Personally, I prefer vanilla Thief for pacing reasons. They should have put those three Thief Gold missions into Thief 2. Thief 2 deals in repetition and I gladly would have seen "Casing the Joint" replaced with something else instead of playing the whole thing all over again in the next mission.
Some other points about Thief VS Thief Gold:
- Thieves Guild: The biggest problem I have with it is that is waaay too hard a mission waaay too early in the game. It's a bitch to navigate, causing a lot of newbies to give up. It also makes the story come to a screeching halt: Just after your fence gets murdered, you're ready to dive deeper into the mysterious plot. Instead you get this mission which doesn't have anything to do with anything. It's still a fun mission once you wrap your head around it and realise that 60% of the level layout is fluff that can be ignored. You can have a lot of fun (if you're into causing monster infights) with the street patrol outside. At the very start of the level, listen to the conversation between the guild members. Quicksave near the end of their conversation, then quickload. The conversation will start all over. Rinse and repeat. By the third or fourth time you've done this, the street patrol willl walk right past the guild members, causing them to attack him. The street patrol is acting neutral towards anyone in the level at first, but getting attacked or hearing a loud noise will send him into a killing frenzy and he will attack everyone and anyone in sight. Great fun! I cleared out the whole level just using the street patrol.
- Mage Towers: I like this level, but there are two main problems I have with it. First, we have something of a continuity problem: The preceding mission "The Haunted Cathedral" asks you to steal 750 in loot (that's on normal mode, on expert the difference is more negligible), while this mission asks you to steal 400. The following mission "The Lost City" is a tough one and you're going to need all the equipment you can get, so putting a mission there that asks you to steal
less money is a mistake. The other problem would be the air tower. Did we really need platforming in Thief? Is that a welcome addition to the game? I don't think so. Also, it's a pain in the ass if you want to speedrun the level, since you'll have to wait for those slow-ass platforms.
- Caverns: I love that level. Again, tonally I thought this would have been a better fit for Thief 2 - I think they even mention it in the Making Of-video for Thief 2 as a level they are currently working on.
- Little Big World is a cool addition, even though it teeters dangerously close to immershun-breaking.
- I dislike the fire shadow they put in for Thief Gold. I can understand why they put him in, but having an unkillable foe has always annoyed me.
- "Lost City" replaces all the craymen with mages. Personally, I prefer the craymen.
Dark Project:
# Has a couple of neat level-based exploits, like how a Speed Potion can be used to nab one of the Talismans in the Lost City to save a LOT OF TIME.
This one would actually be a plus for the Gold version. You can pretty much skip the entire level if you have two speed potions. In the original version, you had to get two talismans, so you had to go through the whole level, in Gold you can just take two big leaps and you're done. The opposite is true for "Return To The Cathedral": In vanilla, there was an exploit that let you keep the cathedral doors open by putting a skull there. No more errands for Brother Murus. Gold did away with that.
.
