Toxin wrote:

I recently played through the Thief series again, and spotted something I hadn't realised before: Thief: Deadly Shadows isn't really a very good game. It's pretty, and really rather funny at times, but as a game there isn't much to recommend it.

Here's why: you don't have to steal anything. For a game called "Thief" that's rather poor.

The previous two games required you to be as larcenous as possible, because the amount of equipment you could purchase for the next mission depended on how much loot you'd snaffled in the previous mission. You couldn't carry unspent money over between missions, so plenty of theft was the order of the day. Of course, you could pick up some equipment during each mission, but it's better to go into a mission as well-stocked as possible, rather than hope you might pick up that critical piece of equipment from a locked chest somewhere.

Thief 3 has removed those limitations. All the equipment you'll ever need is lying around for the taking during the city segment between each mission, and your inventory and cash are preserved between missions. The training mission alone lets you pick up the maximum amount of 25 water arrows just by hanging around the crate and waiting a couple of seconds for the item to respawn. You could buy things like oil flasks, flash bombs, moss arrows and the like, but it just isn't necessary. There's no longer any motivation to steal.

The game engine requires you to steal varying amounts of loot depending on the diffiiculty level, but the reason for doing so has changed from affecting how well-equipped you begin the next mission to merely being an arbitrary objective. There's no reward.

It's a shame that the last instalment in the series just doesn't live up to the standards set by its predecessors. It's a shame Looking Glass Studios folded; I wonder what Thief 3 might have been.

Webster wrote:

I never played the third one.