According to Resistance 3’s creative director, Marcus Smith, Sony has afforded the development team at Insomniac a one-year extension into the Resistance 3 development cycle. This extension is definitely a welcomed change as Smith believes the crunch-time of a smaller development window resulted in people being “killed” by it.

Considering Resistance 2 was under the tight-lined development window and didn’t meet expectations for Sony or Insomniac, it’s not too surprising to see Sony give one of its most loyal developers a much larger window to pump Resistance 3 through. After all, with this added development time, there is a strong chance that Resistance 3 turns out to be the title we were all looking forward to in Resistance 2, but didn’t get.

Despite this new time frame, Smith acknowledges that the studio was able to achieve great things with the smaller windows usually given.

“I think we’ve done a really solid job of keeping up a certain level of quality doing that, despite the time constraints,” he said. “Many of us now have children, and the reality of game development is that we need to maintain the quality, so something else had to change. Extending the development cycle was the way to go. It was something we were discussing from the very beginning.”

With the cycle being pushed back a full year, that means the expected bi-annual release during the Holidays of 2010, would now be pushed back to the 2011 Holiday season next year. Without any delays, that means Sony already has one guaranteed heavy-hitter coming out next year to round it out.