Since today, I'm finally able to play the game as well (regional release dates ... grrrr). I'm late to the party, but here are my first impressions. I should note that I somehow managed to never play any of the other Thief games, so I'm not spoiked by previous experience or huge expectations.

To me, the game feels like it was released a bit too early. I keep running into optimization issues, and the options for performance tuning are unsatisfactory. The _gameplay_ options look really great, giving players a lot of freedom to tweak the game to provide the experience they want, but unfortunately this doesn't do much good if the performance is crap.

I'm running into the following issues:

- Gameplay is stuttering even on lowest settings. Performance is extremely uneven. The game may run great for a while (especially indoors), but then the framerate suddenly drops below 1 when I go outside or when a conversation starts.

- Conversations are unintelligible due to timing issues. The game often stutters before a conversation starts, and then tries to catch up by skipping lines or letting everyone say their lines at once.

- The game can look great (but is then unplayable on any but the beefiest rigs), or look like crap (and still have performance issues at times). There is no middle ground. Point in case, in terms of anti-aliasing the game offers either FXAA (which is fast, but makes everything look blurry), or SSAA (which looks good, but requires exorbitant processing power). Most modern games provide an AA method that combines good quality with decent performance, such as MSAA or CSAA. Thief does not - either you have a truly stellar rig, or you're left with the most primitive AA method on the market, i.e. a simple blur filter. You can't even finetune the number of passes. Hopefully I can introduce a better AA method through my graphics driver, I haven't checked that yet.

- The performance presets make no sense. They change parameters that have very little impact on performance (i.e. lowering anisotropic filtering from 8 to 4; this should not produce any noticeable performance gain on the systems that can run this game). On the other hand, performance-hungry features like Depth of Field can't be turned off (there are just two settings for it, "normal" and "high"). Depth of field is a horrible idea in the first place, I can't remember the last modern game that did not allow me to turn it off.

- The benchmark utility is useless. Two passes with the same settings lead to results that are randomly spread between 20 and 30 FPS.

The above problems mean that the game is currently not really playable for me. The game might be fun when it works, but I couldn't tell. Either I look at a gorgeous slide show, or I play a game that looks like it was released 6 years ago and that _still_ has performance issues. I guess I'll have to wait for a performance patch.

From what I could play so far, I liked the characters and the voice acting, but found the level layout ultra-linear and boring. But I couldn't play very far.

(For comparison: My machine has an i5 25000K CPU, an nVidia 560 GT graphics card with 1 GB memory, and 8 GB of RAM. I wouldn't expect to play the game on its highest settings with that rig, but I exceed the official requirements by far. The game is supposed to even run on dual-core CPUs and an nVidia 250 (!), I have no idea how this is supposed to work. Considering how far my rig exceeds the requirements, the performance that I'm getting out of it is ridiculous.)

They provide 32bit and 64bit binaries for the game. In my playthrough, the 32bit binary was waaaay better. Smaller loading times and only a bit of stutter immediately after level load. Once I moved my mouse around things got smooth again.

CPU: i5 2500k
RAM: 8GB Corsair XMS
GPU: GTX 660 + latest stable drivers available
OS: Windows 7 64bit

Here's my rig:

Win 7 Home x32
4 GB RAM (1.1 GB is always used by background tasks)
nVidia 650Ti, 1GB (MSI card with afterburner OC items turned off) w/ 1GB RAM
7200?rpg 1TB HD on a 1st gen SATA
1440x900 monitor
EDIT: I forgot my processor. It's a 3.0 GHz Core 2 Duo.

I'm playing at full resolution on mostly normal settings. I set shadows to 1 above lowest and I was getting terrible stutter due to on-the-fly level loading. After I turned down the texture from normal to 1 notch below normal, I have yet to experience any stutter at all. The open-world-ish area and all of the levels so far are smooth going.

I've hit just a few sound glitches. A conversation was cut off early and a new NPCs started the same conversation just moments apart, which caused crazy echoing. And I got a somewhat loud hum that wouldn't go away until I restarted the game.

Thanks, looks like very useful info. Also thanks to silviucc and Tallima for their feedback.

I'll give it another try later tonight, and will report back whether the suggestions worked for me. I'm optimistic about seeing at least _some_ improvement, since the suggestions seem to fit the problems that I'm having quite well. I'll probably still have to experiment with AA methods though. I'm playing on an 28'' monitor with a 1920x1200 resolution that's less than an arm's length in front of me - makes for quite a cinematic experience, but also means that jaggies stand out more for me than for many other gamers.

