System Shock 3 isn’t dead, and we may hear more within a year

We last wrote about immersive sim sequel System Shock 3 in 2020, when developers Otherside handed the project over to megapublisher Tencent. At the time, Otherside commented that “as a smaller indie studio, it had been challenging for us to carry the project on our own.”

Now, Nightdive Studios – who own the overall rights to System Shock, and have already remade the first game – have popped up with news that the System Shock 3 project endures, in some form. We could get clarification about its status “potentially within a year”. Don’t call it a comeback, do call it a sign of life.

“The situation around System Shock 3 is very complicated,” Nightdive’s director of business development Larry Kuperman hedged at GDC this week, in comments published by VGC.

Can we expect a proper update anytime soon? “Not as yet, not as yet,” Kuperman went on. “I don’t know when it’s going to clarify, but it could potentially be within a year. It could be, or it could take longer. That said, what I can say is that we have visions of what we can do within what we control.

“You’re going to see a remaster of System Shock 2,” he added. “I’ve been asked twice earlier today why we didn’t do a remake, and I said, ‘are you somehow under the impression that because we do a remaster that we won’t be able to do a remake in the future?’ That might be something that I can either confirm or deny. But there’s going to be content coming out.”

So there’s your bonus headline here: Nightdive might do a System Shock 2 remake after their upcoming remaster, which will launch in June. Asked about the future of the series beyond retreads of the existing games, Kuperman said: “We’ll see what happens. I mean, there’s stuff that we can do within the first and the second.” Some expansions then?

It’s all very… non-enlightening. But I’m happy with any sign that System Shock has a future beyond replaying the hits, and Nightdive seem like they could hack a threequel. In our review of their System Shock remake, Jeremy Peel called it “a breathtakingly beautiful and astonishingly faithful remake that proves the enduring power of Looking Glass design.”

Jeremy’s also got an interview with Nightdive detailing how the studio scooped up the license, beginning with a phone chat with an insurance company and ending with Nightdive’s acquisition by Atari.

As for Otherside – the studio co-founded by original System Shock devs Paul Neurath and Warren Spector – they’re currently working on a new immersive sim, Thick As Thieves.