System Shock 3 is officially dead at Warren Spector’s studio
(credit: Electronic Arts)
Warren Spector's OtherSide Entertainment stopped work on the highly anticipated System Shock 3 in 2019, Spector confirmed in a recent interview with GamesBeat. The announcement definitively ends hopes that Spector's studio might still be working with new publisher Tencent on the follow-up to the 1994 PC gaming classic and its 1999 sequel.
The System Shock 3 project was first announced way back in 2015. Spector—known for producing the original System Shock as well as his work on Deus Ex, Thief, and Epic Mickey—made a splash in 2016 when he left academia to return to game development and joined the team at OtherSide Entertainment to work on the planned sequel.
But the project started to show signs of trouble in early 2019, when OtherSide had to buy back the publishing rights to the game from Starbreeze Studios. Though OtherSide was able to show a public demo of System Shock 3 later that year, by early 2020, the entire development team was reportedly "no longer employed" by OtherSide.