System Shock 3 firm ‘still here’, insists marketing boss, but no word on dev team

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 that OtherSide Entertainment’s Austin team was “no longer employed” and LinkedIn confirmed an exodus of senior leads, including System 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 director Warren Spector hasn’t been active on his social media channels for more than three months.

OtherSide’s official Twitter, Instagram and Facebook pages 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.

One unconfirmed report from a Twitter user later 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 comments don’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 was most recently shown at GDC in 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 partner Starbreeze in February of the same year.

Warren Spector told VGC in May 2019 that talks 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 to an anonymous developer post in 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.”

The System Shock remake from Nightdive Studios remains in development and is due out this year.