http://www.gamrreview.com/news/90718/eidos-montreal-drops-quick-time-events-from-thief/

QTEs will be removed and the XP system too, and there will be high difficulty settings for those liking the challenge the first games of the series offered, there will be even harder settings indeed.

Nice to see Eidos saw the light in time, before ruining it. How could they initially think a dumbed-down or totally messed-up and upset Thief could have worked is beyond me, but luckily they listened to criticisms. I'm a RPG fan, but Thief ain't RPG, making Garrett "grow" would totally ruin the challenge, that must be based on the player using Garrett's stealth abilities and equipment. Heck, an RPG system would be the opposite of what a Thief game needs, as difficulty must instead grow, with the players refining their skills to overcome it, the only thing that can better is the availability of special equipments as the number of obstacles increase, but the most powerful ones must never become too easily available.

What was wrong with the xp sytem?

It was costing Square Enix too much money.... >_>

I, the player, must make Garrett move in a stealthy way, using mostly the environment and its shadows and being as much silent as possible too and using the equipment when all this isn't enough. Making Garrett' s stats improve destroys the gameplay. In Morrowind for example, that is a RPG, with an XP, stats and abilities system, I can improve some stats and abilities up to the point of becoming almost invisible if I crouch and I walk slowly, in AD&D games, with some classes, I can become almost invisible too until I use a weapon or do some other action different from sneaking around that makes me come out of hiding, this must not happen in Thief, you cannot become stealthy just because you triggered a stealthy state, you must really be stealthy in all your actions to succeed, and lighting and the sounds you emit must modify your stealthiness in a very continuous way, otherwise it becomes a different game. An XP system could maybe work in a very limited way: to sell your loot at higher prices and to improve lockpicking as your XP grows, but implementing it just for these two things would be very little cost effective.

It's smart of Eidos to listen closely to the fanbase and try to make a game that caters to them most of all.

Thank God. I really don't understand why almost every game this generation required an XP system.

pity it's too late to add free jumping, prescripted jump points are so silly lol.

Oh noez, I didn't know about this, what did they do?

It's essentially Assasins Creed or Zelda's system I think. You hold down like run button and he'll jump/climb on whatever the game allows you to jump/climb on.

I think anyone looking at it from old thief persective will be dissapointed.
But it still might be a good-great game.

or I could be completely  wrong, heh.

Oh. Not the best thing I could imagine. Not the worst, eithe, but I'd like scripts that take away from the player its total freedom of action to be used only when strictly necessary for the plot, not in quite common actions like jumps, where they make sense only to show fancy stunts at the expense of gameplay...