System Shock 3 - In Trouble?

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GameWatcher reports that Otherside Entertainment has recently laid off a number of important developers. What this means for System Shock 3 is not certain at this stage but there are rumblings from former employees.

The former Community Manager then pointed at a thread on RPGCodex, where another former OtherSide Austin employee, going by the username Kin Corn Karn, was detailing the situation behind doors.

"Warren [Spector, Studio Director] kept promising us a play test to give Boston feedback, but for whatever reason it never happened, so most of us didn't play it until it launched. We were horrified. Not only was it a financial loss for the company, the damage to our reputation was irreversible even if Austin had nothing to do with it. When the news about Starbreeze came it cast a big shadow over our hopes to find a new publisher.", they said on the OtherSide Boston-developed Underworld Ascendant which launched in a disastrous state.

"There's a lot of criticism of Warren here that I don't think is very fair. He was the most visible face of the team so I imagine it's natural to assign him blame, but if anything we needed more of his direct involvement. The team had a lot of strong personalities and he was mostly hands-off. In person he has a very gentle, kind, and humble demeanor. He had a good vision for the game, and perhaps some ambitions that were outside our reach, but I don't recall his involvement ever being corrosive.", he continued, describing Warren Spector.

They then proceed to outline a series of problems that made System Shock 3's development difficult. These included developing the title in Unity instead of Unreal Engine 4, an understaffed design team, and "milestone tunnel vision" (which they say saw the work from milestone demos being thrown away).

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More information.
 
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I backed Underworld Ascendent ... but haven’t played it at all, hearing about the crappy state I was waiting for it to get to a more playable state. Oh well - I would honestly NO SS3 than a crappy SS3.
 
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Not surprised given its early troubled development.

Underworld Ascendent was also a disaster.
 
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A cancelled SS3 would be better than a horrible SS3.
 
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Methinks the situation is crystal-clear:
Warren Spector is an old-school game developer, that is, he got used to the small dev teams of old:
- where the designer, the coder and artist are pretty much equal,
- therefore creative arguments are very heated, and frequent,
- but the small team camaraderie resolves everything…
- … usually at the 11th hour.
The end result is a labor of love, albeit built from blood, sweat and tears.

Now compare this to a modern game dev company, where:
- everything is smartly over-managed (Slack! Performance trackers! Scrum sprints! Outsource! Remote work!)
- but it is actually dumbly under-managed (Crisis? What crisis?)
- with an uneven, toxic team culture ("not my job, not my responsibility, it's his fault")
- yet, the expectations are extreme ("if we won't meet these figures, we'll be f*cked")
The end result is a lifeless product, built from indifference, ignorance and confusion.

I won't say that Otherside is the horror company in the example above, but I'm pretty sure Warren Spector feels out of place at them.
 
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Nightdive has nothing to do with this, it’s OtherSide.
 
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I completely agree with what others have said in this thread, if it appears terrible at this point, yank the plug rather than releasing something that will be mocked, and not revered. And yeah, I also supported the Underworld game and haven't yet worked up the courage to take a peek.
 
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I backed and played Underworld Ascendent. Interestingly I had backed it so far back I forgot and payed for it in the release week. The game was so poorly designed I quickly asked for my money back. What a surprise when I was checking my Kickstarter stuff and found that I was a backer. So I have it back in my inventory.

One of the save features in the initially released game took you back to the beginning of the episode, even if you were just saving to eat some dinner. I think they fixed that but I, like a lot of you here, just don't feel like taking another peek right now.

As far as SS3, I was kinda interested if the game was going to go the route of the excellent first part of the game while on the ship or the really dumb last part of the game dealing with the bio ship thingy. . . . no biases here . . . .
 
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I've actually played UA and while by no stretch of the imagination could it be called good, it did have its moments. It could have been an excellent game, but it had no clear focus, too much was broken and WAY too much was repetitive and thus boring. I'd score it 4/5 on a good day when I'm feeling generous!!
 
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Pity ... but after UA I have nill expectations anyway.
 
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Corwin said:
I've actually played UA and while by no stretch of the imagination could it be called good, it did have its moments. It could have been an excellent game, but it had no clear focus, too much was broken and WAY too much was repetitive and thus boring. I'd score it 4/5 on a good day when I'm feeling generous!!
Click to expand...

Remind to ask you for a small loan in the future.
 
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Is this the one that was nearly cancelled and restarted over in the old engine or is that a remake of SS1?
 
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Lucky Day said:
Is this the one that was nearly cancelled and restarted over in the old engine or is that a remake of SS1?
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The System Shock remake had the engine change when it switched developers. System Shock 3 is still being made with Unity. Makes no sense it should of been Unreal.
 
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Times change; adapt or go extinct. It is much harder to write a big budget game today than decades past; but it begs the question. Does system shock (3) have to be a big budget game ? Yes it probably needs an update in art/graphics but beyond that doesn't the general system of system shock 2 still work today and if so why does the team need to be larger if you outsource the art ?
 
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