f13.net

If there is anyone left that cares, the new Thief title is gold and will ship May 25th.

http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/040505/sfw071_1.html

I care. Really, I do.

I may not once it's released, but we'll see.

I may be to only sorry SOB on this site that has never played any incarnation of this series. The only reason I can think of is maybe they were released during the low spots on my PC upgrade chart (when my formerly uber system is now archaic in comparison to game specs...a point I am rapidly approaching AGAIN).

I preordered. I think I'll warez it to try it first. But I really fucking love Thief. Deus Ex 2 may have broken me forever though.

Thief overtook the Ultima franchise as my favorite, something that amazed me. I really dug Deus Ex, but I had reservations about the sequel which proved to be well-founded, thus I never bought DE2. And THAT'S what is making me nervous.

I'm both giddy with excitement and turtled with fear.

I shall await reviews on these boards with great interest. Will it be another DXIW fiasco, or did they learn thier lessons and make a far better game because of it?

buildings and streets appear to be different 'zones' which would right there ruin the game for me entirely.  Hopefully the things I have heard are wrong.

Given the release timeframe, I seriously doubt anything was learned from DXIW.  Perhaps those lessons will be applied on the next iteration of DX and Thief.

Or maybe Spector will continue to shoot for huge number of sales on consoles.  Hm.  Tough call!  (Not.)

Spector is making the next Tomb Raider game next I believe.  Whoop.  (the whoop was sarcasm)

I tried the free demo and never managed to complete so much as the first mission.

After all of the praise, I found Thief 2 incredibly underwhelming.  The sound was great, that part was spot on, but the rest of the game wasn't fun.  

I think it's because I have a somewhat love/hate relationship with sneakers.   I love the Splinter Cell games, but that's because I'm not playing a complete pussy and often I just sneak enough to the point where I can clobber someone.   In thief I felt like a complete weakling.  

On the flip side, there's Hitman series where you can take about 200 shots from a machine gun before you go down.  In a game that obviously wants you to bloody up the world, it sure has a nice way of telling you after a mission that you sucked and killed too many people.   The game is ridiculously hard (IMO) if you want avoid bloodshed until your target.  You get spotted pretty damn easily and there's always a goddamn choke point you HAVE to go through that's swarming with badguys on covering all angles.  Leaves too little room for error for someone that doesn't want to sit there for 5 minutes plotting the guard's patrol routes so you can slip in that 5 second interval when they're not looking right at you.  (Sorry for the aside)

And then there's BG&E, which is kind of like a puzzle sneaker.  Well done and it never gets annoying (and simple, just stay out of LOS).

I guess I just don't know what's so incredibly special about the thief series.  It just seemed woefully average, with decent AI and superb sound.  Maybe I'll try it again, after I finish SC: PT and get bored of CoH.

Light sources making a difference in gameplay, at a time when light sources were just barely being used as decoration. Thief predated SC. Sure, Garrett was a pussy in most combats. One thing Thief had that SC did not was a bit more freedom is completing mission objectives.

The series wasn't called 'Assassin', despite what Spector and others might think.

I always played on max difficulty and tried for no KO's, not just no kills. It's a game about sneaking, not killing. Of course the lead is a total pussy, he's not supposed to engage in combat. But don't feel bad, as I mentioned, Spector doesn't understand that, either.

I was thinking of buying Thief3 regardless of any mangling done to the formula, but on second thought...I may hold out for the feedback after release. I can always play Thief2 again, I guess.

The thief series revolutionized sound propagation, AI alert levels, and lighting effects (gameplay-wise, not shiny-wise).

Hey, I didn't like the game, I didn't like the lead.  Be less of a dick.

Edited to be less harsh.

I didn't like thief either, mainly because of the inept bow in a game that featured archery to a large degree.

I had a plastic bow in my basement that fired rubber suction cup tipped arrows that had more distance and less arc than that pathetic excuse for a bow.  The bow consisted of a straight piece of plastic and a string.

Didn't realize I was being a dick, I was explaining why Garrett was a pushover in combat. I don't care if you like the game or not :P

Alluvian, I long ago got over the fact that things in games don't function as their real-world analogs. I mean, play a rifleman in SWG for a while, hehe. Max range of 65m!

I finished Thief II, went back and finished Thief I and was replaying Thief II before I found our you could kill unsuspecting people with the bow.

Water arrows, rope arrows and the odd gas arrow all the way! Plus the odd fire arrow to blow up mechs.

It's not so much that I expected realism, but I found aiming the thing to be more of a pain in the neck than fun.

I think I like third person sneaker more than first person as well.  Your body position is VERY important in a sneaky game and in fps you just don't have that information.  I don't know if my ass is sticking out behind this pillar in fps, but I do in third person.  I also find the leaning around corners thing to be cumbersome, much easier to get the exact same effect by swinging the camera around in third person.  Third person also gives you a little more realistic field of view that includes peripheral vision and not tunnel vision like fps.  Just personal preference things really.

Aiming the bow would be better in first person, and I also don't like games that switch perspective all the time so I am kind of SOL.  Although I never liked how the bow fired anyway, so doubt bow shooting will be entertaining in the least for me no matter what perspective it is in.

Streets and interior being two zones would kill the game for me though.  What fun I did have in the second one was constantly hanging around on catwalks and ledges and stuff like that.

Maybe I should reinstall it for the 6th time or so, heh.  Thief is like DX1 to me.  It is a game I should like, and really WANT to like, but it just leaves me flat for some reason.

Sorry for digging up this corpse but.. Penny Arcade linked to a good preview  (http://www.thief-thecircle.com/thief3/danspreview.asp)of the game.  

Sounds very interesting as do all sneaker games to me (I can't put my finger on why I dislike them so).  Doubt I'd like it, but it doesn't sound like the DE2'd the series.

I bought Deus Ex 2.  I even like Deus Ex 2, though I acknowledge it's nifty lighting system addition wasn't enough for the game to hold a candle to Deus Ex 1, if you pardon the pun.   Deus Ex 2 is a textbook example of a situation where too much streamlining is a bad thing.   The engine's nice, though.

So Thief 3, which is using the same parent the Deus Ex 2 engine was built from, is a shoe in for me.   Assuming I can get the scratch to afford the game.   Ah well, the only other game I'm even considering buying is Half-Life 2... and it's months and months away.   For everything else, there's City of Heroes.

I'm of the opinion that the engine's a clunky motherfucker.  Splinter Cells 1 & 2, while not quite having all of the doodads are able to pull off some impressive lighting effects without bringing a halfway decent rig to it's knees.

For an impressive engine I'm looking at FarCry.  Huge areas, really great detail, and very smooth the whole way through.

I havent played Thief since the area where you are sneaking along in the dark dungeon, and a fucking corpse jumps up at you.

