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The Downfall of the Thief Series
Via Kotaku, an interview at Evil Avatar about the bad end of the Thief series. They discuss the game series with designer Randy Smith, who details the fine points of the early games and the ignoble end for the trilogy of games. From the article: "I view Thief 3's more action-inclined gameplay as being more than necessary for a mass-market acceptance. The problems with Thief 3 were the same as the problems that plagued Deus Ex: Invisible War - it was the tech. The team scaled back the freeform design, incorporated loading zones, not to mention the unstable frame rate and other misc. issues derived from the technology. The gameplay was relatively solid by comparison."
It truly astonishes me that many game developers continue to release games that perform so poorly - and that many game players simply roll over and accept it. Back in the early days of 3d gaming, framerate was king - if the average user's system couldn't run every single area of the game without a hitch, effects and poly counts were scaled back until it would run smoothly. I remember playing Doom on my somewhat outdated 386 machine with a high degree of satisfaction.
Nowadays I have a high end PC and graphics card and practically no new game runs smoothly at the default settings. Where oh where did game playability go?