Thief's deadly difficulty issue patched

Eidos has released a patch for the PC version of Thief: Deadly Shadows, correcting a frustrating issue that thrust the difficulty level back to default whenever loading from a save file - much to the annoyance of the Thief hardcore more than anybody, who were forced to revert to "Normal" level whenever they died, when they really wanted to test their wits against "Expert".

Although the game doesn't overtly acknowledge the problem, it's understood that guard awareness and other attributes are affected by the bug. Fortunately the patch, which is available now from Eidos' support pages, should fix it up for good, allowing players to pick a difficulty level and then stick to it however many times they're forced to reload.

According to reports, Eidos is still considering its options for patching the Xbox version of the game, reviewed here. When asked whether Xbox Live auto-update might be an option by sections of the US press, representatives were non-committal. "We are still currently looking into that," one told GameSpot. We'll let you know if and when anything happens on that front.