| | Created byLooking Glass
Published byEidos Interactive
  
Through recent years, Looking Glass may be known more for their flight simulators than anything else.If you're fairly new to the world of computer gaming, then Flight Unlimited 1 & 2 may be all you know ofthem. However, long ago, Looking Glass created some of the greatest 3D adventures in gaming history,including System Shock, Ultima Underworld, and Ultima Underworld 2. Now, Looking Glass is returning totheir roots, creating an entirely new world of adventure called Thief - The Dark Project.  I spokerecently with Greg LoPiccolo, Project Director on Thief. The first question directed at Greg was howThief came into existence. "It was a direct, organic outgrowth of the design process we were engaged induring the development of System Shock a few years back. There were certain aspects of that game thatwe felt really satisfied, notably the tension you get when you're sneaking around. The thought came tous, 'Gee, you know, it would be great to make a game based around that sort of design dynamic, updatedwith today's technology.' Basically, we have a game of stealth where the player is trying not to bedetected. We feel a lot of the entertainment value of a 1st-person game is in creating a rich andengrossing environment. This has obviously been a cornerstone of all of our 3D games (Ultima Underworld,Ultima Underworld 2, System Shock, Terra Nova) and with the way technology has developed we're allowedto do a much better job."
With the recent avalanche of first-person shooters, one word on everyone's mind is 'environment'. It'sa pretty vague description of a much larger picture. Some companies feel it enough to create oddcomplexes loaded with colored-lighting and leave it at that. What's blatantlymissing is an environment that lends itself to gameplay, wherein these two elements cannot exist withoutthe other. Unfortunately, the bulk of shooters out there do not come close to this. You can take outall the graphical bells and whistles and what you have left is the same game you started with. Not sowith Thief. The gameplay is rooted in the environment. "One of the things we've put a lot of work intois a realistic, high-fidelity sound process. We have a parallel 3D database that just propagates sound.If you close doors, it attenuates correctly, it wraps around corners in a very realistic way. Inbuildings, all of the AI transmission stuff allows our Ai to hear and see. So, if you're fighting aguard and other guards are within earshot and that guard cries for help, the other guards will come in.Ultimately, while a lot of games mention their movement physics, we have that and sound physics as well.If you put all of these elements into an engine and fun gameplay pops out, you've done your job. We alsohave plenty of movement and world physics as well that will pull the gamer into the environment. Objectscan bang into one another, you can fire an explosive arrow into crates and the crates will fly aroundand knock into AI's, etc. That's our highest ambition, is to create a world that is flexible enough sothat players can solve problems in ways that we never anticipated. "  One of thefirst things you notice about Thief is the strange world in which it takes place. In many ways it is atraditional fantasy world, but scratch the surface and you soon find a hybrid environment, one whichmixes several different elements to create a unified and original whole. "We had this idea for a storyand there was a strong sense amongst the team that we wanted some fantasy elements. That's what peopleexpect from us and that's what a lot of the people here are into. There was also this sense that itwould be nive to move it away from the standard D&D; cliche world, Tolkien-World, Dwarfs, and Elves, etc.We have quite a few science-fiction buffs here as well, so we decided to glue these two elementstogether, bringing machinery to a medieval world. Once we had that, we developed mission areas thatsupported the fiction and lent itself to the gameplay."
 Checkout more of OGR.COM's preview of Thief: The Dark Project: Tell me some specs on the 3D engine.
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