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.
While the rest of us were nursing hangovers the size of many small Eastern European countries, Massively Multiplayer Online RPG creators Verant and owners Sony were raising their glasses for the second day running to their most successful day of EverQust play ever. Before New Year's, Sony estimate that its 38 San Diego-based servers were playing host to some 60,000 to 70,000 players simultaneously at peak hours Discount Ray Ban, but on January 1st, it is said that the peak total for the most players logged on simultaneously rose to an astronomical 81,858, approximately a quarter of the 330,000 subscribed EverQuest players in the world. The total is said to have steadily increased since the release last month in the States of mission pack The Scars of Velious. The mission pack is due out over here sometime this quarter.