Fucker almost gave me a heart attack.


I'll play this new thief if there are no zombies.

Scuttlebutt is that zombies are indeed back in the game.  I always hated the friggin' undead.  Killer robots I can get behind, but I really hated the undead missions in the first Thief.

It's misleading.   They've this "MouseLagThreshold" setting that makes the engine seem far clunkier than it is.  Setting it to 0 (in the Default.ini) makes the engine run quite smooth with absolutely no loss of detail.


The Far Cry engine is quite good, no doubt about it.  Beautiful outdoor areas, the ragdoll and physics seem considerably better implemented than Deus Ex 2's engine (although Deus Ex 2 let you manipulate objects more than just pushing/shooting things so it's hard to give Far Cry's physics engine a really good test).   The dynamic lighting's much better in Deus Ex 2, though, I like that one room where there's a doll up against a light source and it casts a eiree human-like shadow against the wall.

Ironically, I'm stuck on Far Cry in the regulator after having turned the three steam valves and blowing it.   The very next room (with all the troops and the two ospreys dropping more) *lags terribly*, to the point where I can't even shoot the soldiers without them warping past my crosshair, that shoots down this "very smooth the whole way through" thing for me.    My rig (AMD 2000 W/ 1 gig 2700 Ram, ATI Radeon 9700 w/ 128) should qualify as "half decent", but I'm probalby going to have to turn the detail below it's current 'medium' setting to get past there.

So....anyone take the plunge? For the children?

What have the children done for me?

"You know what I say? FUCK the children!" - G. Carlin

FIFY.

No, that isn't what I would call it.  I am on the clunky motherfucker bandwagon.  The framerate was SHIT in 800x600 on my system. (amd 2500+ with TI4200 overclocked).

I have finished farcry on my system and the area you mention did not give me any trouble that I can recall.  This is at 1024X768 at whatever default settings it gave me.  I can say easily they are a Far Cry (bad pun) better than the graphics in DX2.  Frankly I think DX2 looked pretty crappy outside of the lighting effects that are already better in Splinter Cell IMO.  And splinter cell also ran FAR FAR better than DX2 for me (from playing the two pandora tomorrow demos).  SC2 was easily playable and smooth at 1024x768.  DX2 dropped under 5 fps for me at that resolution.

The engine was an utter DOG.  If I was alone in this I would say that maybe it just didn't like something about my system, but I have seen a LOT of negative commentary backing up my performance problems in DX2.  Changing the mouse settings did not fix it or even make any noticable difference for me.  It was the frame rate, not the sluggishness that pissed me off.


Thief 3 using the same engine just assures I will not buy it.  I might pirate it though if I happen to see it while looking for something else.  Although the thought of zombies makes even that somewhat unlikely.

[edited to add]
If there is enough positive feedback on the engine quality having improved, I will pirate it or play a demo if it exists to see how it works on my system.  If it runs well and is fun I will buy it.  SC:PT from motionsless screenshots looks much prettier and ran GREAT on my system so I give Thief no excuse to not also run great.  Physics is not that excuse, MP2 and farcry also ran great on my system.

I'll jump on the "ahead of it's time" bandwagon, given the incredible work they put into simulating "real" light.    However, at the same time, I'll agree that the engine is both somewhat slow (though playable enough on my AMD 2000 with a Radeon 9700 AIW) and the graphics are not nearly as good looking as those you'd see in engines such as The Source engine or Far Cry.   In fact, comparitively quite ugly.   But I don't play my games with graphics as the first emphesis.


Just to be clear, we're not talking about "the mouse settings", but rather something called "mouselagtheshold" that you have to manually go in and modify on the Default.ini, right?   For me, once I set that to 0, the game runs much, much smoother.  (This is Deus Ex 2 I'm talking about, and not Thief (III): Deadly Shadows, which had no such setting.)


So yes, I bought Thief: Deadly Shadows today.   I've played through the first two missions and am on the first free-form city wandering part now.   Though I'm barely a few hours into the game (and probably have about 40 or so hours in front of me to complete it at this rate) I have to mirror the statements of both Gamespy (80%) and Gamespot (8.3).  

Thief III carries on the tradition of Thief I and Thief II.   The added gameplay innovations (such as togglable 3rd person, manual lock picking, visiting fences and shops, and persistant gear between missions) aren't good enough to raise the bar higher.   The engine glitches (zoning mid-mission, rubbery ragdolls) aren't bad enough to lower the bar either.    So while the polygon count may be higher, the engine may be capable of more advanced physics, and the lighting has received a major upgrade (lighting being one of the few things Deus Ex 2 did right), in the end Thief III is ultimately just more Thief.

(Of course, this is coming from me, Mr. "Deus Ex 2 was alright, though it was no Deus Ex 1", so if you have declared holy jihad against the engine itself, you've already decided to give this game a miss.   That said, I do think they've learned from some of their mistakes, and the engine seems to run without quite as many wierd glitches in Thief 3 as there was in Deus Ex 2.)

The good news is that more Thief is a good thing.   Deadly Shadows succeeds in carrying off the interesting pseudo-midevil-steampunk universe Thief takes place in very well.   Garret's original voice actor is on task and laying down the practically sarcastic tone we know and love him for.   All the other sounds I've run into, especially voice work for the NPCs, is the best I've seen yet in a Thief game.   The oft times spooky/surreal environments to sneak your way through is there.    Poking through wealthy noble's dirty laundry (figuratively) is there.  Last but most importantly: It feels like Thief, and manages to carry that same feeling of creeping your way around like no other series can.

Picked it up this morning. Given how much I have to do today, I may beat it in one sitting just like DX2. If so, reports on disappointment will follow.

First piece of drama queening. I can't change keybindings without crashing. Fucking Ionstorm.

I bought it, I'm a huge fanboi of the first two, so I kinda knew I would :)

I play thief VERY SLOWLY. It took me months to finish the first two, and I've replayed them to completion at least once. So I'm in Lord Edgar or whoever's castle, about halfway done scouring the place.

After tweaking options and keybindings, I dropped into the tutorial and suddenly I felt a cold ball of fear begin to grow in my stomach. The game engine was a total pig! Any time shadows were being drawn, it was chugging. Then I realized I had my D3D settings to 16xFSAA, 16xAF. Woops. My dumb ass figured this out after I had just finished the tutorial, so I went back through it again with more reasonable scene processing (4xAA, 4xAF on barton 3000+, 1GB pc3200, 9800pro) and it runs like buttah. Whew.

It's Thief. Playing through the first mission is bringing back that vibe. A HUGE sigh of relief was heard from my apartment. They hit the major points, and time will tell if the subtleties were nailed as well.

