-person fans who cringe when you hear the words "console" and "third-person," I think you'll be pleased...
Deadly Shadows provides a totally Thiefy experience. It's a little (and I DO mean a LITTLE!) more "actiony" than the first two games in the series... If you get into combat, you have a better chance of surviving and some of our QA guys are proficient enough with a bow and broadhead arrows that it sometimes looks like a medieval fps!
But, for mere mortals, like me, Thief remains a game where you're constantly holding your breath (rather than running around breathless); it's a game where the shadows are your salvation (whether those shadows were created by a designer's clever use of light and geometry or by the player pinching out candles or dousing torches with water arrows); it's a game where a single, unarmed civilian is as frightening as a horde of marauding monstrosities from outer space ("please don't turn around... please don't turn around... whew!").
In other words, for me at least, Deadly Shadows delivers on its early design goals -- it honors the legacy of the earlier games, adds some new and interesting touches and reaches out to newbies as well as experienced pros.
As the guy running the studio, I couldn't have asked for more.
That's my view of Thief: Deadly Shadows. I'm really hoping to collar some other team members to give you their thoughts on the game here in the forums.
Keep watching this space.
Warren Spector
Studio Director, Ion Storm "