Third-person for third Thief

Ion Storm has incorporated a third-person view into the third Thief title, Deadly Shadows, in addition to the traditional first-person perspective, publisher Eidos announced late last week. The developer claims that players will be able to shift seamlessly between the first and third-person views, giving them more tools with which to tackle their stealthy tasks.

Due in spring 2004 on PC and Xbox, Thief: Deadly Shadows was recently confirmed as the name of the third outing in the esteemed series, which began life under the control of sadly missed developer Looking Glass. Eidos also hinted at the significance of that title in last week's press release, commenting that characters and objects' real-time shadows will affect the stealth gameplay, forcing the player to manipulate light and darkness in order to create shadows to hide in - which sounds like a welcome change from the traditional and widespread distribution of conveniently darkened doorways seen in similar titles.