On the other hand, there's already been a bunch of minor bugs and a little bigger AI bug. Seems once in a while an npc on a raised alert status won't go back to his patrol after the alert lowers, he just stands there staring at a wall or whatever. I've seen it three times halfway through the  first mission in the castle. Not a huge problem, but it shouldn't be there.

Other things are guards sheathing their swords and the sword reverting to some default state where it's pointing straight upwards...but on his hip, because he had sheathed it.

But like I said, nothing that really detracts from the Thief vibe too much. I'm guardedly optimistic. It seems like they didn't screw it up, which is all I asked for. It wasn'y broken, and it seems they didn't try mucking with the formula to 'fix' things.

I even like the 3rd person view, I switch back and forth situationally, I just wish I could bind camera zoom (close up brings you to first-person view) to the mouse wheel like, you know, almost every game in existance. Ahh well.

I'm pretty happy, but again, I'm a Thief fanboi. So it's a positive that I'm happy so far, but also a given in a way...

Are there missions where you cannot kill anyone in them?  If so, this could easily be game breaking if a guard gets 'stuck' staring down a hallway you have to pass.  There may be no way past except to kill him.  Not having played the game I can't say for sure, but it raises concerns.  Hopefully they will patch the bug out, but I can't imagine they don't know about it if it is that common.

I like the positive reviews so far.  I would like to like this game, but the engine still scares me.

Anyone playing on a circa TI4200 card?  Can it run in 1024x768?  I can't tolerate games in 800x600 anymore like DX2 forced me into.

DX2 forced 800x600? Criminy! Criminal! No, this scales up to 1600x1200. Unfortunately, they are hard-coded resolutions, and the switches seem to be like "resolution=3" with 3 being 1024x768. I did find a viewport setting that I tried to tweak (I play in 1280x720, a widescreen res, 16:9), but it didn't work. Stretched 4:3 games are unfair to some and whatnot.

As far as the guard's thing, raising his alert again by jostling crates or using a noisemaker should take care of that bug. I play hardcore, no kills, and as few KO's as possible. One reason I play so slowly :)

No, it didn't force 800x600, but for some reason it was a slideshow at 1024x768.  I am VERY forgiving of poor frame rates.  But we are talking low single digits here in very uncomplicated scenes.

[edited to add]

For comparison sake it ran about as well as the totally unoptomized doom 3 alpha engine on my system at that resolution.  It ran 'okay' at 800x600 but looked like shit of course.

I picked it up just a couple hours ago and installed it a bit ago. I'm at the free-wandering city part now.

Short impressions:
-Guards are definitely smarter. You aren't completely impossible to find if it's dark anymore. If a guard bumps into you in a dark hallway, he won't obliviously walk into you anymore. They seem almost hyper sensitive to noise now as well, but guards REALLY like talking to themselves at every opportunity.

-Since you can seamlessly switch from third-person to first-person person view, your whole body always has to be taken into consideration when leaning and moving. It's kinda cool to look straight down and see your feet instead of a floating shadow or something.

-The game runs like shit (3Ghz P4, 1GB PC3200 RAM, Radeon 9800XT), but slightly better than Deus Ex 2. The environments are larger too, but not by very much. The lighting and texturing are a notch higher too. The models are nicer too IMO.

-Decent voice acting.

-Still feels like thief. I'm rather pleased to say that it still feels like thief through and through, and the only "dumbing down" you have to notice is the fact that loot sparkles now (I don't have any problem with it, but the purists at TTLG didn't like it).

-The new lockpicking system is kinda cool, and pickpocketing is much harder.

-The physics and ragdoll stuff is most likely unchanged from Deus Ex 2. Guards flop backwards into odd positions after being blackjacked.

(http://home1.gte.net/res0nzkt/thief3-1.jpg)

Shound't be, there were locations like that in I and II. You just had either to find another way around, douse the light nearby, or distract them to go look at something else.

dinner plates my friend, always fun to watch the guards collect around that dinner plate you just tossed down another hallway.

this thread (http://forums.eidosgames.com/showthread.php?s=f1a6d9e18efa28376673292371d518f8&threadid=38383) says there's going to be a 450 meg 2 level (training and misson 1) DEMO released TODAY.

I now have a sudden need to install Thief I and II and play them on expert.

My problem with stealth games or the current crop (which consists of Splinter Cell PT, Hitman Contracts, and Thief 3 is that they are all wildly different. Four years ago I would have said Thief was my favorite series. After playing this game for a bit, Splinter Cell is my favorite with Hitman coming a close second and Thief 3 trailing...far...behind. This game just feels infinitely more empty than the other 2. I know stealth games are supposed to have a certain amount of emptiness to them, but Thief just feels like I'm wasting my time (also how I felt with Morrowind - which I also bought on release day). I'm hoping Thief 3 picks up, or I'll be turning back to finish Hitman and Splinter Cell - both of which I'm about halfway through.

Ugh.  So it will be 800x600 again for me and my TI4200.  Fuck that.  I will at least try the demo though.  Splinter cell looks much better than this game and the shadows are just as good if not better (just going by T3 screenshots and videos).  There is no excuse for this game to run like a total dog.  Especially since the physics engine implementation detracts from the game instead of adding to it.  The ragdolls look like shit in both this and DX2.  Far Cry and Max Payne 2 are probably the best ragdolls I have seen so far.  Halflife 2 in videos also looks to do them well.

I am at the third level in hitman I think.  I am sort of fizzled out on it due to the game not only being identical to Hitman 2, but the levels are even feeling like repeats.

Still have not picked up Pandora Tomorrow yet.  Not sure what version I want.  I am leaning toward the xbox one because I like using my xbox when my pc is busy downloading.  But I hate the thought of playing a merc in fps with the thumbstick.  grrrrr.

I guess being on f13 staff trumps my report that the game is running like buttah at 1024x768, 4xfsaa, 4xaf, all ingame options maxed. It did chug at 16xfsaa, 16xaf...but I expect most games to chug at that level of scene processing. With normal settings, it's just fine, certainly not a 'dog'.

The ragdoll for corpses does suck. My biggest complaint is that this game was obviously pushed out the door. Lots of tiny bugs that should have been addressed. Right now those minor yet almost omnipresent quibbles are keeping it firmly at 4/5 for me, because despite engine quirks, it's a true thief game and I'm quite happy with it so far. I mean, come on, I've barely begun to play it and already I lifted the reward money for killing me from the pockets of the killers, then snuck past them. That's Garrett in action imo.

I like neither Hitman nor Splinter Cell, fwiw, but I've only played the xbox versions and I can't stand console FPS controls.

If you have any problem with the AI being too easy, restart on a higher difficulty level. They made the default level way to forgiving for series veterans (I played the first two on the highest difficulty setting). I play to the 'ghost' standard, though I sometimes settle for slightly less.

