If only it were so easy as tweaking an INI or two. We'd have a new game hitting shelves every other day.

Multiplayer takes a lot of work to pull off. Coop multiplayer is a real beast to work out. The entire game has to be designed around it. Serious Sam-type titles dont matter: they're just fragfests (not a bad thing, of course, but not the only thing either). Heavily scripted games (Half Life, Far Cry, etc.) need to be specifically designed around the multiplayer experience for that sort of thing to work. Or, you can just cheat a la Halo, and warp players together whenever they stray too far apart from one another.

The PS2 port of Half Life offers a good glimpse of how a coop campaign can take full advantage of using two players working as a team (as opposed to Halo's cheesedick solution). Its coop campaign has some flaws, surely, but it's a blast, and much more involving than Halo's coop. If it hadn't popped up quietly in the console port of a five-year-old game, it'd probably have set a new standard within the industry.

Simple DM multi is a lot easier, but Far Cry is a good example of how a game designed specifically with the one-man experience in mind can easily fail in this area. Forget Far Cry's cumbersome multiplayer interface and worthless netcode; the gameplay was focused on a single player and doesn't lend itself well to DM or CTF.

Returning to the topic at hand: skepticism in the new Thief title is well warranted. All indications point to a style of gameplay departing significantly from its predecessors, which fanboys really have no right to complain about. Seriously, no developer has any obligation to make a game to satisfy followers of their previous efforts.

But more importantly, the game is utilizing an engine that is well known to be fucked to the point of unplayability. In order to make any game on IW's engine enjoyable, that engine would need to be overhauled to such a degree that you might as well just scrap it and start from ground zero. But they haven't. So unless this engine turns out to be an extreme example of a diamond in the very, very fucking rough, Thief 3 will be filth unworthy of even Microsoft's ugly black box.