The developers of System Shock 3 have been fired from OtherSide Entertainment. The future of the game and the studio is in question
The System Shock 3 team was disbanded, the project remained unfinished. And it seems that the future of the OtherSide Entertainment studio itself is under threat.
According to <url>, information about the dissolution of the team came from an anonymous developer from the RPGCodex forum under the nickname Kin Corn Karn. It is confirmed by previously published information from the former community manager of the studio Sam Luangkhot (Sam Luangkhot).
Over the past five months, at least a dozen key System Shock 3 developers have left OtherSide. Among them:
- director and screenwriter of the project Joe Fielder;
- level designer Jonathan Fields;
- UA Specialist Kyle Uberman;
- Lead Programmer Mark Ellender (Lead Programmer);
- Senior Graphic specialist Elizabeth Legros, who presented the game at GDC 2019;
- UI Specialist John Sizemore;
- a number of senior artists, system designers and software engineers;
- The latest was the design director Chase Jones, who left just last week.
The former community manager talked about all these dismissals from June to the present. Around the same time, the studio stopped finalizing another project — Underworld Ascendant. At least one game developer was fired along with the creators of System Shock 3.
Back in December, Luanhot expressed hope that System Shock 3 is alive and is still being developed. After Kin Corn Karn’s statement and the wave of publications that followed, she openly called on System Shock 3 creative director Warren Spector and studio co-founder Paul Neurath to clarify the situation.
How did it happen?
According to the anonymous developer, the root of the current situation is the crisis in Starbreeze. The Swedish publisher owned the rights to System Shock 3 until February last year. He sold the rights to OtherSide in order to improve his own situation (recall, Starbreeze went through restructuring all year due to the threat of bankruptcy).
“If it weren’t for the crisis in Starbreeze, we would have created something interesting with fresh and innovative gameplay,” said anonymous. But after the publisher left, the project became very intimate. The team understood that it was not large enough and could disappoint fans of the franchise.
“Our high expectations (from System Shock 3) have led to high costs for experiments,” the source writes. — As a small team, we knew that we could not compete with modern immersive sims in terms of quality and volume of production, so we had to make a creative, smart and unusual project. We were going to do something unique, maybe exciting, but probably not what the players were waiting for.”
After Starbreeze’s rejection of the project, the studio searched for a publisher or new investors for a year. Back in May, OtherSide Entertainment tried to negotiate “with a large number of interested publishers,” as Warren Spector said. He also noted that the company has its own resources and, if anything, it will be able to install the game itself. But, according to the source, the team was disbanded anyway.
What is the current state of the project?
The latest demo of the game was shown at GDC 2019 in the spring. By now, according to the same anonymous person, the studio has “critically lagged behind” the content creation schedule. Although the core mechanics of the game are almost ready.
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System Shock 3 was announced in 2015. The game was conceived as a direct continuation of the classic dilogy. All games are first—person shooters with horror and RPG elements. The action takes place on a space station where a hacker (the player character) is fighting a hostile AI named SHODAN.
The first game was released in 1994. The second was in 1999. Warren Spector was involved in the development of both. His work on the third part began in 2016, when he moved to OtherSide Entertainment. The development was carried out on the Unity engine.
Let’s add that in September OtherSide released a small teaser of the game.
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