I...just...what...WHAT have they done to thief?

[Hama]

That can be turned off. All of the hand-holding stuff can be turned off.

[Pan]

Not all the hand holding stuff can be shut off. The vent plates and wire boxes and stabby climber mahjig scratches are all over the place. The maps feel theme park-ish vs a real city to immerse in. Hurt my overall opinion of the game.

[Hama]

Old Thief maps felt theme park-ish too. Just the graphics were worse so most people didn't notice. And I'd rather have a prettier looking game and smaller environs.

[Pan]

Different priorities I guess. I have always put gameplay ahead of graphics. Though the levels in the original thief were sometimes fricken huge. The new thief is claustrophobic by comparison. With today's tech there is no reason a game cant be "pretty" and have large environs so this game takes a hit from me. Hell Deus Ex felt larger and even seemed to load smoother.

[Hama]

Deus ex was less graphically daunting and had less clutter. Although I understand where you're coming from. I am a graphic designer, so I just love to see a beautiful game.

[Werthead]

The PS3 and XB360 have serious memory limitations which makes it difficult for them to have big environments. The Bethesda games and the likes of GTA5 have clever streaming and other ways of getting around it, but that's technically challenging and very expensive. Quite a few games go the THIEF route of simply having smaller areas but using a lot of verticality and limited routes to hide how small they are. DISHONORED did the same thing, but did a much better job of it, as did DE:HR (I think DE:HR also had hidden level loading bits).

[Hama]

So, we're still screwed over by ancient consoles with terrible hardware. Yay.

Consoles have ever been a huge rock around a PCs neck.

[Stereofm]

I loved Deus Ex a lot better. Everything was running smoothly.

[Peter Stewart]

Once I saw Gopher's review, I knew this was bad.