Alluvian - the weak piece on your video card as new games come out is the abysmal pixel shaders - I just upgraded a couple months ago from a ti4400 to a 9800 pro.

I am aware of that sky, but doesn't far cry also extensively use pixel shaders?  That game runs fine for me.  And your system running the engine like butter means nothing to me as I don't have your system.  I also don't have Fabricated's system so I will have to try the demo to see my luck.

Anyway, the problem is budget you see.  It is called being in debt and having a gamer wife who desperately needs a full system overhaul.  Our otherwise decent midrange dell if hamstrung by only allowing 528 megs of ram (piece of shit mb).  Since it is all fucking proprietary any mb replacement will also need a new case and power supply.  Any change in MY video card will surely require an upgrade to hers as well.  So it is not a simple upgrade path for me unfortunately.  The wife is okay with her system now, but without at least 1 gig of ram and a 9800 range video card that system will DIE when EQ2 comes out (she will at least play the first free month).  Her system is the critical upgrade system now, not mine.

I don't believe that I can run farcry great and have to upgrade for a comparably poor looking game like thief3.  Maybe farcry does a better job turning off shaders that my card does not run well, but then in my opinion if thief 3 does NOT do the same, it is a fault of the game, not my system.

Maybe the dx2 engine just does not like my system.  Hell, you complained about Hitman 3 running horribly for you and I get consistent 20+ fps with default settings and resolution turned UP from default.   I admit I don't run ANY AF or AA as I find them both pointless system resource hogs.  If I see jaggies I will turn up my resolution for IMO a bigger visual boost with less performance hit.

I don't get it. Thief 3 and DE2 both ran on modified versions of the current Unreal engine. How can they have been modified so badly that they run like shit? The UT2004 Demo ran like butter on my 1.2 Ghz AMD with 384 MB RAM and a GF2 MX 400 at 1024x768, and ok on my fiancee's old AMD 800mhz Duron with 192 MB RAM. How could they fuck up an engine that scaled that well? By not allowing it to scale right?

I thought ThiefIII's shadows were a shader program, I could be wrong. Shadows were what were killing my performance before I pulled back the aa/af, and that's with decent dx9 hardware. Afaik, there were only one or two settings that required pixel shader 2.0 performance in Far Cry (ultra high water is the only one I can think of).

No, I didn't. I've only tried 1 and 2.

And budget stuff, hey man, I hear ya. I took a stab at being a professional musician. I know broke. That's why I hate it when people think I'm bragging about my hardware, when I'm really just excited about it. I come in peace, man. And hey, having a gaming wife is so much better than having a wife that doesn't understand gaming at all and thinks it's all because you hate her or some other girly idea they sometimes get.

As to why Ion pooped out a mediocre engine, well, I dunno, I'm too busy being relieved that they managed to deliver a Thief experience in gameplay.

Does UT2k4 use the Havok physics?

I'm running Thief 3 now on a Athlon 2200+ and a Radeon 8500 64MB and at 1024x768 with shadow detail at full and bloom on and I have little problem even with fairly complecated scenes.  I'm not far into the game so by complicated I mean the courtyard with the two guards and the moving lightsource.  I had at least 30fps in that scene.

My secret?  NoCd crack...  Fuck you Securerom.

UT2004 and Havok physics? I think so.

As for SecureRom and SafeRom and all that... yeah, fuck them.

Describe "Buttah". I say "buttah" is 60FPS. Thief 3 didn't experience any of the serious frame hits that DX2 subjected me to, but it certainly wasn't screaming along by any standards.

Criminey, when will those silly publishers learn that Securerom doesn't stop internet piracy while just hurting the game performance?   Anywho, game plays reasonably good for me, but the frame rate is still considerably lower than Unreal Tourney 2004, which is a far more optimized engine, it seems.

However, I forgive em' because I know the Thief 3/Deus Ex 2 engine is working a lot harder.   While it was indeed initally based on the Unreal engine, they did massive in-house modifications to it.  

Thief 3/Deus Ex 2 were one of the first engines to really include Havok physics (I see a Gamespot announcement about it's implementation in Thief 3 from back in 11/2001) but Max Payne 2 beat them both to market (and had a somewhat better looking balance on the physics to boot).  I think the physics in MP2 are actually a little simpler than DE2, but they look better because they're implemented right where it counts.   Try blowing up a barrel in both games and MP2 will produce a more satisfying result, but DE2 will produce a more complicated result.

What really sets Thief 3/Deus Ex 2 apart, and the probably the reason why the engine chugs so much, is that they have light done right.   Lights don't just cast shadows of mobiles, they cast shadows on everything, including the environment around them.    Find a light, any light, and you'll notice it can cast shadows from something as simple as the bumps on a stone wall.    There's a big difference between a flickering torch and a steady electric light.    If you find a low-slung light source, try dropping something in front of it - that object will cast a very realistic shadow, which you can then hide in.    Try that in Max Payne 2 or Far Cry: Very few engines are capable of pulling this off.  

You'll also notice the AI seems to have more info at it's disposal in Thief 3.   I've noticed when guards spot me they're often saying something like, "There he is... in the street!" and when looking around for me they'll say something like, "I think I'll go search by that barrel..." or "I think I'll go search by that bookcase..".   When they greet eachother on the street, there's a definate difference in dialogue if a commoner is greeting a guard versus another commoner.    There must be many hidden triggers in the game that provide the AI with this kind of capacity.

So yeah, Thief 3's engine definately seems slower, but there's many hints there that the reason is because it's genuinely working harder.

No chugging, no slideshow, no stutter. Smooth video rendering. My only complaint is that I can't seem to get a widescreen resolution.

Yeah, I noticed Garrett casts shadows upon himself, wasn't that some big technology DOOM3 was pimping early on?

Sorry, I guess I forgot who made that comment then.

As an update, I finished the tutorial and am playing through the first level in 800x600 on my 2500 barton and TI4200.  Shadows are at the default minimum.  It is running decent for me, I will try 1024x768 and some experimentation with the shadow slider after work.  If it can handle 1024 I will probably buy it.  I like what I see so far, but let me just rant a tiny bit.

Why the FUCK are they wasting cpu cycles on the ragdoll physics?  They look like utter SHIT in this game.  Please just animate the damn death.  EVERY single kill or knock unconsious has looked utterly AWFUL.  And I mean EVERY ... SINGLE... ONE.  Legs bending backwards, back contorting, UGH.

/rant off

The gameplay itself seems pretty good, although I am SUPER early in the game and too early to really comment on it.  The 800x600 is assaulting my eyes though, so if the game vomits like dx2 when I put that to at least 1024 then I am just going to uninstall my ill gotten game and not touch it till it is in the bargain bin one day after getting a new vidcard.  I will have played less of it than the demo will have in it anyway.

