System Shock 3 has been in development for over four years, with a teaser site announcing the title’s development on December 14th, 2015. It would appear, according to RPGCodex forum user “Kin Corn Karn”, a former developer at Otherside Entertainment, that the game is no longer in active development. He goes on to say:
“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.”
The game was most recently seen over at IGN on September 11th, 2019 in an exclusive gameplay trailer and screenshots from the project helmed by Austin, Texas-based studio, Otherside Entertainment, who had previously developed Underworld Ascendant which was met with mostly negative critical response, largely due to the game being seemingly unfinished, the aforementioned title currently sits at a 31 on Opencritic.com.
This comes as little surprise after the studio was hit with possible layoffs in November of 2019. In December, the former Community Manager for the studio took to Otherside’s own forums as well to give his condolences to those afflicted by the layoffs, saying:
“Extremely sad to see the Austin team affected by layoffs.
FWIW, I know people are concerned about the state of the studio. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t worried as well. Someone from the Shock3 team has been speaking about their experience over here on the RPGCodex if it hasn’t been linked already. In that thread, there are more concerns about OSE shutting down and what it means for Shock3 as well as ongoing projects.
I want to say, having been at OSE while layoffs were happening and having left just before this next round in Austin, I deeply admired every single developer I had the chance to work with. Having played the internal SS3 demo, I know the Austin team worked their asses off and made some stunning progress in the past couple of months. It hurts to see many of these developers out of a job on a project they worked so hard on. Some of the developers in Boston, like Jared, still haven’t found full-time work since June.
I understand this is the reality of game development, and doing this kind of work at an indie makes this so much harder. I watched firsthand a lot of the struggles that went into publishing UA. I wish all of our fellow former- and current-OSE employees the best of luck with their endeavors. I imagine the studio felt similarly a few years ago when UA was floundering for funding. They pulled through, somehow. I hope OSE can pull off the same, while still maintaining the quality and lessons learned.
I genuinely wish and hope that the additional Boston project and SS3 continue to steer forward.”
We have reached out to the team at Otherside Entertainment for comment on the potential cancellation and will update this article with any information we may receive.
