Deadly Shadows didn't quite live up to Thief 2 in terms of level design and mechanical flexibility. However, Ion Storm did a good job capturing the essence of Thief despite the wonky jerry-rigged Unreal 2 they were building it with paired with the Xbox's 64MB RAM limitations. Some of the problems with Deadly Shadows are shared by Deus Ex: Invisible War, which used the same engine. However, Deadly Shadows arguably didn't flounder as badly as Invisible War in terms of indecision around artistic direction and core mechanics, and also had a key difference -- Ion Storm released the SDK for Deadly Shadows. Since the SDK's release, people have been working on trying to massage the kinks out of the game. The various projects are culminated in a combination mod named Thief 3: Sneaky Upgrade. The various submods it includes can be easily enabled disabled from the installer and from the included configuration tool.
The most important mod is probably Thief 3 Gold. This mod stitches together the previously disconnected-with-load-breaks maps into cohesive wholes. This means that you can freely traverse a mission and never see a load break. Load breaks were probably the single biggest complaint about both Invisible War and Deadly Shadows. Especially since Ion Storm seemingly decided to solve memory leaks on Xbox by rebooting the game every time it loaded. That's why load breaks in these games are so long and why loading saves takes the same amount of time as a clean boot. Unfortunately the game's long load times can only be mitigated, not fixed.
The Collective Texture Pack improves the quality of the game's textures while remaining faithful to the original art style.
The Minimalist Project overhauls the gameplay to be closer to Thief 1/2, and generally less casual-friendly. This is not necessarily the way you'd want newcomers to play the game but it's great for oldschool fans.
There are some other optional mods that make the briefing videos Thief 1/2-style and stuff like that.
The Sneaky Upgrade also includes a bunch of fixes on its own:
The most important mod is probably Thief 3 Gold. This mod stitches together the previously disconnected-with-load-breaks maps into cohesive wholes. This means that you can freely traverse a mission and never see a load break. Load breaks were probably the single biggest complaint about both Invisible War and Deadly Shadows. Especially since Ion Storm seemingly decided to solve memory leaks on Xbox by rebooting the game every time it loaded. That's why load breaks in these games are so long and why loading saves takes the same amount of time as a clean boot. Unfortunately the game's long load times can only be mitigated, not fixed.
The Collective Texture Pack improves the quality of the game's textures while remaining faithful to the original art style.
The Minimalist Project overhauls the gameplay to be closer to Thief 1/2, and generally less casual-friendly. This is not necessarily the way you'd want newcomers to play the game but it's great for oldschool fans.
There are some other optional mods that make the briefing videos Thief 1/2-style and stuff like that.
The Sneaky Upgrade also includes a bunch of fixes on its own:
- New missions and restarted missions will use your chosen difficulty instead of Normal/Easy
- The City sections are played on your chosen difficulty instead of always being on Normal
- Frame rate and refresh rate limiting fixes broken lockpicking, ladder climbing and wall flattening
- Some speed-up of level loading, especially with vsync on
- Fix for the desktop being visible during level loading on Vista and up
- The game will no longer crash when binding an analogue controller through the keybinds screen
- Fix for controller axes sometimes being set up reverted
- Fix for a crash that could happen when using the game's multisampling option
- Fix for the mouse freezing or becoming invisible when using large font size settings in Windows
- Fix for the mouse cursor not being captured on Windows 10
- Improved compatibility with Windows 10 by installing the d3d8to9 wrapper DLL from ReShade
- All resolutions reported by the system, plus an optional custom display mode, are available from the options screen. The aspect ratio is shown as well
- In widescreen the horizontal view is extended, instead of cropping off the top and bottom
- The field-of-view can be specified by the user. The setting will work with both the original game and fan missions, with existing savegames and with missions which use scripted FOV changes. FOV adjustment includes the mechanical eye and bow zoom
- The HUD and menus are shown correctly, regardless of resolution and aspect ratio. In 3-monitor modes, the HUD can be constricted to the center monitor
- The main menu and loading screens are shown correctly, at 4:3 aspect. The proper movies, which are letterboxed, are allowed to crop to fit the monitor (up to 16:9)
- Take screenshots with descriptive file names, and automatically with savegames
- XBox360-type gamepads are working, the triggers are mapped to buttons. Support for up to 16 gamepad buttons using modifiers. Mouse and escape key emulation
- Run the game on a display other than the primary
- Multiple quick saves, quick load the most recent save, human-readable savegame folder names
