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I recommend "Thief - the Metal Age". Arguably the biggest modding community on the net. Hop over to Thief: The Circle for more info.

No, realism.

Investors don't throw their money away to produce something that will only yield them marginal returns that don't reflect the risk. In the case in point, the Thief series had a track record. It had already shown itself to be hugely innovative in terms of gameplay (and sound modeling, but not graphics or physics) and capable of attracting a small devoted following. See thief-thecircle.com to see just how devoted -- the fan-made mission community for Thief 1 and 2 is still going strong after all these years. But to an investor -- you know, the guy without whose money development won't happen at all -- the main point of interest would be the "small" part. It tells him that he's not going to get much back for his trouble. Therefore, the game had to change if it was to be made at all. It became more mainstream-oriented, and it was modified to be playable on a console to significantly expand the potential market. Both changed had an unavoidable effect on gameplay.

Would I have preferred a Thief 3 more in the vein of the first two? Absolutely. Do I prefer having the Thief 3 we got rather than no more Thief at all? On balance, yes.

That's not complacency. That's living in the real world.

Hear, Hear!!

I second that emotion. I've played Thief, Thief II, and Thief III. Not only were the games great fun and engaging the first time around but the tremendous fan support made it even better. The original missions in Thief were, for most, more entertaining and engaging but the improved Dark enging in Thief II took the play to the next leve, I thought. Thief III, released after the untimely demise of EIDOS, is a different game entirely...it lacks the original spark of the first two...but it will scare the weak-of-heart into cardiac arrest if you aren't careful.

For both The original Thief and the improved engine in Thief II, hundreds of fantastic fan missions are available. My aging CD's from Thief are going on six years old, they are _both_ loaded on my current systm, and are fully playable.

http://www.ttlg.com/
http://www.thief-thecircle.com/

There's a lot of help out there for that - try Dromed Central and Komag's Introductory Tutorial. There's also the Editors' Guild at TTLG.

Well, I use my PC as a game box with some browsing only (with SSH if I need to access one of the unixish machines) so here's my stuff:

10 : Spybot Search & Destroy (Excellent spyware killer)
9 : Spyware Blaster (Recommended by Spybot author to run concurrently)
8 : Some form of browser.
7 : PuTTY (SSH client w/ tunnelling)
6 : Thief (awesome game)
5 : Thief 2 (more Thief!)
4 : Darkloader (allows one to run custom fan missions in the Thief games)
3 : System Shock 2 (creepy sci-fi rp/fps)
2 : For those days I feel like a slug-fest? Doomsday and the ol' Doom games. (adds real 3D and all the video card eye candy to Doom/Heretic/etc. A MUST HAVE!)
1 : Half Life You know it! (still has one of the best stories of any game around)

Actually, some companies did try originality. Let's take, say, Looking Glass. Those guys made *EXCELLENT* games. Thief revolutionized the FPS concept. Thief 2 is one of my fav games ever, and one of the very few remotely recent games that I consider worth my time.

Next thing you know, Looking Glass bites the dust.

Why?

My idea is that if you're reaching for the masses (and if you want to make money with a $50 game, you'd better reach for the masses), you'll have to aim for the masses' Lowest Common Denominator. Kind of like McD, if you want: they sell cheap crap that is successful worldwide because it's the lowest common denominator of food. Maybe it goes the same for games, and the suits, whose priority is to make the most money out of the game, will only approve games with the most basic gameplay...

Sad, indeed. Good thing there are mods...