System Shock 3 Development Team "No Longer Employed"

The development of System Shock 3 has basically come to a grinding halt. According to several outlets, it seems like the whole team working on the game have lost their jobs; at the very least, a whole bunch of vital people are no longer with the company, including the lead programmer, the director and writer, the senior environment artist, and other key players.

If you, like me, got excited back when the first news of a System Shock 3 started cropping up, well, we got our hopes up way too soon. The curse of the franchise has struck again; a whole bunch of key people working on the game at OtherSide have all confirmed that they’ve left the company in the past five months. This includes the lead programmer, design director, the writer and director, QA lead, senior environment artist, and others. According to an anonymous developer, as reported by several outlets, the entire team is “no longer employed” at OtherSide.

Now, of course, the trouble started a year ago, when Starbreeze sold the publishing rights of System Shock 3 back to OtherSide. That way, they recouped what they invested in the game, and everything has since been squarely on Otherside’s shoulders. And, well, it seems that things really haven’t worked out. Which is a shame, because, according to former community manager Sam Luangkhot: “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.”

So, yeah. System Shock 3 remains in limbo for the foreseeable future; if anything, it’s now one step closer to the grave than before. Are we eve gonna see it? Well, maybe. Once Cyberpunk 2077 launches, I have a feeling that there will be a rise in the market for similar sci-fi titles. So, with any help and a push from Father Capitalism, we might yet butt heads with SHODAN again.