Thief Production Issues?

A post on Polygon calls the state of the Eidos Montreal's upcoming Thief reboot into question, saying they've learned from "anonymous sources familiar with the studio" that the project is suffering from inflated production costs and staff departures attributed to "corporate politics, creative confusion and a lack of publisher oversight." They say that the team has had to spend a lot of effort on creating press demos, and that "many programming tricks" are required to run their demo, going so far as to say "the vertical slice doesn't load inside Thief's current heavily modified version of Unreal Engine 3," which is hard to understand (it makes it sound like the demo doesn't actually run). They say that Square Enix is growing concerned with this situation, noting that a portion of the recent GDC demo video was to be released to the public, but a source tells them this plan was scrapped because Square Enix was unhappy with the quality of the footage. They conclude noting the game is still slated to be shown off at E3 this June.
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Re: Thief Production Issues?
Apr 27, 2013, 10:58
JTW
22.
Re: Thief Production Issues? Apr 27, 2013, 10:58
Apr 27, 2013, 10:58
JTW
 
If you read the article and take the quote in context, it would suggest that 'lack of publisher' oversight includes both proper financial management, and ensuring that the team was working according to a viable plan.

Without that oversight they ended up going way over budget, and ended up presenting demos that only worked because they were specifically scripted to work, as opposed to working through natural gameplay. The current state of the game seems to be something very different from what they had agreed to make when they started.

There's no way to say for sure whether that is good for the final game (made it more 'old school' than planned) or bad for it (ignored plans to stick to its roots.)
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