This won't help anyone having problems, unless brands/drivers come into play. I'm having no issues (in terms of framerate/performance). The game appears to be FPS-locked at 60 and I'm staying pretty much at 60. I'm playing at 1920x1080 with most of the settings "high" or "on".


Intel I7 3960X @3.30 GHz
32GB RAM
7.8 Windows Experience (7.1sp1)
SSD
GTX 590

I was a little worried on the video card as the recommended specs are a 660 or higher, but I guess since the 590 is a dual board single card that it packs more resources... seems like they still need to work on their numbering schemes.

The first digit denotes the GPU generation, the second the processing power of the card. A 590 should provide much better performance than a 660. The performance gains between different generations are smaller (by far) then the performance differences of the different models within each generation. The only risk with having a powerful card of an older generation is that the GPU might not be able to utilize the newest graphics features, but I don't think anything significant was added between nVidia generations 5 and 6.

I can't seem to paste the whole review, so I'll do it in sections. This is part 1. The short version is that Thief 4 is a flawed game that provides tons of fun. At 40 hours of play time, I still have 2 levels remaining. I can highly recommend to stealth fans.

Audio: 7/10

Points deducted: Combat music can't be disabled or modified. Its tied to overall music sliders. It plays during intense action sequences as well. Often you will miss dialogue, even plot dialogue during these sequences. Garrett will make comments at the same time as other NPCs causing you to miss both since both play at the same volume. A few of the cut-scenes have the voices too low, which is fairly poor since those are pre-rendered. Garrett's voice isn't Garrett. He is ok, but I find his voice to be the weakest of the cast. Other NPCs outshine his performance considerably. While trying to read side-quest objectives, nearby NPCs continue to repeat the same line over and over again.

The Good: Musical score is very well done (mostly the exploration and ambient music). Sound effects are amazing. surround sound is spot on. City guard and NPC banter is exhaustive. There is a plethora of recorded dialogue to seek out. For being an audio focused game, Thief 4 delivers a sound-rich experience as good as, if not better, than its predecessors. A little polish on the above cons and this would be a masterful accomplishment.

Thiefiness: 10/10

The Good: Secret areas hidden very well throughout the city and the missions to encourage hours upon hours of stealth and exploration. Look through keyholes to witness conversation, or to plan your approach. Disable security systems and traps. Hunt for documents, special loot, items, and coin. Pickpocket, lockpick, steal, listen, follow... its all here. Rope arrows are back. Use the environment and your equipment to solve minor puzzles. Customize the UI to have as clean of an interface as you like... or stack it up and have help in every pixel of your monitor. Knock out guards or ghost the level... or even the entire game. Not only does the gameplay allow ghosting, you can even set the game rules to enforce it. Put out small candles with your hands if you are close enough (finally!). Loot is well hidden and there is plenty of it. Your journal keeps track of loot sets which contain paintings, plaques, rare loot, and documents. You will also need to buy special tools to obtain all of it. On the Master difficulty level it will be required to visit your fences to buy gear in order to obtain all the shiny goods.

Maps: 6/10

Points deducted: The city is huge. The compass only functions "as the crow flies". There is rarely a simple A to B quest. There is no help in trying to navigate the maze that often takes you up to the roofs then down to the sewers and through completely out of the way places in order to reach your objective. While this is grand fun in free play, its very frustrating when simply trying to play the next mission. (You must get there manually). Also, you can't set a waypoint. With side quests being a nice part of this game, getting to the quest givers to check and see if they have quests can be difficult. Further, icons don't always show on the map pending your current location. The ability to set your own marker is a freshman game feature at this point in the industry. The actual "missions" themselves are a bit more linear than the city. There are only 8 and a couple of them are very large with multiple paths, but the rest are smaller with little options. The worst feature this game employs is the ability to take a step forward and lock yourself out of the rest of the mission. Forcing a replay if you wanted to keep exploring where you previously were. Rookie level design would dictate they give you a way back to where you came from before the mission ends. I have tracked over 2 hours simply trying to find the guy that gives me a sidequest since the map and compass won't show me where he is. This is unnecessary frustration in an otherwise splendid and sprawling city. Different parts of the city are also NOT marked on the map, which is really silly given the size of the city.

The Good: The maps are beautiful. Detail abounds. Every pixel is decorated and is visually stunning. There are some fantastic puzzles using the map space. The city is a maze full of exploration, discovery and loot hunts.

Visuals: 8/10

Points deducted: Unfortunately, this area is mostly marred by bugs. Missing or skewed textures on an important NPC and guards wigging out or getting stuck in a dead state. The, "you are dead" screen is not fitting for this type of game. Some visuals should be adjustable via game settings like the shroud of darkness and the light notification pulse. Additionally a few low res textures were spotted in a few locations.

