Yeah, they really did a poor job with many of the story missions. Heck, some of the client jobs have a better design.

How far along are you, btw?

Just chapter three. I was mainlining the story but I'm going to spend time in the city next. The early stonemarket section was the only one I really liked so far. The story missions are insanely linear.

The City can be a bitch to navigate on occasion, but other than that it's probably one of the better parts in the game. You know, just going around stealing stuff, and all.

I kinda liked the third story mission, though. Surprisingly large and some good atmosphere in there.

Alright, I'll definitely do chapter 3 before abandoning it then.

There seems to be some mission-looping bug in Thief 4, that causes all saves in a mission to point to the beginning of the mission. This bug only seemed to show itself on April 1st - I really hope it's not an April Fool's joke, that would be pretty terrible, it's stopping people progress in the game, no matter where they are.

http://forums.eidosgames.com/showthread.php?t=142875

I'm currently stuck on Level 5, and after playing the beginning a few times, I've given up until I hear that's it's all fixed...

I've also noticed the "bugs" incrementing as I've played. By the time I finished my 3rd playthrough, the game started crashing on reloads and the "bottle" inventory item would reset every single time I would load a save. I also had mantling issues where he would keep slipping off the pre-defined mantle locations.

As much fun as I had playing through it the first time, the shortcomings and poor decisions and lack of any semblance of plot (at least for the main story) really increase frustrations the more you play. Well worth the money... but not comparable to other games in the series where replays where part of the experience.

Yep, the April Fools save data bug is legit, you can check the following link for Square Enix's response. Sorry I can't post the direct link so you have to copy/paste in the browser.

www.gameinformer.com/b/news/archive/2014/04/01/users-report-date-related-thief-save-data-corruption-square-eni x-responds-.aspx

EDIT: I can't get rid of the weird space in enix, remove that and the link will work.