The team has seen major changes to leadership positions

Apr 29, 2013 07:13 GMT  ·  By

It seems that the development process for the newly revealed Thief reboot, handled by the team at Eidos Montreal, is affected by problems within the various creation departments and by the departure of a number of leaders.

Polygon is quoting a number of anonymous sources inside the studio as saying that the Montreal team is divided in groups that do not respect each other’s vision of the game.

Lead and senior design positions have a high turnover rate and that means the overall concept for Thief is changing all the time, which makes it very hard for artists and gameplay designers to create coherent levels and mechanics that will not need massive changes in the future.

With each new appointment, more developers are drawn into studio politics rather than focus on increasing the quality level of the new Thief.

As early as late 2012, when the reveal package for the game was being put together, some artists rebelled because of a number of intimate scenes that were set within the brothel section and were in the end cut from the showed footage.

At the same time, the sources have emphasized that most of the Eidos Montreal team came to work on the new Thief because of their love for the franchise.

Apparently, the current incarnation of the game is very different from that envisioned about five years ago, when the development process began.

The vertical slice shown behind closed doors during the Game Developers Conference is also making some developers unhappy because it no longer reflects the core elements of the game.

Publisher Square Enix is also to blame because it failed to intervene in the process and make sure that the entire team focused on the game rather than on politics.

Thief is expected to launch on the PC, the PlayStation 4 from Sony and the Xbox 720 from Microsoft, with more information set to be delivered during E3 2013.