System Shock 3 Production On Hold With Development Team “No Longer Employed”

It wasn’t too long ago that we got our first look at alpha gameplay footage of the upcoming System Shock 3, so you might have been under the impression that development was progressing smoothly. However, as per a new report by VGC, it seems that development of the sequel at OtherSide Entertainment has hit a major roadblock.

As the report points out, various key members from the game’s team have left the studio, including the game’s writer, director, design director, and lead programmer, which is confirmed by their LinkedIn pages. Meanwhile, recently, a member of the development team anonymously posted an update on the situation over at RPG Codex. Wanting to avoid “confusion about the state of the company and the project”, the developer revealed that though the core systems of the game had progressed quite a bit, the studio was “critically behind” in developing content for the game.

Discussing whether the “failure of the project” was right, they talked about how System Shock 3 had to be “creative and weird” because it know it couldn’t compete with the scale of AAA immersive sims in the market.

“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,” they said. “And we were on our way to make something unique and possibly fun, but probably not what the audience was hungry for.”

The developer also wrote that if Starbreeze – who, due to their financial issues last year, had to sell the game’s publishing rights back to OtherSide Entertainment – had not “gone into crisis”, that would have allowed the developers to make something interesting.

“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,” they wrote.

Saying that they did not want to give too many details to avoid violating their NDA, they did say that “the team is no longer employed” at OtherSide Entertainment.

No official statement has yet been made about this by the studio, so right now, there’s no knowing what the status of the project or its development team is. Stay tuned to GamingBolt for more updates.