Thief: Deadly Shadows has gone Gold

[Ezdaar]

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.

[Sarno]

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.

[Daydreamer]

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.

[Comstar]

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.

[Rasix]

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.

[schild]

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.

[Fabricated]

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.

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.

[Alluvian]

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.

[Fabricated]

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

[Sky]

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.

[Sky]

Just reinstalled Thief 3 on the new hd. Poking around the widescreen board, I remembered it doesn't work in widescreen on my system ( ) 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

[Shockeye]

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

[Big Gulp]

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.

[schild]

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

[Sky]

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  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?

[schild]

720p is cutting edge?

[Sky]

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.

[Strazos]

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.

[stray]

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

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

[Strazos]

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.

[schild]

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

[Calantus]

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.

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.

[Big Gulp]

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.

[schild]

Hell, I thought Daggerfall was a more engaging game than Morrowind.

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

[Paelos]

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.

[Ironwood]

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.)

[Signe]

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.

[Calantus]

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

[Furiously]

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.

[Sky]

Hell, I thought Daggerfall was a more engaging game than Morrowind.

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 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.

[WayAbvPar]

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.

[Yegolev]

I hate Morrowind.  It just goes on and on and on... endlessly.

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.

[Sairon]

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.

[Samprimary]

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.

[Ironwood]

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.