 By October 1999 , the team had cut the game 's multiplayer feature . Pearsall explained that Looking Glass did not " have the resources to do a new kind of multiplayer and ship a finely tuned single @-@ player game " . Plans were announced in January 2000 to release a multiplayer @-@ only Thief game shortly after the completion of Thief II . As Thief II 's development continued , Looking Glass experienced extreme financial troubles . The company 's Marc LeBlanc later said that " Eidos was writing a check every week to cover our burn rate " during the last months of the project . The game 's final cost was roughly $ 2 @.@ 5 million . According to company head Paul Neurath , Eidos informed Looking Glass that " it was not an option " for Thief II to miss its release date , and that there would be " dire consequences if [ we ] missed by even a day " . An anonymous Looking Glass staffer later told Salon.com that Eidos " told us basically to ship [ Thief II ] by their fiscal quarter or die " . 
