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‘System Shock 3’ in Limbo as Dev Team Vanishes

Credit: OtherSide Entertainment

Who is SHODAN supposed to turn into cyborgs now?

Since its announcement back in 2015, the development for System Shock 3 has been especially secretive. While NightDive Studios is currently working on a remake of the original game, OtherSide Entertainment was supposed to be creating this new entry into the cult classic sci-fi horror series. However, according to some recently discovered information, it seems most of System Shock 3‘s dev team are currently missing in action (by which I mean they either quit or were laid off).

According to reports collected by Video Game Chronicle, multiple important members of the team have left the project over the last few months. This includes the writer/director, the QA lead, the lead programmer, and the senior designer, just to name a few. Despite these departures, the remaining team was still working on the game, at least as far as anyone knew. According to VGC’s most recently obtained report, though, it now appears as though nearly or all of the team has been laid off from OtherSide Entertainment.

An anonymous developer, whose story was corroborated by OtherSide’s former community manager Sam Luangkhot, posted to the RPGCodex forums about the dire state of the project.

  • “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.”

Several gaming news outlets have reached out to OtherSide for a comment on the current state of System Shock 3, but as of writing, radio silence has been maintained.

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