A developer who was part of the team working on System Shock 3 has come forward to clear the air about who is and who isn’t working on the game. He posts on RPG Codex under the handle Kin Corn Karn, and he informed the community that the team that working on the game is no longer employed to work on the game.

DSO Gaming picked up the news from the post on RPG Codex, which was made by Karn on January 31st, 2020.

In the post, Karn responded to users who were asking about System Shock 3, many of whom believed it had become vaporware. In the first post, Karn explained…

“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.

 

“Was the failure of the project right? It’s hard to say. If Starbreeze hadn’t gone into crisis I think we would’ve delivered something interesting with some fresh and innovative gameplay, but a much smaller game than what people were expecting and inevitably disappointing for a sequel to such a beloved franchise.

 

“Those high expectations drove a lot of expensive experimentation. We were a small team and knew we couldn’t compete with current immersive sims in production quality and breadth, so we had to be creative and clever and weird. And we were on our way to make something unique and possibly fun, but probably not what the audience was hungry for.”

Further down someone asked what became of the team or if anyone is even still working on System Shock 3.

But Karn makes it clear that the team that used to work on the game is no longer employed to work on the game…

“I don’t actually know what’s going on, but the team is no longer employed there.”

Now it’s important not to take what he says and extrapolate all sorts of other conclusions from that. While the team may not be employed “there”, it doesn’t mean the game is completely dead. Some others might still be working on it or it could be contracted out to another studio.

There could be negotiations going on right now to finish development, or to hand off the project to another studio.

And yes, alternatively, the team could be gone and the game could be dead.

The last we heard about it was Warren Spector saying that they were pushing for AAA-style quality but with an AA price point. That was back in October of 2019.

Based on what Karn is saying, it doesn’t sound like things are going too well after Otherside Entertainment nabbed the publishing rights from Starbreeze Studios back in February of 2018.

We haven’t had any official updates on the game since late 2019, so we’ll see if they address the statements made by Karn or if the project will just silently fade from view.

(Thanks for the news tip Guardian EvaUnit02)