I just can't help myself

[eepcat]

I was organizing some space in the den today and came across the Thief Deadly Shadows box. It's been a couple of years and I don't remember much about it, other than disappointment. I've been concerned that I was perhaps too hasty in my judgement of the game, so I installed it again. I'll spare you my rather strong opinion about the experience, but suffice it to say I am eagerly anticipating playing DarkMod mission - - the engine is so much better and DarkRadiant is sheer joy to work with.

- eep!

[Baddcog]

I played thru about half of T3 on a bottom spec comp when it came out, way to slow and choppy. Put it away for quite awhile and finished on a better machine. Still a little choppy but I actually didn't think it was that bad. It's got a bad rep but I think 50% of that was just disappointment because everyone had waited soo long and had such high hopes.

 

The other 50% was due to weird things like too load zones, no rope arrows, bad framerate, ect... So I'd say the devs messed up some, but I liked it alright. I actually did finish it second time around, and I rarely finish any game before I get bored and lose interest.

[Crispy]

I enjoyed it and finished it. If it was any game other than a Thief game, then that would have been perfectly sufficient. Unfortunately, while it stands perfectly well on its own as "just another game", it doesn't quite measure up to the standards of the previous games.

 

Doesn't matter. We have TDM now (and everyone else will as well in due course).

[Ishtvan]

I enjoyed playing it (after immediately modding it so that I was not on "always-run" mode ) and finished it, but then had no urge to play it again.

 

I still use the T2 CD for FMs. The only replay value I got from TDS was that the box makes a pretty good elbow-rest.

[sparhawk]

I also primarily play T2 FMs these days. When I play at all that is.

[Macsen]

It was quite a good game apart from the sluggish controls and small poky missions with load points. There was a lack of different routs to complete missions. You just felt caged and frustrated. But I'm sure if someone ported the game to the Thief II engine it would feel much fresher and freer.

[STiFU]

I am actually playing Thief 3 again since a couple of days, because I had to push my thief-fever down and I didn't want to spend the whole afternoon trying to get thief 2 to run on a quadcore with a widescreen tft. (In the end, widescreen didn't work in T3 either, but that's another story) All what has been said so far is perfectly right, but you forgot to mention one really positive thing about Thief 3:

The living City! A lot to discover, many things change in the city parts after every mission and it gives you a lot more freedom than the missions themselves. I really like this concept, having to travel to certain fences, shops and of course to the missions. Really nice!!

[Springheel]

I thought it was an idea that had some small potential, but was totally wrecked by the implementation. The city sections were smaller than the missions themselves, and provided little to no replay value, other than having to run through them to reach the right "stolen goods store"--conveniently located on every street-corner.

[Komag]

I don't think it was totally wrecked, just quite short of what it could've been. I liked the city sections myself, they made the game feel more familiar to me, rather than just new missions till the end, you got to mess around in familiar "home turf" areas with different things going on at later times.

 

I also learned to take it easy and sneak around rather than black-jack everyone, due to the respawning thing (so that was a negative to me at first which turned into a forced positive in the end)

[STiFU]

Aside from that you get to discover more things later on, when you got the climbing gloves. Have you visited that high secret attic in the first city district?

[OrbWeaver]

I don't think it was totally wrecked, just quite short of what it could've been. I liked the city sections myself, they made the game feel more familiar to me, rather than just new missions till the end, you got to mess around in familiar "home turf" areas with different things going on at later times.

 

I liked the look and feel of the city sections, but architecturally I thought they didn't make much sense, because of the small size of everything. How could the main city docks be about 50 metres wide with room for one ship?

 

The clocktower missions suffered from bizarre-design syndrome as well: there is simply no way up to the top level without scaling that large central tower thing with the climbing gloves. Do we assume that all of the Hammer workmen did the same when they wanted to get to their offices and bunks?

 

I understand the need to keep the level sizes down for memory reasons, but at least have some locked gates and stuff to give the impression that the real world is normally-sized, even if you can't get to all of it in-game.

[Komag]

Yeah, there were realism issues, but I eventually began to just consider everything more of a microcosm or model representation of the city, not the reality.