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System Shock 3 may be dead following OtherSide Entertainment layoffs

After the departure of much of the System Shock 3 team at OtherSide Entertainment, the game's future is in serious doubt.

TJ Denzer

February 10, 2020 1:20 PM

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System Shock 3 has been through a rocky road of licensing rights and development setbacks. We saw a promising pre-alpha snippet a while back, but not much since, and it looks like we won’t be seeing anymore System Shock 3 indefinitely from the looks of things. Following layoffs of key System Shock 3 personnel at OtherSide Entertainment, it’s looking like System Shock 3 is dead in the water for the foreseeable future.

It was revealed back in December 2019 in various communications that OtherSide Entertainment had laid off some of its staff, as originally confirmed by OtherSide Community Manager Sam Luangkhot. It turns out that a key part of those layoffs had been the team working on System Shock 3, as revealed by a developer posting under the name Kin Corn Karn, who said the team for SS3 is no longer employed. Further evidence of trouble on the project is that System Shock 3’s recent Game Design Director Chase Jones revealed on his LinkedIn that he is no longer with OtherSide and has moved on to work at Lost Boys Interactive.

Jones’ exit from OtherSide speaks volumes, but Kin Corn Karn revealed further that though a core foundation of System Shock 3 was done, the game fell too far behind to keep up with expectations.

“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,” Karn wrote.

Karn attributes the issues with the development of System Shock 3 to the changing of hands between StarBreeze and OtherSide Entertainment. Starbreeze originally acquired the rights to System Shock in 2017 and promised to put a hefty sum of money into the sequel, but when Overkill’s The Walking Dead failed under the Starbreeze banner, the studio sold the rights back to OtherSide to recoup its losses. OtherSide released a snippet of pre-alpha gameplay showcasing series villain SHODAN in late 2019, but with the layoffs in the months after, these snippets are all we’ll see for a while.

Seems we’ll have to rely on Nightdive Studios and their remaster of the original System Shock for any new good things out of the series for the time being.

TJ Denzer

Senior News Editor

TJ Denzer is a player and writer with a passion for games that has dominated a lifetime. He found his way to the Shacknews roster in late 2019 and has worked his way to Senior News Editor since. Between news coverage, he also aides notably in livestream projects like the indie game-focused Indie-licious, the Shacknews Stimulus Games, and the Shacknews Dump. You can reach him at tj.denzer@shacknews.com and also find him on Twitter @JohnnyChugs.