Last year, OtherSide Entertainment announced that the studio would be adding two more games to the ever expanding list of classic game revivals. First, OtherSide ran a successful Kickstarter campaign for Underworld Ascendant, a spiritual successor to the Ultima: Underworld series. Then in December the company announced that it had obtained the rights to produce System Shock 3. Today it's announced that there will be a familiar hand guiding the ongoing development of both games: Warren Spector.
If you're unfamiliar with him, let's just say that Spector's resume runs deep. Though he had a hand in the creation of titles as varied as Wing Commander and Epic Mickey and Crusader: No Remorse, the most influential game he's ever worked on is probably the original Deus Ex, for which he served as project director. And since he worked as a producer on the original System Shock and both Ultima: Underworld games, Spector is more than a little familiar with each of the classic franchises that OtherSide is reviving.
OtherSide itself was founded by Looking Glass Studios alumni Paul Neurath, and Spector's actually been serving as a creative advisor at the studio for a while now. He'll be taking a role as studio director there later this year once his teaching duties at UT Austin wrap up. Though he says that he loved his work as an educator, the allure of working on these familiar franchises was too hard to ignore:
...[W]hen the opportunity to have a bigger role in bringing Underworld Ascendant to life, as well as playing in the System Shock universe once again, helping to bring these games to a 21st century audience, I just couldn’t say no. Working on System Shock was one of the most fulfilling things I’ve done in my career and it’s hard to describe how much I’m looking forward to sharing with players what SHODAN has been up to since the last game was released.
It's interesting that Spector phrases it this way, because while we have no idea what the fictional SHODAN has been up to since System Shock 2, we can absolutely see the mark she's left on games in general since 1999. The narrative driven, first person game has gone through a huge journey in the last decade and a half, and a lot of that change can be routed through a genealogy leading back up to System Shock. While it's obvious to see the connective tissue between System Shock and games like BioShock, Dishonored, or Deus Ex: Human Revolution, it's easy to forget that even less traditional first person games like Gone Home and Firewatch can trace a lineage back to SHODAN. And that's to say nothing of the countless game makers who were inspired by the cyberpunk horror game despite having no direct connection to it.
I bring this up partly because it was only a few years ago when Warren Spector spoke about his distaste of "ultraviolence" in games:
The ultraviolence has to stop. We have to stop loving it. I just don't believe in the effects argument at all, but I do believe that we are fetishizing violence, and now in some cases actually combining it with an adolescent approach to sexuality. I just think it's in bad taste. Ultimately I think it will cause us trouble.
We've gone too far. The slow-motion blood spurts, the impalement by deadly assassins, the knives, shoulders, elbows to the throat. You know, Deus Ex had its moments of violence, but they were designed - whether they succeeded or not I can't say - but they were designed to make you uncomfortable, and I don't see that happening now. I think we're just appealing to an adolescent mindset and calling it mature.
In the time since Spector said this, there's been no discernible decrease of ultraviolence in games, but there has seemingly been an increase in the availability of less- and non-violent games, even games in the same first person mode of those that Spector has spent so much time working on. We have Gone Home and Firewatch now... and Eidolon and The Witness and Sunset and Everybody's Gone to the Rapture and The Stanley Parable. And we have non-commercial, experimental games like Connor Sherlock's Voice of Vamana, which builds a concentrated atmosphere of wonder and terror in just an hour, or Amy Dentata's 10 Seconds In Hell, which imparts a different sort of terror in only a few moments. We have so many first person narrative games that we no longer have to be impressed only by their existence, but can evaluate their efficacy too.
So I'm curious to see what OtherSide will achieve with Spector's hand on the wheel in this post-SHODAN world. System Shock 3 will not only be compared to System Shock 2, but to all of the games that have come in its wake. Will it be as violent as BioShock Infinite, despite Spector's complaints? Could it be as visually terrifying as Alien: Isolation, despite coming from a much smaller team? Will it be able to (or even attempt to) have the same narrative focus as something like SOMA (or the upcoming Adr1ft or Tacoma, for that matter)? If we're incredibly lucky--and if Spector and everyone else at OtherSide are really on their game--maybe we'll get something as special as the original System Shocks were. It's impossible to know, but I hope that whatever we do get from OtherSide is at least worth bringing up in the company of all of the other games that've come before it.
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