The Minimalist Project overhauls the gameplay to be closer to Thief 1/2, and generally less casual-friendly. The Collective Texture Pack improves the quality of the game's textures while remaining faithful to the original art style. Unfortunately the game's long load times can only be mitigated, not fixed. 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. Especially since Ion Storm seemingly decided to solve memory leaks on Xbox by rebooting the game every time it loaded. Load breaks were probably the single biggest complaint about both Invisible War and Deadly Shadows. This means that you can freely traverse a mission and never see a load break. This mod stitches together the previously disconnected-with-load-breaks maps into cohesive wholes. The most important mod is probably Thief 3 Gold. The various submods it includes can be easily enabled disabled from the installer and from the included configuration tool. The various projects are culminated in a combination mod named Thief 3: Sneaky Upgrade. Since the SDK's release, people have been working on trying to massage the kinks out of the game. 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. Some of the problems with Deadly Shadows are shared by Deus Ex: Invisible War, which used the same engine. 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. Deadly Shadows didn't quite live up to Thief 2 in terms of level design and mechanical flexibility.

Thief deadly shadows mods