But in terms of what the developers had planned, the game that came out most compromised from under Spector's watch was Thief: Deadly Shadows.
Originally Deady Shadows was meant to be twice as long. Every level designer was asked to design two levels for the game, but they were all asked early on to scrap one of those levels.
The freely-explorable city Deadly Shadows introduced was intended to be many times larger than it appears in the final game. Emil Pagliarulo, the designer who created Thief 2's famoue "Life of the Party" mission had "a legendary build-out geometry of what the docks might have been. And it was almost 100% scrapped by the time we were finished."
The reason behind this ruthless cutting-down was partly to do with the console focus. But equally significant was that the studio went against its own mantra, and began developing its own technology. For both Invisible War and Deadly Shadows, Ion Storm Austin created a custom shadow renderer that could project real-time shadows from every character and object.
"It was a combination of videogame technologial sort-of one-upmanship early on, combined with an imagined notion that real-time shadows would lead to dynanism in gameplay scenarios that Thief 2 couldn't deliver. The fantasy of what we would do when the shadow of a pillar would truly move, and you could stay inside that shadow as the guard with the torch crossed through a room with thick enough columns, it sounded really good on paper."
But the combination of this advanced renderer and the limited power of the Xbox meant that huge swathes of the game had to be cut down to get it in. "It ended up being one of the decisions that most of the team felt was a massive mistake. The city sections, good gravy, we reduced those to almost nothing."