I happen to like the sparkly loot myself.  It always annoyed me in the first two having to pick up EVERY single thing never knowing what was useless and what was loot.  So far in this game I have seen the exact same model used for 'valuable loot' as is used later on in the same level as nothing more than something to throw.

I kind of with the map showed me where I was... I know it is part of the gameplay that the map is very undetailed, but I get lost pretty easy.  No problems yet, but I know I will eventually.

Oh, and the model for gariot looks HIDEOUS to me.  Ugh.  *shudder*  Good reason to NOT play in third person I suppose.  maybe I didn't follow the game enough, but does he have a cyborg eye?  It glows in the dark... I would think that would be a bad thing for a thief.

Enough nitpicking for me.  The game lives or dies on 1024x768 tonight.

Damn, sounds like you didn't follow it at all...  He lost the eye in the first game, the hammerites gave him the mechanical one, and that's why you could have nifty stuff like zooming and the spy orbs in the second game.

Nope, all thief games have pretty much bored me to uninstall in about 3 missions flat.  Not sure if this one is any different or not yet.

I agree 100%. Put the geek toys away until they work, dammit. Imo, from what I've seen about Havok physics, it = teh suck. I might catch some shit for that, and at least the boxes and barrels don't go flying the way I've heard they do in DE:IW. But they seem pretty crappy to me.

Also, I need to go back and check, because I haven't fired an arrow from far enough to notice, but I was trying to kill a beetle I thought was going to attack me (it's just there to make noise, I guess) and it seems broadhead arrows have no arc? A few arrows (like the fire arrow) traditionally in the series had a flat trajectory, but most arrows flew normally.

I tried to hide one guy I KO'd for about ten minutes, trying to get his body to lie normally, and it went from that arched back to legs through the floor to shaking like someone on heroin withdrawal.

Since I'm a Thief fanboi, I can pretty much overlook most of this stuff, since they have pegged the gameplay pretty well, but sheesh. Again, it just feels like it was rushed out the door.

Actually, you could tell by the shape and texture which loot was worthwhile and which was junk in the first two.

Well, sheesh, whattya expect? :P The reason I didn't try out Hitman 3 was that I didn't like the first two :)

I have this odd compulsion so like the Thief series.  something inside me says I SHOULD like these games.  I am hoping I actually like this one.  If so maybe I can go back and enjoy the others.

Bored to uninstall is actually pretty innacurate.  Annoyed to uninstall is more like it.  I got very annoyed at guards who would VERY inconsistently aggro for apparently no reason.  I could save and do the same thing ten times and be caught 2 of them for no reason even though I didn't do anything noticably wrong.  Being spotted when I should have been hidden and NOT being seen other times I was right out in the open also annoyed me.  I never played it enough to see if there were actual reasons for this or not.  I also found things like moss arrows and rope arrows abit too silly.

So if I like one of these games then I may be able to play the others and tolerate or overlook the issues I have with them.  That is my foolish hope at least.

As far as havok, it CAN work.  I think max payne 2 used it well, although objects in the game didn't have enough friction.  The ragdolls were decent though.  Far Cry probably to date has the best use of Havok.  Better use of friction, bullets going through weak objects, GREAT ragdolls.  DX2 and Thief3 (so far) have used this technology and made it a DETRIMENT to their game instead of a feature.  Havok CAN be made to work well, but often it is not used correctly.  HL2 looks like it will set a new standard for physics.  Doom3 is also bragging a lot about them.

I think we were separated at birth.  I like the concept of these games. I really want to like them. THEY SOUND GODDAMN NIFTY.  But the last time I tried Thief 2 I got annoyed at the guard aggro and just picked up another game and never gave it a second look.  

To be fair, I think I picked up Thief II about 3 days before I got my xbox.  I was mired in that thing for quite a while before I came up for air.

I'll give this one a shot.  Demo out anyhoo.

I'm surprised, I just downloaded the demo, and as long as I turn off AA I can run it really smoothly at 1024X768.  This is with a 1.4 Athlon (yeah, I know, need to upgrade), but a GeForce FX 5200.  I also have 1.5 GB of RAM, so that probably helps out a hell of a lot.

Yeah, so far it's Thief.  No real complaints except for the stupid rubber doll physics, and the fact that I need to stand up before I can blackjack or backstab.  I even like the 3rd person mode.

Yup.  Runs well for me so far.  Only fear now is that I hear they have included zombies.  Which sucked ass in the first one from what I hear.  This is not an action game folks, don't put in shit that you can't sneak past.

As far as blackjacking or killing with a knife from behind, it works fine for me while crouched.  I do it all the time.  The distance is abit more finicky though.

I wish more places were labeled on the map or had readable signs.  Garret would know his own damn town. When they say xyz is hidden in blowjob armory I should fucking know where blowjob armory is.  The way the game is setup I can never even read a sign because there are guards by most of them.  So I end up breaking into every single little shop I can hoping one is the blowjob armory.  So far I have robbed a poor tavern owner and killed all his clientelle (although none of them saw it coming), and I have robbed a gemcutter who was a far cry from noble.

My sound cuts out on me every hour or so as well and I have to do a full system reboot to get it back.  F-ing annoying, but I have had lots of issues with this onboard soundcard so I don't really blame Thief for that.

Shot a noise maker arrow, CTD, killed all voice sound as I was unable to hear the announcers in Chaos League.

Nifty.  Sometimes I really fucking hate this onboard sound.

I hear ya, I'm seriously considering dropping some bucks on a SB Audigy.

The problem there is my local mail order place (it's mail order but it's local so I can call it in and go pick it up RIGHT THEN and they are very liberal with returns) has several different good cards.

An Audigy ES OEM for $45 and Audigy 2  ZS for $91 and an Audigy Platinum ZS for $191 and finally they have a SB Live 5.1 for $30.

I want surround sound and EAX, which they all have, and long experience with sound cards tells me that I'm no audiophile so is it worth it to go the extra $60 bones for the Audigy 2 ZS over the SB Live?  Does anyone know what it offers over an Audigy ES?

Any help is appreciated, even if it's just a link to some audiophiles condecending review.

P.S.  There is no way I'm dropping $190 smackers on a sound card that for 99% of my purposes will sound identical to a 15 year old SB 64.

I miss rope arrows, those were fun. I'm withholding judgment on the climbing gloves until I get them, but it'll be tough to match the coolness of the ropes, trying to find a good wooden beam to plunk it into so that you could not only scale whatever you were scaling, but retrieve the rope arrow. I did entire missions in the earlier games with one rope arrow. I guess it's a tradition thing.

