Thief: DS is shipping today in the U.S. It should be available in stores tomorrow.

I am genuinely disappointed with Ion Storm's recent efforts. Per the reviews gameplay and AI seem to be spot on in T:DS but Ion Storm seems to have done little to improve the engine sufficiently over the version used in DXIW. The crappy graphics and animations are inexcusable. I wasn't expecting state of the art graphics from DX:IW and T:DS but this is ridiculous Even the original Thief series had quality animations for the 3D models And these tiny XBox friendly levels don't go over well with me either.

Graphically it seems to me the biggest problem with these latest Ion Storm games is the developer's obsession with bump and/or dot mapping. These techniques give models the illusion of possessing a higher polygon count and respond realistically to realtime lighting effects but they can kill the framerate when utilized on anything but the most powerful 3D cards. I think this is also the reason why DX:IV and T:DS lack high poly models and detailed textures (let alone extremely detailed textures like those found in Max Payne 2), it was a trade off Ion Storm was willing to make in order to keep the bump/dot mapping and highlight their powerful lighting effects. It also helped Ion Storm kill two '3D' birds with one stone. Since the XBox doesn't have the same memory capacity as 256meg+ PC equipped with a 128 meg 3D card they cut corners and saved themselves the trouble of creating a more detailed texture set for the PC versions of DXIW and T:DS. Basically the only thing Ion Storm's game engine does right are lighting and physics effects. It was the one thing that saved DX:IV from looking like complete crap. I don't count the AI as that is considered independent from the rendering engine.