Starbreeze Will Publish System Shock 3 and Invest $12 Million into Its Development

Megalith

Megalith

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Fans of the System Shock franchise have plenty to look forward to, as they will not only be getting a remake of the original game but also a legitimate sequel that picks up right where the second game left off. Enclave and Riddick developer Starbreeze is lending a monetary hand, and while it’d be interesting to see their take on the game, we may be better off with the current team, which comprises members who worked on the original.

Starbreeze AB, an independent creator, publisher and distributor of high quality entertainment products, has signed a publishing agreement with Otherside Entertainment regarding the game System Shock 3. Starbreeze will invest $12 million to bring the game to PC and other platforms. System Shock 3 – The latest in the series of landmark, award-winning games from Otherside Entertainment is in development under the direction of industry legend Warren Spector and a dream team behind such ground breaking games including the original System Shock & System Shock 2, as well as Thief: The Dark Project and Deus Ex.
 
Awesome. Finally. A game of strategy and not rocket jumping. I am looking very forward to this.
 
That was some unexpected good news. I love Starbreeze. However, I had heard that many of their people left to form Machine Games (they've worked with id on the Wolfenstein games). I was kind of curious how much of Starbreeze was still Starbreeze from say the Riddick time period. Anyway, good people are working on this project, (and the remake of the original). I'm looking forward to all of it! Best series ever.
 
I love SS1 and SS2 as much as anybody, probably more, but sometimes you just gotta let things go.
 
J3RK is right. The starbreeze of today is not the same team as when Riddick was made. They did leave to form machine games and released Wolfenstein TNO.

Though it will still probably be amazing.
 
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GaryJohnson said:
I love SS1 and SS2 as much as anybody, probably more, but sometimes you just gotta let things go.
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Nope. That's absolutely not true. Why would anyone let go of something that brings them joy. I still play SS1 and SS2 maybe once every other year or so, and still find things I never noticed, new ways to do things, etc. The fact that some of the people that made the originals are working on the new ones, along with some new blood, getting support from some of the best game designers around will absolutely make these games great. How long did people wait for a new Wasteland game? People seemed to like the new one.

Should we all have just let go of Doom because the original came out in 1994 and it had been 12 years since D3? With that mindset you'd miss one hell of a game in 2016.

What about the new Zelda game that's getting pretty much perfect review scores from critics and players alike. It's an old franchise... We should forget about it.

Sure, there are some games that don't hold up to their nostalgia-rating, but I think most of us here are intelligent enough to know which ones are which.
 
tetris42 said:
To what? More fucking Bioshock?
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Agreed! As much as I had fun playing the BioShocks, they were nothing compared to SS1 and SS2. And that's not just my ultra-fan-ultra-bias talking. (which I do admittedly have some of :D ) I've played BioShock twice, Infinite once, and didn't bother with BS2. I tried to go back to BioShock for the new version, but just didn't get back into it. There must be reasons that I can keep going back and playing SS1 and SS2 repeatedly and enjoying them the same every time. I could try picking it apart, but I'll just chalk it up as a giant heap of delicious je ne sais quoi.
 
J3RK said:
Agreed! As much as I had fun playing the BioShocks, they were nothing compared to SS1 and SS2. And that's not just my ultra-fan-ultra-bias talking. (which I do admittedly have some of :D ) I've played BioShock twice, Infinite once, and didn't bother with BS2. I tried to go back to BioShock for the new version, but just didn't get back into it. There must be reasons that I can keep going back and playing SS1 and SS2 repeatedly and enjoying them the same every time. I could try picking it apart, but I'll just chalk it up as a giant heap of delicious je ne sais quoi.
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It's more than nostalgia even. I've given two friends the System Shock 2 test. Both played Bioshock first and liked it, and I convinced them to play System Shock 2 after the fact. In both cases, they thought SS2 was the better game, one of which completely blown away by how much Bioshock copied.
 
DeathFromBelow said:
I can't forgive him for Thief: Deadly Shadows.
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That's just how the whole industry was going at that time. Sure a few devs stuck it out with amazing PC releases, but right around that time publishers wanted the most bang for development dollar, console parity to avoid sales losses on various platforms, etc. (I mean, they're still kinda like that, but things are getting better again on the PC end.) Personally, I don't think holding a grudge against an otherwise amazing dev/designer over one game from a weird era is especially rational. Things are different now than they were then, this is a different company, different investors, and the whole point of the project is to do the series justice (at least in my view).

