He sounds like Stevie Nicks. Bet he didn’t know Tom Petty.
According to the Otherside community manager, as of February 2018, the game was still in pre-production, so even if System Shock 3 immediately entered full production after that post and the Starbreeze stuff didn’t stall development, it’s probably years away from releasing. Crazy to think this was first teased back in 2015, and Starbreeze announced they were backing it two years ago.
Hows this, for obvious reasons I cant say much…
But I’m not worried.
Hopefully they either have the money to self-publish or found a different publisher, either one would probably be a good sign.
The alternative is Starbreeze saw what happened with UW:A and noped the F outta there.
We have very much enjoyed working with Starbreeze on System Shock 3. They’ve been a great partner. As developers themselves they understand the challenges of game development and that’s been refreshing. However, in light of Starbreeze’s current situation, we decided together that it would be best for us to go our separate ways for now. We wish them the best of luck.
OtherSide is rolling forward with System Shock 3. Warren Spector has built a great team and the game is more than halfway completed. At its core, it already feels like a System Shock game, while at the same time introducing new elements to the franchise. As the original creators of the game, we want to see this game made as much as our fans do.
Look for more information about System Shock 3 soon.
Someday, a long time from now I’ll talk about UA.
Awesome! :)
Best of luck with the project.
Good news re Shock3, and I very much look forward to the UW:A post-mortem!
Maybe throw a few feelers out this time before you commit to design. Changes to UA were not for the better, to be honest. Sometimes a simple refinement of a proven formula is enough for a good game.
Totally agreed, and I trust Spector not to f*** up the design of SS3.
The main danger would be competing with Arkane’s efforts – they’ve advanced the immersive sim field, and SS3 should provide something that’s comparable, and preferably advances the state of the art.
Not my team Bateau. I know what you mean tho.
Past successes do not predict future performance. UW:A was produced by Paul Neurath and built by a dream team of Looking Glass vets. Warren Spector was an advisor. Sometimes things just never gel, or external forces intrude. Shit happens.
Quote from Warren Spector via the Otherside forum:
We parted ways with Starbreeze (amicably), which means we are in the process of lining up a new publishing partner. Happily, given the pedigree of System Shock and the progress we’ve made so far there’s been a lot of interest. Has the situation affected development? Not really. The team is still, as we say, ‘psyched and cranking’ - in other words, continuing as normal. We’re confident we can bring System Shock 3 to market and have it take its place as a leading title in the immersive simulation genre.
Hopefully Shock3 is a larger team. My general feeling is that UW:A tried to do too much with too few people. They were all strong veteran developers, but an immersive/emergent RPG with a “tons of verbs” core design is just too much for a small team.
Stusser kinda nailed it. The thing that sucks about games–more than film, music or books, is its so damn long to get another swing at the plate.
Most of us at one time or another have been involved in a non-optimal project for whatever reason. It sucks its painful, and hindsight is 20:20 on what happened. Frankly in the middle of it as a dev-it is hard to see. Too focused on the small picture, not the big…a strange spot for me since my career has been ‘big picture’. The biggest guilt I have is leaving the producer role for a dev role.
Anyway all you can do is Pick your self up, dust off and get back at it. I will say, the game is better after Update 2. We basically redid the whole guts of the game-how it progresses, missions, exc. Movement, combat, AI improved. After clearing our heads post launch…and post public beatings…there has been a bunch of things by pretty much every developer like ‘how the hell did that get in there like that’ The bane of rushing to a date, and a bunch of other stuff. It wasn’t particularly fun. As for this that or the other on how or why–I just am not saying. Wait for the book. :)
Stusser also nailed it with ‘too small team’ yeah, that was the biggest ouch. Shock is far larger.
That list of substantial changes to Ascendant covers my complaints, so I’ll definitely give the game another shot when update two releases. I’m very interested to see how how the fundamental mission structure evolves from the initial launch. I hope the game world feels more like a contiguous space.
Is it really that impossible to see the game objectively when you’re in the thick of it?
I’m a programmer but I don’t make games…
It can be remarkably difficult to see the forest for the trees. When you spend months of your life staring at the single pieces, moving them around, changing their color, clicking through the menus a gazillion times. It just affects your perspective. It can be really difficult to step back. It usually takes a total break where you don’t look at a project, touch it or think about it for a few weeks to regain that.
EDIT:
You become too emotionally attached to the project. You’ve poured blood and sweat into it for aaages. That impairs your judgement too. You can’t be impartial anymore. If you’d spent 3 months building an intricate feature but it’s just “not fun” - how would you feel to rip it out. It might improve the project but man… all that work, wasted.
You also get really used to and numb to annoyances like user interface failures, unresponsive input, etc. Especially when it should be somebody else’s job to fix. Then the game comes out, everyone complains and you realize you hate it too but you’ve just been suffering through habit for two years and forgot it didn’t need to be that way.
It’s hard to imagine when it’s on the scale of UA but in a general sense it’s really easy to fail to realize that the game you’re working on isn’t good.
As stated above, definitely. I’m a software developer. Not working on games. But I’ve seen the same issue occur more than once on large projects. You get to the point where you are trying to work with and improve what’s there rather than wondering whether it should be there. Without an unlimited budget, you can’t just go back to basics indefinitely.