I find it very odd that not only am I using onboard sound, but it sounds great and isn't buggy nor instable. I've got the ASUS A7N8X with the Soundstorm chip (born in the xbox) for real-time DD5.1 encoding. It's not EAX, but it is fully positional...and free...

I, too, have been looking around for the blowjob armory, heh. Though after robbing the gem cutter, I saved him from thugs, in case I need him later in the game, and no tavern patrons were injured in the fleecing of the tavern :) I'm wicked rusty, though, not near Ghost performance at all...

I may be in the minority here but I think SB has gone to hell with the Live series of cards. I've had nothing but problems with them. Find yourself a cheap Hercules Fortissimo III or something. It will do EAX, EAX2, Direct Sound, A3D, etc. and not have all the wierd issues the SB cards have.

Right now I'm attempting to lift a ratty old hand off of the Pagans, but I'm somewhat stuck. You have to make offerings of water, moss, and blood at an altar, and I can't figure out how to offer the fucking blood.

I tried throwing a dead body onto the altar, didn't work. Tried shooting the body so it bled, didn't work. So yeah, I'm kinda out of ideas unless there's a vial of blood somewhere I need.

I didn't have the patience to ghost this area since the male pagans can make themselves run really really fucking fast, so I just knifed or shot in the eye every guard I saw. Pagans? What Pagans?

Although this sounds good I am having a problem finding the card, other than a few used ones on ebay no one seems to have them.  Not even Hercules own web site...

Yeah I noticed that after I posted,. I have a Hercules sound card that's a couple years old, picked it up at CompUSA I think. You might try the Turtle Beach cards, I've had good luck with them in the past.

M-Audio makes some really nice cards too I hear.

One thing to be careful of with the m-audio card is that I don't think it does hardware DX stuff. Has to do it all through software so increases the processor load.

I get about 20-25fps on average with low settings on a 1500xp 768 MB ti4400, which is oddly enough playable because of the slower pace of the game. It's CPU capped as 800x600 gives me the same fps. Also turning the EAX stuff on didn't result in a performance hit which is odd for me. I might be able to bump some settings up into medium quality, as I haven't really tried though.

I’ve completed 4ish missions depending on how you count. As for the game so far I think it's a much better continuation of a series than DXII was.  The levels feel large enough. Load times are quick enough that I can't read the little quotes they put on the load screens (wish it didn't change the quote halfway through). I'm very impressed with the implementation of loot glint. It's about the size of 4 pixels from any reasonable distance and isn't very noticeable unless your looking for it. So I find it more convenient than immersion breaking. The blue glow they put around highlighted objects is another matter. I'm getting tired of opening bright blue glowing doors. Lock picking is a lot less impressive than the hype they put on it.

Sound as a whole is very well done. The positional audio aspects of the game are the best I’ve heard. The ambient sounds are very good and go along way to helping with immersion. Voice acting is somewhat spotty though. Garret has the same voice as before thankfully but others are less than stellar. Don’t buy and sell stuff in Stonemarket if you can help it unless you like Australian pirate and dumb groupie accents. Someone had to have been really high when they chose those. Speech for guards is done incredibly well they’ll greet each other and seem to have a wide variety of things to say. They have taken pains to make the things they do repeat repeatable things like prayers so you don’t run into the he just said that two seconds ago situation that you do in other games.

The city aspect of things is so so. The whole place seems too narrow. I’ve been to two different main sections so far and I don’t think I’ve found anything I would properly label a street yet. The city seems to be made entirely of back alleys. I like the idea of fences and stores but at times the city feels too bland. The blatantly obvious "secret" thief sign hurts immersion more than loot glint does. They could defiantly use more city-like activities for the random civilians than patrol. I was pissed when I found out the tavern was closed at night, that just doesn’t make sense. I want a functioning tavern damnit.  

AI guards (on hard) are very impressive yet still stupid. They will notice and remember a wide variety of things, doors opened, objects out of place, treasure gone, lights out, and other guards missing yet they do very little about any of this besides walk around a little bit more. I think this is more of a design limitation than an AI one as the developers didn't want cascading alarms but I wish the guards would show a little bit more concern when the treasure they are guarding disappears than walking around for 30 seconds chalking it up to no big deal and going back to guarding a now empty room.

The game isn’t without bugs unfortunately. This is what I’ve encountered so far: Three CTD when attempting to quick save. Guards have a tendency to forget about bodies if they get too far away from them and keep “finding” them when they come across it again locking them in an alerted state. Thankfully this just requires moving the body to a better spot to get out of. There is a scripted sequence where some civilian guards catch a thief. The thief runs away and comes across a city watch guard who joins the chase. Eventually the guards kill the thief, which pisses off the city watch who attacks the guards. The guards then kill the city watch and proceed to kill every unarmed civilian in the area for some unknown reason. Some variation of this happened every time. The best I could do was arrow the thief before he got very far. None of these are game stopping however.

The core aspects of  Thief 1 and 2 that made them great have survived the transfer to Deadly Shadows well. I bolded that because it sums up a lot of what is good in this game in way too short of a sentence. The eerie cutsceens are still there along with all the Pagan/Hammer/Keeper quotes and literature. Creeping around in the shadows listening to guards and knowing your in way over your head if they find you is just as fun in this one as in the first two. I’m happy that I have it. If you liked the first two I say you’ll like the third. If you didn’t like the others though there is nothing new in this one that will change your mind.



Fabricated: Here is what I did not sure of what is required and what is not.
Club the guard.
Shoot the water and moss arrows at the symbols.
Put the guard between the symbols and the paw. There is a shallow spot that seems meant for this.
Shoot the guard with a broadhead.

I just got T3 and I'm digging it.

I've played both Splinter Cells and despite the polish and originality, I simply dispise the mostly linear trial-and-error game play.  I've played both previous Thief games and couldn't finish them because of the seemingly random Guard behavior and the level design issues pointed out by others.  Maybe its just because I'm older now, but I'm finding T3 much easier to get into.  The guards are understandable without being completely predictable, and the levels are non-linear without being unpolished or uneven.  All in all, one of the most enjoyable stealthers since MGS1.

It would seem WinME does not allow the game to run (demo dosn't work for me).

I am now going to cry until I can afford to save up the 400 bucks to buy WinXP. Damm you Spector.

You can get WinXP OEM for under a hundred bucks on a lot of harware sites.  Try newegg.

Edit: Checked newegg, home is $91 and pro is going for $141.

You can walk into Best Buy and buy Win XP home for students for $79 or $99. I forget which one. Just say you are a student. Or you can find one wandering around the store.

Thanks. I was probably putting the body in the wrong place.

The AI overall is pretty wonky. The new guard AI is really really good when cranked up all the way, but the AI in the town section is just weird.

