Just to be clear, I came over to the Vampire team after the first two years of development, and my role was to provide programming leadership and work on areas of the game code that needed immediate help, such as creature artificial intelligence and file-packing issues. So, I never interacted with Activision during development.
With that said, the Vampire game had been under development for three years. While that’s not a long time for a role-playing game—Fallout had taken three and half years to develop, and that was a simpler game made almost a decade earlier—Activision had become impatient and wanted the game shipped as soon as possible. They wanted to cut areas of complexity, we wanted to maintain quality, and the game was caught in a lopsided tug-of-war. In the end, Activision “won,” and the game was shipped with many bugs, cinematic cutscene issues, and incomplete areas.