The real problem is, you get months of previews, screenshots, videos, that sort of thing, up until the release. Reviews are generally from gaming rags that have some sort of arragement with the publisher, and of course have the caveat of 'this is a review copy, all the bugs will be gone by release' to nudge them away from some negative points. And, as most games sell when they're new and have premium shelf space for their shiny new boxes, the majority of sales occur before many of the independent reviews are released. This is all assuming that people even bother to look into the quality of the games, instead of just looking at the back of the box and saying 'Ooh, that looks pretty!' and taking it home. I'd guess that console gamers are more guility of this than PC gamers, on average, because most of the real discussion goes on in online forums and gaming news sites. PC gamers are already at a PC, and generally have to keep up with the online community for new patches, mods, info from the developer, or whatever. Console gamers, on the other hand, expect their shrink-wrapped game to be perfect out of the DVD case.

Thief 3 (I'm not going to use the stupid marketing name, that's what it is) isn't a bad game, but it could have been much better. It suffers from many of the same performance problems as DX2, especially at higher (read: PC) resolutions. If they'd have given the PC port team a month to optimize it and make the interface better, I think it'd turn out to be a much better game, or at least the mistakes would be more forgivable. There's also a fair few places where you can get stuck, especially if you're the play-on-expert, get-all-the-loot, explore-everywhere type like myself. I would have also appreciated a checkpoint-based save system, or even multiple cycling quicksave slots, so you can skip back a bit earlier in the level without restarting or having to manually create and overwrite a save game every single time.

This comment was edited on May 29, 02:20.