According to an article over on Polygon, the upcoming Thief reboot may be suffering a lot of issues behind the scenes. Given Squenix’s recent troubles, it’s understandable that some of their titles still under development might suffer a bit, but the situation is rumored to be substantially worse off than could be reasonably assumed. According to ‘anonymous sources familiar with the studio’, which should always be taken with a whopping spoonful of salt, Thief has been suffering due to many changes in direction and vision over its already lengthy development process.
With each new high-level position change on the project, some aspects of the game were redesigned and re-envisioned, leaving the game in a mismatched, barely working state of jumbled ideas. What’s even more worrying is the supposed fact that the press demo that was shown off earlier this month seems to have been entirely designed to obfuscate the real game, and instead show a rosy vision of something that doesn’t exist as such, not to mention the fact that it took 10 months to make, which is time not spent developing the actual game. Call me crazy, but when you have to turn off NPC AI just so your demo will run, I’d say you’ve got a problem on your hands.
Now, I’d normally be happy to dismiss such rumors as immaterial until we see more of the game, and ultimately irrelevant if the actual release sees a polished, working version, but a recent incident with a different developer still stands out in my mind. The last thing I’d want to see come of Thief is the kind of bait and switch that Colonial Marines pulled, so I can only hope that things get back on track and that we all get a great game come 2014. Hell, if all else fails, I’d be cool with a cyber-shades totting Garrett pilfering the pants off a medieval cyber-punk version of Detroit.
