As announced on the TTLG forums (http://www.ttlg.com/forums/showthread.php?t=129171), The Dark Mod is now available for download from www.thedarkmod.com/ (http://www.thedarkmod.com/). This total conversion of Doom 3 transforms the game's FPS experience into a sneaking game inspired by Thief: The Dark Project and Thief: The Metal Age.
For those of you unfamiliar with Thief (and you shouldn't be), it allowed you to play the role of a master thief and explore a dark mediaeval/steampunk world populated by guards, aristocrats, various lowlives, religious fanatics and weird monstrosities. Unlike a regular FPS, your character had to rely on stealth to evade enemies and deal with them without direct confrontation: staying in the shadows, making little noise and using tools such as torch-extinguishing water arrows and diverting flash bombs. The Thief games also featured highly 3-dimensional environments, where climbing, jumping and mantling allowed a great degree of freedom in your explorations.
The Dark Mod is essentially (although not legally) Thief for the Doom 3 engine: graphics are much advanced over the late 90s visuals TDP and TMA had; mantling on objects is smooth and almost catlike, without going into ridiculous superpowers, and object interaction is generally polished. TDM's main purpose is to serve as a modern editing platform for "fan missions": the Thief community has been one of the most prolific in existence, creating over 700 missions, some extremely high-quality; it is hoped that a steady stream of missions will see the light as people become familiar with the editor (which, based on my preliminary investigations, seems powerful and relatively easy to use). Currently, 3 missions are available, but more are supposed to be out in short order.
The mod is currently still in open beta status (and this is after 5 years of work by a fairly large modding team), so not everything may be absolutely polished. However, the demo mission released last year was already stable, and a lot of work has been done in the meantime. In my opinion, this might be the most ambitious mod project that has been brought to completion, and I highly recommend people to go and check it out. Plus, Doom 3 should now be pretty cheap, and shouldn't require too much hardware.
Last but not least, here are a few sample screenshots from the main page:
(http://www.mindplaces.com/darkmod/jdude3.jpg)
(http://www.mindplaces.com/darkmod/spitter03.jpeg)
(http://www.mindplaces.com/darkmod/bonehoard_4.jpg)