The bug I just discovered tonight (which will effect everyone, including XBox players) will make me wait for a patch. Yes, its that bad. You see, in Thief DS, the difficulty mode affects the following elements of the game: -objectives / -number of guards / -AI perceptiveness * / -AI combat ability *

When you load your game during a mission, you naturally expect that all of these elements will be preserved. The truth is that the latter two will be reset to normal difficulty, regardless of what setting you started the mission on. How do I know this for certain?

Well, the DEFAULT.INI file contains a block of entries that describe the "multipliers" used to scale certain AI properties according to difficulty:
Quote:
; -- THIEF 3
;
; AI visual acuity multiplier - how well AIs can see
Difficulty_AIVisual_Mult_Easy=0.9
Difficulty_AIVisual_Mult_Normal=1.0
Difficulty_AIVisual_Mult_Hard=1.15
Difficulty_AIVisual_Mult_Expert=1.2
;
; AI auditory acuity multiplier - how well AIs can hear
Difficulty_AIAudio_Mult_Easy=0.8
Difficulty_AIAudio_Mult_Normal=1.0
Difficulty_AIAudio_Mult_Hard=1.03
Difficulty_AIAudio_Mult_Expert=1.13
;
; AI tactile acuity multiplier - how well AIs can feel
Difficulty_AITactile_Mult_Easy=1.0
Difficulty_AITactile_Mult_Normal=1.0
Difficulty_AITactile_Mult_Hard=1.0
Difficulty_AITactile_Mult_Expert=1.0
;
; AI hitpoints multiplier - all AI starting hitpoints will be scaled by this
Difficulty_AIHitPoints_Mult_Easy=0.75
Difficulty_AIHitPoints_Mult_Normal=1.0
Difficulty_AIHitPoints_Mult_Hard=1.2
Difficulty_AIHitPoints_Mult_Expert=1.3
;
; AI combat speed multiplier - all AI combat animations are scaled by this
Difficulty_AICombatSpeed_Mult_Easy=1.0
Difficulty_AICombatSpeed_Mult_Normal=1.0
Difficulty_AICombatSpeed_Mult_Hard=1.1
Difficulty_AICombatSpeed_Mult_Expert=1.2
;
; AI-to-player damage multiplier - all damage applied to the player by the AI is scaled by this
Difficulty_AIToPlayerDamage_Mult_Easy=0.5
Difficulty_AIToPlayerDamage_Mult_Normal=1.0
Difficulty_AIToPlayerDamage_Mult_Hard=1.25
Difficulty_AIToPlayerDamage_Mult_Expert=1.5

Because I was finding the game too easy on expert, I decided to increase the appropriate multipliers. It worked great at first, Hammerites were killing me in about 2 hits, just like in Thief Gold. But after reloading my game I noticed a drastic change. Much to my surprise, the damage seemed to be reduced below even the standard expert level. Unfortunately, this bug seems to occur with unmodified DEFAULT.INI files as well. Try it out for yourself. Restart a mission on *expert*, save immediately, take 1 hit from a baddie and note the health lost. Then load your game, and do the same. The damage will be smaller the second time.

Of all the multipliers listed above, the one that is not affected by this bug is AI hitpoints, which makes sense since they are calculated at the start of the mission. Think you can get around this bug by setting the "normal difficulty" multipliers in your DEFAULT.INI file to those of "expert"? Think again. The multipliers are reset to 1.0 regardless of what's in the ini file. This is bad folks, real bad.