Bad news for fans of the immersive sim genre. A former developer who worked on the long-awaited sequel to one of the grand-daddies of the genre has stated that development on System Shock 3 has halted with the development team being no more employed.
The bombshell was dropped by RPGCodex user “Kin Corn Karn” – a former developer on System Shock 3. Naturally, his claims offer credible insight into what is happening behind the scenes at developer OtherSide Entertainment. System Shock 3 has been in development for five years now, and Kin Corn Karn’s statement shed some light why it took so long, and more importantly, that Otherside Entertainment might have bitten off more than they could swallow. Here’s what he had to say:
The only reason I’m posting is because I saw so much confusion about the state of the company and the project I thought some first person information would be welcome. I never suggested we were halfway done, core systems are a great foundation for a game but most of the work is content development which we were critically behind in, both in real assets and in tool support for an efficient pipeline.
Was the failure of the project right? It’s hard to say. If Starbreeze hadn’t gone into crisis I think we would’ve delivered something interesting with some fresh and innovative gameplay, but a much smaller game than what people were expecting and inevitably disappointing for a sequel to such a beloved franchise.
Those high expectations drove a lot of expensive experimentation. We were a small team and knew we couldn’t compete with current immersive sims in production quality and breadth, so we had to be creative and clever and weird. And we were on our way to make something unique and possibly fun, but probably not what the audience was hungry for.
Creating a systemic multi-layered game is a tall order for even large studios and by going the self-publishing route, Otherside looks to have set their goals unrealistically high. It also probably didn’t help that their most recent game Underworld Ascendant flopped pretty hard. Not only financially but also with both gamers and critics. And that was also a sequel for one of the 90s more prominent PC games. Just like System Shock.
Otherside has not released a statement about these comments but the social media accounts have gone radio silent since last October. Let’s hope System Shock 3 will eventually see the light of day and be a formidable sequel for the franchise. And if all fails, at least there’s a full-on remake of the first System Shock and a remaster of the second game on the horizon.
