Don’t expect to see Thief 4 soon

Wipe the tears of glee and cork the anticipation. It looks like we popping skulls with blackjacks in Thief 4 for a while. An Eidos-Montreal developer recently told IncGamers (via Joystiq) that the game is currently in pre-production — a step shy of full-blown production (or development, if you will.)

The dev, Stephane D’Astous, went on to mention that Eidos-Montreal is currently hiring. The studio is looking for 40 capable hands (which shouldn’t be that hard in this economy) to take the game into production.

If you’re wondering how long this could take, consider this: D’Astous wouldn’t comment on the platforms. Instead he said, “With the fast evolving world of hardware, there’s a lot of things that will be happening in the following years so we need to be close to that – but either way, there’s a lot of work to be done.”

Like we said, cork the anticipation for now. Put it away in a special place that you can retrieve in 2012 … if the world doesn’t explode.