There's an absolutely phenomenal interview over at Evil Avatar with Randy Smith of Looking Glass Studios and Ion Storm Austin fame, basically examining Thief 3 and bluntly asking "What the fuck happened there, dude?"

The interview covers the technological problems of trying to fit Thief 3 on the XBox and Randy being fired by Warren Spector for sticking too closely to the freeform ideals of Thief 1 and Thief 2.

Here's the overall summary on why Thief 3 became so lost:

The problems were more classic development problems: we didn't follow a strict development cycle, we didn't coordinate development well between 2 very similar projects, we didn't have a good budget and schedule, we didn't have great alignment with the publisher, the tech development wasn't well planned and took a bunch of wrong turns, the design was too ambitious, the direction was unfocused.

Randy also bluntly points out that Deus Ex: Invisible War sucked. Good for him. Part Two of the Interview ought to be hitting tomorrow. Florian Eckhardt

Interview with Randy Smith [Evil Avatar]

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