OtherSide Entertainment has gone through some layoffs, so the 2015-announced System Shock 3’s development could also run into trouble.

In September 2017, Starbreeze signed a deal to publish OtherSide’s game. However, in 2019, the Swedish company ran into financial issues due to Overkill’s The Walking Dead flopping. Then, Warren Spector said that they’re looking for a publishing, funding partner, and they’d self-publish title as a last resort. However, nobody knocked on their doors.

VGC reports that Chase Jones, the design director, has left OtherSide last week. He wasn’t the online one: „System Shock 3’s writer & director, senior designer, lead programmer, QA lead, senior environment artist and more” have also left or got fired. On OtherSide’s forums, every layoff has been kept track of.

„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,” an ex-OtherSide employee, using the name Kim Corn Karn, wrote on the RPG Codex forums.

That’s sad, but there’s no official cancellation of the game just yet, so let this be a last shard of hope to see SHODAN return (and we don’t mean the remake of the first game!). We don’t see why Embracer Group (the owners of THQ Nordic and Deep Silver) didn’t step in to help…

Source: PCGamer