The Good: Every inch of the city (and the missions) is gorgeously detailed in a plethora of items. Its not a "shiny" game as many feared. Its a dirty, gritty, Thief game and its breathtaking. The distant skyline is well rendered, NPCs are decorated per their station, cut-scenes are fantastic, and the overall atmosphere is exactly where a Thief game needs to be. Even the loot variety goes far beyond coin and wine bottles.

Gameplay: 8/10

Points deducted: Too many actions are bound to the "action" key. This caused a problem when I dropped a body next to a pillar. Both "peek" and "move body" were visible at the same time and it defaulted to peek. I could not move the body. Throwing bottles often did not work. In one location, even hitting the guard in the face yielded no reaction. Reloading has some odd side affects. I've seen NPCs change clothes, go missing, jump in their patrols, become alert, etc. Challenges in missions often contradict each other, making it impossible to complete them all. many of the challenges are combat related (although they are optional). Jumping removed and more platforming style movement was put in place.

The Good: The controls are pretty clean, and IMHO, much better than the clunkiness of Thief 3. While many abhor the removal of jumping, I actually like how it plays. With the more platforming focus, its much easier to discern your options. There are aslo context clues for those who choose to enable the feedback. I think this level of movement and exploration enhancements fits the Thief genre better than jumping all over the place. It also removes a great deal of frustration from missing pixels in previous jumping puzzles. Now you can focus on more fun activities than whether you missed that ledge for the 12th time or not. Its still a first person game, with first person movement, first person combat, and first person exploration.

Part 2:

Combat: 6/10

Points deducted: Even melee guards can throw things at you. Their precision is deadly and the damage is massive. Guards often seem linked. Especially when they patrol in pairs. When one sees you or is alerted, there is no time delay before the others in the area are also immediately alerted. This becomes a problem when as noted above, everyone is a marksman and lethal. Running away in this game isn't a sure thing anymore. Even when a guard is not alerterd and you attack via ranged from in the shadows and score a perfect headshot... it takes about 15% of their life away (I'm only commenting on Master difficulty). There are no more deadly stealthy take downs. While some of these may be considered "pros" to many, they are not acting as advertised and seem slightly hard-core for a preset difficulty setting. I sunk points into the ability to be able to knock out guards even when they were alerted... I never saw this work correctly. The shadows are NOT enough to conceal you. If a guard paths within 10 - 20 feet of you or a body, they will become alert and then find you. While this is more realistic and challenging... its also a significant deviation from the previous games and will pose some frustrations and new learning curves for the vets. The difficulty can change from easy to challenging on a dime and then back to easy again just as quickly. You cannot knock out non-combatants on the higher difficulties. This makes many of the neat... devices unusable in certain missions. This seemed a bit extreme for a default difficulty level.

The good. You do not have a sword in this game. Your only melee weapon is your blackjack. By pressing a dodge key, and then swinging your blackjack you can engage in hand to hand combat. This feels cleaner and more realistic than our sword carrying friend from the first Thief games. The bow/arrow feels very responsive. But more than anything, its satisfying to plan your attack and hide in the shadows, silently taking down your foes one at a time. This game focuses on planning your attack more than any of the previous 3 games.

Uniqueness: 9/10

Points deducted: The theme changed very drastically from other games. Thief 1 - 3 were fairly clean games. For little discernable reasons Thief 4 contains nudity and adult content. As mentioned in the combat section, the shadows only work if no one is arround. Even knocking out a completely unaware NPC in perfect dark will alert everyone nearby if another guard is 10 - 20 feet away in the shadows with you. No more still images for cut-scenes. No voiced dialogue for the mission briefings. A newly voiced garrett, while ok, isn't Garrett. There are only 8 actaul plot missions to the story.

The Good: Missing a tumbler while lockpicking can alert nearby pets from the sound it makes. Dogs and birds are cleverly placed and both react differently based on your actions. New arrow types create fun and interesting platform style puzzles. Side missions can be obtained and completed at your leisure while roaming the city and they are optional. There are both quick missions, (go find this one item in a secret area) and small sized, self contained maps with objectives and unique loot. You can buy AND sell from fences scattered throughout the city. You can also buy character upgrades that make you VERY slightly better in various areas. And based on your difficulty, it can be very expensive to do so. Equipment is not littered throughout levels. If you thought it was odd that Lord bafford would know what a flash bomb was, let alone own some... this will make you happy. Visit your fence between every mission if you want to find all the goodies. Now you can track all the documents you find and know if you have found the whole set for given areas. This also allows you to read them at any time after you have found them. Broken glass and water puddles are new hazards to watch out for that can give your cover away. Fully animated cut scenes not only show off some amazing character detail, but really help the story move along and draw depth into some of the characters thanks to some great voice acting. Use of the claw allows further exploration. Look through keyholes for extra conversations or to simply scout the room before entering. Nice lockpicking system, especially with a mouse. Unbelievably detailed environments without losing the grity feel of the Thief universe. Very simple approach to finding hidden secrets behind paintings. You can look over railings for a better view of the area below you.

