Thief III--the game's working title--has a lot in common with Ion Storm's other upcoming game for the PC and Xbox, Deus Ex: Invisible War, and indeed the two games are built on the same advanced graphics engine, so Garrett can now hide in dynamic shadows, including the shifting darkness created by a torch held by a guard on patrol. In contrast to Deus Ex's myriad player options and branching design, Thief III is a focused game that's all about sneaking into places you're not supposed to be in, stealing valuable items, locating important characters, and piecing together bits of information that expose an atmospheric story that's tightly woven into the gameplay. According to Spector, "Deus Ex is a Swiss Army knife and Thief is a scalpel."
One of the reasons Eidos would rather not put the "III" at the end of the title is the upcoming Thief game is intended to attract both new and old fans. Although the game loyally acknowledges previous events in Garrett's legendary career and builds upon this legacy, you won't have to be familiar with the earlier games to understand what's going on. From the beginning, Ion Storm conceived of Thief III as a game for the Xbox and the PC, and the game is being simultaneously developed from a shared code base so the team can quickly demonstrate a new build of the game on either platform.
Randy Smith, lead designer and project lead for Thief III, told us that while this cross-platform approach presented some technical challenges, it has undoubtedly benefited the gameplay. The earlier games in the series let players use many different commands mapped to various keyboard controls, but the same commands in Thief III have been reworked for both consoles and PCs so the game's control will be "simple, clear, and powerful." The uncluttered interface we saw seemed quite intuitive--some elements appear only when relevant. Only the light gem (a magical stealth meter) is prominently displayed at all times, a reminder of just how important it is to know if you're hidden in shadow or perfectly visible to enemy guards.
Ion Storm is tight-lipped about how the story will unfold over the course of the game. We had the opportunity to see some of the game's cinematics, and these artistically rendered segments--which blend richly colored hand-drawn illustrations and 3D animation--set the tone of the game and introduce the major factions rather than tell a protracted story. According to Smith, Thief III will be a "show, don't tell kind of game," and much of the story will happen right in front of you, over the course of the missions. At one point during a demo of a mission, we walked in front of an arrow loop cut in a castle's thick stone walls and managed to overhear a conversation between two guards in a much brighter room on the other side. At other points during the game, characters may start to fight right in front of you, and may even kill each other.
The design sets out to combine story and gameplay without relying on heavily scripted sequences and to always provide a variety of ways to complete a mission. These guidelines represent what, in the designers' characteristically conceptual way, Ion Storm calls the "abdication of authorship," which essentially means that your actions--seen from the first-person perspective--are the focus of the game. While previous games in the series didn't force you to accomplish your goals in specific ways, they didn't offer the range of options you'll find in Thief III. You'll decide whether you should deliberately blow your cover to lead enemies into an ambush, or try to sneak past them. The new game will provide you with the tools you need to escape your enemies or fight it out.
Thief III will take advantage of Ion Storm's advanced game engine, with lip synching for every bit of character speech in the game, dynamic lighting and normal mapping for the lighting, realistic physics based on the Havok 2 toolset, and sophisticated 3D audio effects. All this will be combined with gameplay that Ion Storm hopes will be intuitive for new players and recognizable to anyone who's played the earlier games. As Smith says, "All the mechanics from the original Thief are being evolved for Thief III. They'll be easier to control and they'll also have a higher production values associated with them to make them more satisfying."
there's a stealth meter that will tell you if you're hidden in shadow or not. This is actually more important than ever, because the new game's environments aren't nearly as uniformly and ominously dark. Deep blue colors are often used instead of black to fill in the darkness and make it easier to see the game's detailed environments on a TV or computer monitor. Thief III's dynamic lighting isn't a simple special effect that's limited to shooting out lights. Any light source can cast a dynamic shadow that can potentially serve as a safe haven for Garrett. This allows for new gameplay tactics, such as trying to move in time with guards who are carrying torches. The torches smoke and sputter realistically, and they also create swaths of darkness in rooms with rows of columns.
Ion Storm has put great effort into making the AI opponents more lifelike and interesting than ever. The smallest details can arouse their curiosity, but they'll have a series of progressively more serious alert stages, so a momentary glimpse of movement won't always cause a professional guard to call for his buddies. But guards will approach and investigate a variety of unusual phenomena, so don't expect to use a water arrow to extinguish a torch right in front of someone without attracting that person's attention.