I blackjacked a mugger looking guy in a narrow alleyway because he wouldn't get the fuck out of my way, and about 3 minutes later another mugger guy found the body and freaked out. He ran off to the nearest guard and attacked him. After barely killing the guard, he slaughtered 2 civilians before another guard chased him down and put his lights out.

Really weird.

The city AI gets worse and worse as more factions come into play and plain old uber agressive mobs start getting lose.  The city becomes a warzone where everyone is killing everyone.

What I hate is that I seem to get blamed for everything.  Guard sees me, I run into an alley quick.  The guard is looking for me when a ruffian from the alleyway (I ducked into one of the thieves areas with the red hands) sees the guard and goes crazy on his ass.  Guard dies.  Another guard comes over, guard dies.  Ruffian then must get a god complex.  Ruffian kills 3 civilians until finally a hammerite kills the ruffian.  The hammerite sees the bodies as I walk out of a shadow (allied faction with hammerites)  Hammerite attacks me as I go and reload my damn savegame.  I mean christ, the hammerite SAW the ruffian killing those people.  Why the fuck did it attack me?  This is not isolated, but at the end of the game now, I have seen it at least a dozen times where it has forced me to reload because it got crazy.  It probably happened a lot more than that, but once hell starts breaking loose I sort of stopped caring and didn't let ANYONE see me anymore.

At the end of the game now.  I like it.  Worth the weekend purchase (yeah, I went out and bought it).  Runs reasonable on my slowish system.  Detail about halfway up, shadows all the way up, bloom on, low detail textures (default for my system).  Not as pretty OR as smooth as farcry, but livable for me.

The main thing is that the game is fun.  I will probably go back and do thief 2 now.  Hopefully I can enjoy that one after finding a 'hook' in one of these thief games.

Like I said, I am pretty damn sure I am at the end.  Don't want to give away any plot though.  Lots of twists and turns even though most of them you can see coming a mile off.  Still a cool story, but too telegraphed.  I spend most of my time in missions making up little songs about how stupid garret is for not seeing the obvious.

I don't think I will replay the game at the highest difficulty, but I have made lots of savegames and you can restart missions at higher difficulties so I will probably do a few of the more enjoyable missions on the hardest.  I am on the third one after realizing that the default second one was basically brain dead.  I decided to buy the game at that point, the default setting was WAY too easy.  You could run past almost any guard in the game as long as you ducked around a corner and waited after.

I don't know who I should suggest it to.  I liked the other thief games but never got very far in them.  Frustration or boredom would win.  This is the first one I will be completing. I don't know if that means thief fans will like it or NON thief fans will like it.  I think it is a good game though for sure.

That is just my opinion.  Others will surely vary.

[edited to add:]
Yup, that was the end.  Probably 16 hours for me to complete on the third difficulty (first few missions on the default setting).  It could have been done MUCH faster, but I like trying to get 100% loot and such in missions and did a lot of the unnecessary (and pretty unrewarding) sidequests.

Ending sort of fizzled for me, rather anti climactic.

And it frankly does not make a fucking lick of sense either.  There are some objects that an enemy does not want you returning, so they are guarding the locations.  You have to pretty much sneak right in front of their face to place the items, and then you move on to do other tasks.  It makes you wonder, why the fuck don't they just take the fucking item after you placed it?  It made no damn sense.  Hell, the whole story sort of stops making sense in light of the ending.  Oh, and the two "Our ____ has returned to us" bits in the ending didn't make a damn bit of sense either.

Good game though, suffered from a lame ending.  I sort of hope they make another thief game at some point.  I think it would be interesting after the changes this one has made to the world in which they take place.

God I hate Ion Storm.

I had been trying to get far enough into Thief 3 so I could feel justified in writing a review, and after finally getting rolling and getting a couple missions done, I can progress no further due to random crash-to-desktop bugs.

I dunno what's doing it, but it happens whenever I enter certain areas (some parts of the docks, the ship, and it happened a few times in the forbidden library).

ARGH

I'm still enjoying the game, trying to ignore the flaws. There's a good game in there somewhere, if someone had taken the time and care to finish it.

But the poor implementation of technology is really too much to ignore.

I was traversing the city between missions, and a Keeper and guard spot each other. The guard turns and looks behind a crate "I saw something!", the Keeper thinks he saw me, but turns and stares at the wall behind him.

I decide to use a noisemaker to snap them out of the poor decisions they made and force a confrontation. (I don't use noisemakers normally because I'm working on ghosting the game, fairly easy on default difficulty so I'm replaying on a harder setting now)

They see each other, the guard kills the keeper, another guard shows up, sees the blood and starts looking around for ME. Citizen sees the blood, screams when she bumps into ME, calls a guard on me. The guard who originally killed the keeper comes with her, sees the body, and wonders how the body got there.

No memory, no interguard communications. Crappy AI. Almost funny if it weren't so immersion-breaking.

(http://www.f13.net/images/necropost.gif)

Just reinstalled Thief 3 on the new hd. Poking around the widescreen board, I remembered it doesn't work in widescreen on my system ( :cry: ) but I did stumble across a link to some high-res textures. The guy upped the normal mapping, too, apparently. Looks pretty nice, and there's also functional stuff like taming the item highlight and changing it from blue to copper.

http://www.graphics-by-john-p.com/textures/Thief-DS/index.shtml

Wow, those textures look 1000% better. I'm tempted to pick up the game and try it now.

It's actually a pretty decent Thief game.  I particularly liked the villain in this one.  The problem with the game is that the city travel stuff gets old really quick when you keep having to travel all over town.  It was a good idea, but I think the implementation was lacking.

Those textures are simply better looking. That guy needs a job in the industry, particularly if they didn't lag the game too much.

I applied all of them, but I do have a 256MB radeon 9800 pro. No performance hit that I can notice, I had some slight mouse lag...then I remembered to hack the 'mouselagthreshold' in the .ini. All other options cranked (multisample @ 2 or 3, I forget), Barton 3000 w/ 1GB PC3200.

I only wish the game could do 1280x720  :cry: Some days being on the cutting edge makes me a sad clown. Part of why it doesn't lag is that I'm running it @ 1024x768.

They do make the game nicer, wish he had done them all...why wasn't this guy on the pc version team in the first place?

720p is cutting edge?

Unfortunately, yes. I have to hack most games to get them to run in widescreen ratio resolutions.

Hopefully this next generation of consoles fixes that.

Wow...

It says Something about the industry when a 3rd party has to redo so much of a modern game to make it look good.

Fuck Ion Storm for the abortions that were DX2 and Thief 3.

DX2, yes. Thief 3, no. Thief 3 was still great, despite the bullshit.

You just don't like Thief in general, right?