Side note: I haven't played Deadly Shadows, but I hear that the Shale Bridge level of the game was one of the best, most atmospheric and creepy segments of all time. Up there with Ravenholm, sections of SS2, etc. So...
 
dark_reign said:
It was consolized much like Deus Ex: IW but overall it wasn't a bad Thief game.
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Literally the only good thing about that game was the 'Robbing the Cradle' level. The plot sucked, the characters sucked, most of the locations sucked. The whole thing just felt rushed and low budget, you notice things like the prerendered cutscenes looking worse than the actual gameplay or the 'ragdoll' effects that were comically broken...

J3RK said:
That's just how the whole industry was going at that time...

Personally, I don't think holding a grudge against an otherwise amazing dev/designer over one game from a weird era is especially rational.
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As far as I can tell he was a part of the problem. I don't literally hold a personal 'grudge' against him any more than I hold a grudge against George Lucas for The Phantom Menace, but in both cases I'm not going to pretend that what they did wasn't tremendously disappointing.

This particular quip ticked off the Thief community like nothing else:
But in the way that Deus Ex: Invisible War was designed to achieve success with a wider audience, so too has Thief evolved from its original incarnations. "You can't make games for M.I.T. grads," Spector quipped, referring to the complexity and difficulty of past games. To bring new gamers into the Thief world, important changes have been made that smooth the transition between this game and its predecessors as well as antiquated design decisions and present-day ideas.
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:D There's a lot about that quip that yes, would piss off one's core fans, but also very true in the gaming landscape then, and actually still happening now. (though maybe not stated the same way) Developers are STILL "trying to appeal to a wider audience". Sometimes that means we want other types of people to find something to enjoy about our game. Other times it's "we're feeling pressure from a certain portion of the community, and we want to appeal to them". Other times it's "we just want to make more money, but don't want to come right out and say it." Gaming, and PC gaming even more-so, isn't what it was when SS2 and Thief came out, or anything before those. It was a niche within a niche, and you could design a hugely complex game with a full keyboard of controls, because you were precisely designing games of a complexity that someone using a computer would actually be able to grasp. How many gamers in today's clilmate do you think could operate DOS, let alone configure a game to run in it, then actually play? :D Now the millions come in from the "bro" gamers who sure aren't going to learn a full keyboard and mouse worth of commands to play a game while they crush beer cans on their heads with their buddies in a frat house somewhere. I think he was actually ALMOST spot on with that comment. Look what happened to Origin, Looking Glass, SSI, and other companies that are no longer with us BECAUSE of this very fact. If anything (and I don't want to arbitrarily assign too much credit) he saw the way things were headed and wasn't too far off.

That doesn't mean we have to like it, and in fact I see a lot of really nice things happening in PC gaming these days that seem to bring some of the scope and complexity back, but still incorporating some modern conveniences. It's ok again to make a Doom game that doesn't have a squad based campaign, tactical play, etc. It's all of a sudden ok to make sci-fi RPGs again, and cyberpunk games, etc. Things are getting good again, and it looks like it may be time to bring out some proper System Shock style games again.

Spector's one(ish) or two(ish) lackluster and disappointing games aside, he's still someone who knows how to design something of that scope. He's also not the head designer on the project from what I understand. He started in a consulting capacity. I don't know if that's changed, but there are a lot of good people working on these projects. I think they'll be good. We also have a lot of good things to inspire this. The success of Doom might be a nice little beacon here. Letting devs know that they can make the types of games they want, and if they do it well, and follow their own design instinct and not what the publisher is demanding to make it friendly to idiots, maybe it will work.
 
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DeathFromBelow said:
Literally the only good thing about that game was the 'Robbing the Cradle' level. The plot sucked, the characters sucked, most of the locations sucked. The whole thing just felt rushed and low budget, you notice things like the prerendered cutscenes looking worse than the actual gameplay or the 'ragdoll' effects that were comically broken...
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It was never going to live up to first two Thief games because those games set the bar so high. But it's still worth a look if you never played it, bugs and all.

Looking Back at Looking Glass:

 
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