Robette: Looks very good, but also reminds me of how I haven't finished Thief 2 and 3 yet. Anyhow, while at it: there seems to be a lot of complaints about thief 3 and how it is not a but game per se but merely a disappointment given it's predecessors. Should I actually play thief 3 before 2 or keep the order?
MonkeyKombat: Definitely play 2 before 3.
Yup, and then finish the third one.
Storywise it´s the same quality as the previous entries and it nicely concludes the story (there´s only one thing I didn´t like, but that would be a spoiler), engine-wise - no: Ion Storm tried to lure new players in, especially on consoles, so they switched from the Dark Engine to Unreal, which had nice graphics, but was severely limited thanks to console hardware of the time and suffered from consolithritis: levels were MUCH smaller and divided into chunks, Garret forgot how to swim and how to use rope arrows (thanks to physics engine quirk they decided to get him climbing gloves, which had severely limited use compared to arrows of yore, although developers had more control over where player can go).
The only good changes were Garret used dagger instead of a sword + lockpicking minigame was supposed to be harder when compared to the previous games, but thanks to a design overlook it is childishly easy (first try all the cardinal points, once you got the one where lockpick is shuffling inside a lock and making a sound, fine-tweak it to the right position, and that´s it.
Once you get hold of it, you will be able to open ANY lock in the game within the matter of seconds).
It contains one of the most atmospheric levels from the whole trilogy - Shalebridge Cradle and, to my own surprise, I know several people of varying age, who are all console gamers, didn´t played Thief 1+2, and said this is one of the best games they ever played, so they must have done something right here.