Story: 5/10

Points deducted: the plot feels very much like Neverwinter Nights. There is a plague, bodies are piling up, city is under quarantine, we must stop Dexter... err, I mean, the Baron. Ending was not to my liking, and it was very abrupt. By far, the worst MAIN storyline in the series, IMHO. The slow build provides promise, but then nothing is really delivered.

The good: The writing is pretty good. Lots of humorous side comments, back story, banter, and typical Thiefy goodness. Its not nearly as repetitious as previous games. They voiced a fair amount of dialogue for the city.

Marketing: 3/10

Points Deducted: the Bank Heist bullets say the following: "Unlock a challenging mission that will put your
thieving skills to the test." Then the trailer says "track your time and beat your friends"... which is what the
challenge maps are for. But, even though its "challenging" and its tracked... its not a challenge map, meaning
everytime you want to replay the bank heist, you have to go and find it in the city like a normal level.

The trailer for the Bank Heist also says, "The hardest safe to crack isn't in the biggest bank". While that sounds
cool, what they mean is, its a very, very small level. It took me an hour my first time through, but that was not
exploration. Its wall to wall guards, cameras, and tile floor. Throw in a few traps and it takes a bit to get
used to it. The top 100 leaderboard spots are all under 24 minutes and this is day 1.

The soundtrack that I paid extra for when I bought the game contains only 10 tracks. If you want the other 10, you
have to pay extra. Intentionally misleading advertising at its finest :/

There is day 1 DLC, which I find appalling. The good news is that, so far, its only one Challenge map.

The good: The official marketing videos are top notch. Not knowing their other plans, i was lured into a day 1
purchase by seeing how customizable the game was in addition to some wonderfully orchestrated gameplay and story pieces. The game was also on sale for well over a month before launch and it did come with multiple bonuses pending where you bought it from.

Here is a tweak guide that might help you out for some of the problems, there is a stuttering segment as well, you can give some of the solutions a try

http://forums.thedarkmod.com/topic/16001-thief-4-tweaks-fixes/

Finally got my youtube issues sorted... a few examples of shortcomings in the game... luckily these issues were not seen very often:

AI bug happened to me 3 times:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ef1TN7Paki8

Texture glitch on a main NPC, was that way the entire game, but only this NPC causing me to think it was not my rig:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rtEoSnlBFhI

Issues with removing jumping... IF you don't plan the terrain properly. This only happened once that I recall, but this is what people will yell about.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RyQtSrafxT0

Okay, I know solved most of the technical issues I had (thanks to everyone for providing assistance!). I think the core problem was actually that I had not updated the nVidia drivers - doing this immediately solved a the annoying frame rate drops to <1, as well as the unintelligible dialog due to everyone talking at once.

The suggested fixes in the "Dark Mod" forum improved performance as well, but some of them also degraded the image quality considerably (e.g. the "lying woman" picture in the starting room was a pixelated mess, the shine on treasure items looked messy, etc.), so I reverted them. It was worth a try though. :)

I still seem unable to introduce a more efficient AA method into the game. If someone has successfuly applied CSAA to the game with the newest nVidia drivers, please let me know.

I was now able to play through the entire prologue, and can give some more feedback:

- Very good presentation: high-detail textures, natural animations, but still gritty atmosphere. Very high quality cinematic cutscenes.

- Good voice acting. I don't get the criticism on Garrett's voice, he sounds perfectly okay to me. I never played the old Thief games though, so I don't know the "original" voice and can't tell whether that one would have been better.

- Very boring level design: completely linear, your path is pretty much pre-determined, I felt like playing Doom 3 again. Not a good sign, hopefully this was just a feature of the prologue and not one that permeates the game.

- The game offers me a choice with regard to playstyle, but so far I haven't seen many situations where the choice would have been meaningful. It's not like "Deus Ex" where the brilliant level design allowed you to play the same level in very different ways depending on your skills. There's just a handful of situations where you can choose to take someone down or rather distract him / slip through unseen, that's all the choice I'm seeing so far. This may improve later in the game, I certainly hope so.

