Thief: Deadly Shadows

Eidos and Ion Storm's Thief: Deadly Shadows puts a spring ?in the step of gaming's most famous footpad.

Sam Fisher and Solid Snake have enjoyed their days in the sun, but this summer will see the return of one of stealth gaming's most -shadowy heroes. Thief: Deadly Shadows not only features the elusive master thief Garrett in his first console adventure, but it also rounds out the story line of the setting and grants players a little more freedom than any other stealth game on the market.

A Calm Night
The original Thief (subtitled The Dark Project) launched in 1998, a scant two months after Metal Gear Solid revived subtle gameplay on consoles. Developed by Looking Glass Studios (and conceptualized by Irrational Games' Ken Levine, father of Freedom Force), The Dark Project was one of those games that when you play it, you just know you're playing something new and special. The sequel, Thief II: The Metal Age (2000), featured finely tuned gameplay and more of the sort of stealth action that Thief players wanted. When Ion Storm got the rights to Thief for another sequel (Studio -Director and Thief alum Warren Spector apparently went to great lengths for the right to make the game), they decided that they wanted to make a game that was true to the Thief legacy while also improving the -series' good points and ditching the bad. "When you sit down to play Thief: Deadly Shadows," says Lead Designer Randy Smith, "you won't ever mistake that you're playing the latest and greatest game in the Thief series."

A Whispering Wind
"When picking and choosing elements of the previous games," says Smith (no relation to Deus Ex: Invisible War Lead Designer Harvey Smith), "we've often said that we want to match Thief's dark, gritty mood and Thief II's emphasis on stealth gameplay." Ion Storm took a look at the strengths of the Thief games and highlighted them. For instance, Thief has never been about "playing the -radar," as Spector has stated it, unlike games like Metal Gear Solid in which you spend as much time watching "vision cones" in your radar as you do sneaking and looking for shadows. Instead, you can tell by the direction a guard is looking or by the dialogue he speaks whether he can see you or not. Realistic audio and visual feedback replaces the radar and vision cones, making for a more immersive experience.

Another strength of the series is that un-like other stealth-based games (and Ion's own Deus Ex), Thief's concept is very narrowly -focused. "Thief is the stealth game. Most other games have multiple gameplay aspects, and only one of them is stealth," says Smith. Not having to code in a full fighting engine or combat model frees up the developers to think more deeply about the stealth game, which is what Thief is all about. Smith explains, "Our guards have a wide range of suspicious states, a large -number of evidence types they respond to, and a huge variety of ways they can respond." Compare this to the A.I. of Invisible War, which had to react to so many diverse situations (Has the player killed my friends? Is he a member of my group? Did he fulfill this particular mission? Is he pointing a gun at me?) that it wasn't quite so intelligent at reacting to stealth players. According to Smith, "Guards in Thief notice torches that go out, doors left ajar, missing valuables, and broken -furniture as well as blood pools, bodies, and other signs of recent combat. They will become alarmed if you bump into them, and they will notice if a guard is missing from his post for too long."

Muffled Footsteps
So what about the stealth? Garrett is a master thief, so he has to be equipped with all the skills and tools one might need to break and enter with panache. Of course, you can sneak, shimmy along walls, and stab opponents in the back for a one-shot kill ? la Tenchu, but you can also climb walls, douse torches (even ones carried by guards) with water arrows, wash away telltale blood stains, pickpocket keys from guards, put people to sleep with gas arrows, dissuade pursuers with slippery oil, light that oil aflame with fire arrows, manipulate light sources to create new shadows and hiding places, and so on. You can lure guards into rooms and lock them inside, club them unconscious with a sap (Air Hendrix's -favorite), or strike them blind with flash bombs. You can also pick any lock you see, steal any object you can carry, and sneak past every enemy in the game without killing a soul. And you can do all of this in first-person or third-person perspective and even change perspective on the fly as Ion Storm has decided to fully support both view modes throughout the entire game.

As mentioned above, the sounds and visuals play a huge role in Deadly Shadows. Rather than having guards suddenly pop a huge exclamation mark over their heads when they see you, Thief has them bark out a few lines of warning or some verbal taunts as they begin looking for you. If you go unseen, you can sit in shadows and listen in on conversations that might give you clues to valuables you might not otherwise have found, and you'll know that the fact that they continued their conversation shows that they don't know you're there. Deadly Shadows boasts more in-game voices than Deus Ex: Invisible War, even considering that Thief doesn't have any interactive conversations at all. All of this voice work is designed to let you know what's going on in the NPCs' heads without resorting to odd icons or cluttering up the screen with meters and radars.

The Flash of a Blade
Now, Thief II wasn't exactly a huge seller. For Deadly Shadows, Ion Storm has decided to change a few things that may have held the previous Thief games down. For one, the developers have changed the "recovery game," or the way the game plays when you inevitably get caught. In the other Thief titles, your best bet was to run and hide until the A.I. got tired of looking for you, but Ion decided that's a bit boring. In Deadly Shadows, you're much -better equipped to escape without the "wait-and-see" approach. Your flash bombs, gas arrows, mines, and other equipment exist almost primarily to help you fight your way free, and you can also stand up to combat better than you could before.

Another new feature is the city section, a hub of freedom in which you may break and enter your little heart out between missions. In these sections, the only goals are those you make for yourself: If you need money to buy more arrows, for instance, you might look for an apartment to rob or a mark to pickpocket. You might find clues in notes or conversations as to where you can find some serious loot, and you can search the city for a good fence to whom you can sell your ill-gotten goods. City sections don't have great impact on the story, but they do offer you the freedom to be a freelance thief when you're not off trying to save the world.

And Then Silence Once More
With lessons learned from the past Thief games and the recent release of Deus Ex: Invisible War, Ion Storm is poised to strike with Deadly Shadows. With its sharp focus on stealth and its depth of gameplay, the new Thief could steal the stealth genre title out from under the likes of Sam and Snake this summer.

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