About the chopped up levels, if you read the first review I linked, they clearly stated that not only are the constant loading screens annoying, they lead to you feeling like you're moving from one tiny area to another and prevent you from feeling like you're ever infiltrating any kind of large location.
This technical limitation destroys the chance for Eidos Montreal to design some truly Thief-like levels. At no point do you feel like you are infiltrating a whole and complete locale, because the game is simply unable to render one. Instead, missions follow a depressing linearity, in which Garrett regularly clambers over obstacles and drops down on the other side, only to discover that there is no way back up, so that the game can flush the previous locations from memory. This happens with such surprising regularity that, at best, Thief’s missions feel like a linear progression of smaller, non-linear interiors. At no point does Garrett sneak into a building, steal an object, and then leave the way he came; he always follows a linear path through an environment to be suddenly spat out at the other end. These paths feel claustrophobic, as most interiors conform to a series of narrow corridors or walkways.
Thief 1 and 2 managed to pull off entire buildings and large open areas without loading screens 15 years ago and they were by no means less graphically intensive for their time when compared to the reboot. I recently listened to a podcast where a guy described the graphics of the original two games as 'rudimentary' - that is, everything was designed to convey important visual information to you. What doors you could enter or items you could take was always clear, while preserving visual fidelity and large, loading screen-free areas. All this and the games still managed to be Looking Glass's most profitable releases ever at a time when PCs cost 2-3x what they cost today. The reboot fails at all of these endeavors - the levels are small and the graphics fail to convey important visual information, 15 years of progress later.
Heck, DS was designed with the Xbox in mind and people criticized it for introducing too many loading screens, even though the hub world only had them when you entered a building (90% of the time, this meant either Garrett's house or the fence) and between districts. I clearly remember still being able to traverse entire multi-floored mansions without a single loading screen in between. Even with the console limitations that influenced the design, it was still far more open than the reboot and I didn't need a god d
amn Focus vision to be able to tell what I could take, despite the improved visuals over the first two games.
