While he kept the door open, the person behind Deus Ex and Thief, Warren Spector, seems to have all but given up on System Shock 3. The studio developing the game, OtherSide Entertainment, hasn’t made mention of the title in over two years and its leader, Spector, has now implied that it might just be dead in the water as a project.
The news comes from a recent interview by GamesBeat. While he remained fairly closed on the matter, Spector suggested that OtherSide has given up on ever developing System Shock 3. The problem was apparently the pandemic.
“We released a statement last year,” Spector explained. “There’s not much more to say at this point. Tencent is taking the franchise forward. It’ll be up to them to say what they want to say. There’s not much clarification I can give you.”
That statement in question concerns the sale of the System Shock franchise to Tencent. “We are happy to announce that Tencent will be taking the System Shock franchise forward,” Otherside announced in May, 2020. “As a smaller Indie studio, it has been challenging for us to carry the project on our own. We believe Tencent’s deep capabilities and expertise as a leading game company will bring the franchise to new heights.”
OtherSide had apparently been working on System Shock 3 for several years. “We worked on it in 2018 and 2019,” Spector pointed out. “That was it.” He noted that OtherSide had 17 people working on the project before the System Shock franchise was handed over to Tencent.
Spector said that OtherSide was forced into downsizing during the peak of the pandemic. “There was certainly a period of personal recovery. I’m not sure how to say it. I take this personally, you know? Game development is not just a job to me,” he noted. “It took me a while to get my creative juices flowing again. And then COVID-19 hit. The world got crazy.”
Two years later and Spector is looking to the future as opposed to the past. System Shock 3 might never see the light of day, but his next project, “an immersive sim under a new intellectual property,” might just make it to launch. In any case, the studio has taken on quite a bit of new talent in the meantime.
“It feels great to be working with a talented team on a new title and a new intellectual property,” Spector asserted. “Fans of my work already know what to expect: an immersive world and engaging narrative that players will directly impact through their choices and playstyles.” He went on to say that “it’s going to be a pretty deep game. There’s going to be a lot of variety in what you can do and what we ask you to do.”
OtherSide began developing this upcoming title shortly after the System Shock franchise was handed over to Tencent. “I started thinking about it around the time COVID-19 hit,” Spector explained. “Picture me sitting alone in a room with my empty hard drive coming up with cool stuff. It sounds like a dream, but it’s not. I have a lot of ideas. I always tell people ideas are easy. I legitimately have hundreds of game concepts from one-sentence form to 20-page form on my hard drive. I went through a bunch of ideas and developed them to the point where I said ‘nah, this isn’t the one.’ But ultimately I hit on one that’s the one.”