I really like the concepts of the Thief series, but I just don't personally like the gameplay.

There's nothing wrong with it, but I just don't like it.

Really, Deus Ex 2 wasn't that bad. It was just an xbox game. I enjoyed it more than Halo 2.

Thief 3 has nothing on Morrowind. I reinstalled that sucker not long ago and had to download a whole bunch of face mods so I wouldn't throw up every few steps.

I didn't like the art of Morrowind period.  The bodies were all disjointed and awkward moving, and the faces all looked like those of Downe's Syndrome sufferers.  The terrain tended towards various shades of brown and gray.  Compound that with a drop dead boring world and I'm sorry, but it was just a huge letdown.  Hell, I thought Daggerfall was a more engaging game than Morrowind.

I'll give Bethesda credit for ambition, but frankly I've always been disappointed by their games.

Since I first set foot off that boat in Morrowind I've thought Daggerfall made it look like shit. Daggerfall was just phenomenal.

When you were playing Morrowind, did you try to make your house into the ultimate library with a copy of every book in the world? I played a thief class and found that to be pretty fun.

Armor mannequins.  That's what the game needed.  Armor just looked so sad on the floor.

(If anyone has a link to such a mod - DON'T SEND ME IT.)

I hate Morrowind.  It just goes on and on and on... endlessly.  Even after I edited my character and cheated just about every possible way I could, I STILL couldn't finish that bloody game.  I think it's a Klein bottle in disguse.

To be honest Signe, you probably just sucked horribly at it. No offence. :P

Oh and Ironwood, for you: http://www.rpgplanet.com/morrowind/modcontrols/mod.asp?modid=1375

I played Morrowwind for about 10 minutes, got bored silly, killed by cliff racers 10 times, thought everyone looked like ass, looked at the crappy looking armor and prompty uninstalled and sold it on ebay.

I agree. What I really liked about the franchise was the massive dungeons, with crazy wells that went 20 levels down into the submersed portions, etc.

I made it maybe 3/4 of the way or so through Morrowind before becoming so bored I couldn't go on...and then when I tried to go back I was totally lost (poor journaling + a gazillion npcs), and the thought of starting from scratch was nixed by the character creator. My dark elf type guy was pretty cool, but I wanted to play somthing else. Apparently there is dark elf, lizard guy, and butt-ugly guy.

No native widescreen support (http://www.widescreengamingforum.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=4629&highlight=morrowind#4629) sealed it's fate. The hack isn't bad, but more than I'd mess with for MW. I'd sooner reinstall Gothic or Gothic 2.

Bethesda needs a new art director in a BIG way.

The bugs in Daggerfall were just face-stabbingly awful, though. I remember getting stuck in some random dungeon with no way to get out for one reason or another quite often.

There were some things I liked better in Daggerfall, to be sure, but overall Morrowind was much more polished. Which is pretty scary.

Obviously, you never played Daggerfall.  Morrowind was a quaint, compact village next to Daggerfall's mind-boggling, desolate world.  I would rate Daggerfall higher than Morrowind if I could play it without falling off the world all the time.  When I consider that they both need modification to enjoy fully, it evens out a lot.  Morrowind was at its best with several key mods, such as the no-cliffracer mod, and the journal-sorta-works-now patch.  The most impressive thing about Morrowind, to me, was TESCS: I could make my own patches.

Morrowind was a cool game but it had a freaking huge flaw imo, travelling made up way to much of the game, and it was extremly tedious and slow in the begining when you ran around at a snails pace. It's also one of those games where it starts out really hard and then gets extremly easy ( god they even had an item which made you regen to full hp faster than mobs were hurting you, or how about crafting some boots which granted permanent flight ). I played it at launch and even though I never did care or finnish the main story I enjoyed runing around and geting powerful, after reinstallation and geting all the expansions I couldn't even make it out of the first village before I got tired and uninstalled.

I invented a 'Travulet' for Morrowind.

I set it up so that I was moving with the numpad (8 4 6 2) and the buttons 1 and 3 switched me between two items.

1: Travulet. 1 point permanent levitation, 1 point permanent water breathing.
2: Ground amulet: Other effects, including permanent effect water walking.

Then, always wore a Daedric tower shield with, what, 255 points of jump?

Jumping is superfast travel. Used in conjunction with a ring that does nothing but constantly heal me, yer set.

Bloodmoon was really good.

It added so much more.

I'm being serious.

Building the town was cool, making the choices were cooll;  even turning into the fucking werewolf (omg spoilers) was cool.

Tribunal sucked a big bag of rotting lepers nuts tho.

Bow down before the derail master, bitches.

My item was a necklace that healed stamina faster than you could use it. Jump, run, jump, run, jump, run. Not a supercheat, but you could work up the skills way faster without getting pooped out all the time. I had found a permanent levitation staff in game that I used for travel, no need to "cheat" there, imo.

Hmm...maybe I should track down the expansions + mods (high res, kthx) and give it another whirl. I need a break from GTASA and BF2's retard melting pot just ain't it.

Slight re-rail: The new textures are a very nice addition. Load times are increased somewhat, though. Well worth the tradeoff imo.

If only Bloodmoon came out earlier... it really showed what could be done in TESIII.  But we got Tribunal.

Travel sucks but provides motivation to join the temple.  I found some Boots of Blinding Speed, which make you run incredibly fast but inflict 100% blindness.  Since my char was an orc, however, it was only like 75% blindness thanks to innate magic resistance.

The one thing that TESIII/TESCS was missing was a savegame editor.  I give it nine thumbs up.

On topic... the Thief series is unquestionably good.  People who don't like it simply don't like good things.  Rawr.

One thing that still makes me giggle to think on it was that Orc Warlord who was unbeatable and unkillable (kinda) and possesed by his sword.

The quest was to beat him in single combat and put him out of his misery thus gaining a ....cursed sword.

What the writers obviously didn't imagine was Johhny Ironwood with his ultimate levitation necklace standing ten feet above the warrior and shooting arrows into his head.

That was funny.

I killed him the same way, just without the necklace ;)

All this talk, and funny enough especially the negative stuff, is making me want to play Morrowind really badly. Stop it, damn you.

Gah, I know I'd just get bored the second I attempt the main plot.

I was jonesing for a game last weekend...resubbed to WoW and promptly remembered I really don't like that game anymore. I don't think I'm a candidate for mmogs anymore, outside mmofps.

Was this the sword that ruined your stats by permanently making several of them 1?  That was the only time I used TESCS to make myself an item for use in my game, so I could fix that problem.

Most people or things could not stand toe-to-toe with my character, enchanted ebony and daedric equipment bristling as it was... so I am not sure if I remember anyone who was unbeatable.  Outside a mod, that is.