- Immersion-breaking loot placement that makes no sense. Silverware standing around in the street etc. It feels placed carelessly and only for the sake of giving the player something to loot, like collecting rings in a Sonic game. Less loot would have been better for the atmosphere.

- NPCs keep talking with themselves to "announce" whether they are looking for the player or have stopped doing so. There's a woman sitting in her living room, and I shoot a water arrow straight in front of her face to douse the fire in the fireplace - and she exclaims "Who did that?!". After a while she says "There doesn't seem to be anybody there." (how would you know lady, you haven't even begun to look!). Then she proceeds sitting in the dark forever while I loot the room. Not very convincing.

- Movement feels extremely restricted. I can't jump (yes, I know, old news, but it seems such a silly choice and it turns out it's really a problem during gameplay) - but if there's a ramp, I suddenly, magically, can. Some things I can climb on, others I can't. Some corners I can peek around, others I can't. Some ledges I can drop down, others I can't. It's the inconsistency that's the main problem here, it's ruining the immersion. I'm constantly faced with situations where I think "I ought to be able to do this here", but I can't, and this is pulling me out of character regularly. The only "solution" is to keep the on-screen control prompts on throughout the game, but that's killing immersion right from the start.

- In short, the overarching feeling that the game is giving me so far is one of restriction. My movement feels restricted, my way of interacting with the environment feels restricted, etc. I never feel really in control, in each situation I can only do what the developers kindly permitted me to do in that specific situation. And contrary to other games, which at least restrict me in a consistent way, this game constantly frustrates me by allowing the same interaction in one situation, but not in another, so that I can never "settle" in one type of gameplay and feel immersed.

It's way too early for a final verdict though. The prologue may simply be much more restrictive than the rest of the game. In Tomb Raider 2013, the first section was ultra-linear as well, but later the game offered two or three really large areas to explore. It may be similar with Thief. I do get the feeling though that the developers opted for a control paradigm that just doesn't work.

So, the game looks good but needs to run at constant 60+fps or else it looks like is running at 20fps....this is crap!
And not being able to jump makes it very awkward to move around the world, specially because you need to use keys to do everything, want to peak in a corner?hold E then hold space to turn in the corner, want to climb? hold space, want to run ?hold space, need to open a window?mash E

You cant tell one you can climb something or not, very frustrating...

So the combination of poor performance of the game and bad controls made this game a very bad one, it have some potential maybe in the future...
(my pc is an i5760 with an ati 6950+ 12gb or memory and the game runs very poorly, first time a game that runs at 50fps looks and plays crappy on my pc, had to put everything on low to play it decently...

Ugh... Michael Ironside is not Sam Fisher anymore? Sad. Last game I have is Double Agent which I have not yet played. I really enjoyed the Splinter Cell series but haven't touched the newer titles due to Ubisoft's business practices although I hoped to be able to try them at some point (becoming DRM-free, or perhaps a giveaway win or somesuch). Would be a huge disappointment to lose Michael Ironside as Sam Fisher as he really suits the part and makes the character come to life doing what he does best.

They're making a Splinter Cell movie too, and I wondered about this as Ironside is more of a supporting actor than a lead, and he's older now and probably not action-hero-star agile per se. I doubt they'll use another actor for Fisher but use Ironside's voice as that just seems unlikely out of Hollywood. I figured everyone would have to come to terms with the likely change for the movie, not unlike the changes in the new Tomb Raider reboot (which worked out well IMHO), but didn't anticipate it in future games in the series.

Ah well, I suppose change can be good too. Sean Connery is no longer James Bond, but there were some others who did a pretty good Bond like Roger Moore and now Daniel Craig even though I didn't care for Brosnon, Dalton for example. Who knows... :)

I really like the new Thief and find it to be a good game. I'm running the game on mostly high settings and just to give people an idea of what rig to use for that mine is:

I5 3500 3,4ghz quad-core
8 GB RAM (1800mhz)
570 GTX 1,28 RAM
7200rpm harddrive WD

The game runs at about 50 FPS. It mostly runs smooth but with the occasional framerate drops (especially after loading a new area).

Most bugs have been audio related like voices being too low or too high during cutscenes. I also had to restart the tutorial once because an objective didn't update. But so far I haven't seen any game-breaking bugs. I also did have one BSOD.

All in all if feels like a Thief game and I would say it's on par with Deadly Shadows. It's not amazing but considering the amount of regurgitated crap we get these days of modern military shooters I find it to be great fun to be back in The City once again (though navigating it can be a pain in the ass).