The Making of Thief: Deadly Shadows
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Many of the difficulties centred around technology. (If you're going to be a middle-ware company if you're going to be a content company, and say your strength is to come up with game systems and content that are groundbreaking. don't also attempt to be a technology company,) Jordan argues, (We decided to write our own renderer. The company had no experience with that. They'd barely gotten the Unreal Tournament technology to be subject to their whims for Deus Ex. and when that renderer finally did come online, it was somewhat nightmarish. Not the fault of the guy who wrote it, just that it would have needed another year of hashing out issues before it was really ready. If there was one thing that was the Achilles heel of both Invisible War and Deadly Shadows it was the technology. It was hard for us to use, and we could never really get the performance up to what it needed to be for retail. And we fought it the whole way there.)
In terms of other problems, it's perhaps telling that there was a time that Ion Storm were discussing a change to the name (Manifesto Games). (There were some radical departures from traditional structured business at Ion Storm, which often lead us in a direction which people like to call (Organic) but really meant that mostly you were. well, self-congratulating while the game wasn't making as much progress as it needed to. It was so academicreally put your game down on paper. I don't believe that. I believe the best games are the ones that they could play and tune as early as pre-alpha."
