We haven’t heard a word out of OtherSide Entertainment regarding the status of System Shock 3 since before the new year. Over the past year the studio has announced layoffs and financial difficulties, and to make matters worse, a number of reports indicate that key project leads and developers have walked away from the project, leaving the future of the game and the studio itself in serious question.
Yet despite the sad conclusion these reports lead us to, it looks like there might still be life in OtherSide after all. A few days ago Otherside Entertainment’s VP of Marketing and Business Development Walter Somol posted in an ongoing layoff thread on the company’s forums, revealing that the studio is “still here” and working on a “new concept.”
“We’re still here. We’re all working remotely right now, probably like most of you,” Somol writes. “Our new concept is coming along nicely and we are really excited about it. We have cool and we think distinctive art style for it and we have that and gameplay coming together in UE4. I know it’s a tease, but I just can’t really say anything about it at this point.”
It’s important to note that Somol works as a member of OtherSide’s Boston team, not the Austin-based team that was said to have been working on System Shock 3 and was subsequently laid off last year. Given the fact that the game was originally developed in Unity and Somol is referencing a game being developed in the Unreal 4 engine, it’s entirely possible that the company is developing a new project.
System Shock 3 was officially announced in December of 2015, with industry legend Warren Spector, a producer on the original game, returning to work on the latest installment. In 2017, Starbreeze revealed that it had acquired publishing rights for the game, however OtherSide regaining the rights after Starbreeze found itself in serious financial trouble and had to sell of assets in order to stay afloat.
Since that time System Shock 3 has received a single teaser trailer with pre-alpha gameplay footage, which you can view below.
What do you think is actually going on at OtherSide Entertainment? Are they remaking System Shock 3 in a new engine or scraping the project altogether for a new game? Let us know down in the comments or hit me up on Twitter, @heyitsjjtravers.
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