System Shock 3 developer OtherSide Entertainment has provided its first update since claims that the bulk of its Austin development team had been let go.
Earlier this year one anonymous developer suggested thatOtherSide Entertainment’s Austin team was “no longer employed”and LinkedIn confirmed an exodus of senior leads, includingSystem Shock 3’s writer and director, lead programmer, design director and more.
Since that report OtherSide has failed to respond to requests for comment and studio directorWarren Spectorhasn’t been active onhis social media channelsfor more than three months.
OtherSide’s officialTwitter,InstagramandFacebookpages haven’t been updated at all this year.
At the time of publishing, just four people, including Spector, are listed as working at OtherSide’s Texas studio on social network site LinkedIn.
Oneunconfirmed report from a Twitter userlater claimed that OtherSide Austin’s office has been empty for some time.
This week the company’s marketing and business development VP Walter Somol broke the silence, insisting: “We’re still here.”
Somol is based in OtherSide’s primary studio in Boston, Massachusetts, which worked on 2018’s critically panned Underworld Ascendant, and not the Austin, Texas-based System Shock 3 team.
The VP said in a forum post related to layoffs: “We’re still here. We’re all working remotely right now, probably like most of you. 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.”
Somol’s commentsdon’t appear to be related to System Shock 3, and the marketing head made no further reference to reports its team had been let go. VGC has reached out for comment.
System Shock 3 wasmost recently shown at GDCin March 2019, when Spector confirmed it was being made with the Unity engine.
The System Shock 3 studio had been searching for a new publisher for much of 2019, following its separation from former partnerStarbreezein February of the same year.
Warren Spector told VGC in May 2019 thattalks were progressing with “a lot” of interested publishers. He claimed that OtherSide had enough capital to fund itself for “quite a while” and didn’t rule out the studio self-publishing the game itself if it had to.
According toan anonymous developer postin February 2020 (confirmed as legitimate by OtherSide’s former community manager), System Shock 3 was “critically behind” in content creation, and its development team was “no longer employed.”
TheSystem Shock remake from Nightdive Studiosremains in development and is due out this year.
