Vapourware System Shock 3 by OtherSide Entertainment - taken over by Tencent!

[LESS T_T]

New job posting for Lead Game Designer: https://otherside-e.com/wp/jobs/

We are looking for an experienced Lead Game Designer to join the System Shock 3 team. The Lead Designer will report to the Creative Director and work closely with the Senior Producer, Art Director and Lead Programmer to imagine and plan gameplay systems and interweave narrative into an immersive simulation experience. The Lead Designer drives the conceptualization and documentation of gameplay features and supervises prototyping and implementation to a high level of quality. Candidates must demonstrate a strong sense of what makes good gameplay. Candidates are expected to be organized and have excellent communication skills. In addition, the candidate must be able to demonstrate experience in hiring and managing a team of designers to develop a game and the ability to collaborate with other disciplines.

• 5+ years of professional game design experience.
• Multiple shipped titles on PC, consoles, and/or mobile – one or more big budget titles that took more than one year to develop.
• Experience working in a leadership capacity on a project with a publisher.
• Sufficient knowledge of all design disciplines – including combat, systems, level and narrative – to manage designers in those disciplines and get hands-on to assist when necessary.

• Working knowledge of and experience implementing gameplay in various game engines, especially Unity.

• Passion for developing and playing games, especially in the Immersive Simulation and FPS categories.

 

[Cyberarmy]

Unity...
Le sigh...

 

[LESS T_T]

Well, it's not like they're inexperienced indie team. Their engineers seem confident, and, if they're indeed using Unity, I'd assume they made a source code licensing like Cities: Skylines dev.

 

[Ash]

What the hell? I guess Starbreeze aren't giving them top dollar funding then.

 

[coldcrow]

Errrr, my interest in this just dropped sharply. You'd think Unreal or CryEngine would be better suited for SS3, or whatever they are using for Underworld Ascension.

 

[ciox]

SSR switched from Unity to UE4 in the end, maybe Unity is just the traditional initial concepting choice? It's not like they have anything done anyway.

 

[Infinitron]

whatever they are using for Underworld Ascension.

That's Unity.

 

[Infinitron]

Some stuff from Sam: https://www.othersideentertainment.com/forum/index.php?topic=1909.msg25624#msg25624

Can confirm that SS3 is still pre-production. The in-house team is still quite small (I think less than or a little more than 10?), and they've been working hard on whittling down what concepts they want to move forward with.

I understand you're excited for the game and want to see what's been going on since, but when we DO have something prepared to show, you KNOW it'll be worth the wait.

 

[Morgoth]

Unity + Level-design intense games = Stutter stutter stutter.

Like the old times I suppose.

 

[Zarniwoop]

Wait , WHAT ?

They're going to make a System Shock, in Unity?

LOLOLLOLLLOLLLOOOLOLOLLOL

 

[RoSoDude]

Some stuff from Sam: https://www.othersideentertainment.com/forum/index.php?topic=1909.msg25624#msg25624

Can confirm that SS3 is still pre-production. The in-house team is still quite small (I think less than or a little more than 10?), and they've been working hard on whittling down what concepts they want to move forward with.

I understand you're excited for the game and want to see what's been going on since, but when we DO have something prepared to show, you KNOW it'll be worth the wait.

https://www.othersideentertainment.com/forum/index.php?topic=1903.msg25430#msg25430

My jaw DROPPED looking at some of the concept art areas!! I'm excited just looking at the ideas conveyed in the concept art, and the environment design is very promising. Lots of space to drop in hints of what the space station was like before things went wrong, and SO much can be done with the lighting alone...

Definitely want to see how the Citadel looks in another few months!

That second post is intended or the System Shock remake rather than SS3, no?

But it does remind me -- I hope SS3 chooses a setting and circumstance with as much novelty as SS2. The comment from Warren about wanting to go back to Citadel Station and play as the Hacker... meh? We've been there and done that in SS1, and that's also being remade. SS2 echoed much of the same spirit of waking up in a hostile environment in space teeming with mutated monsters and deadly machines, but managed to explore some completely new terrain as well. The fiction of the Shock universe is rich enough that they should be able to go in a unique direction while hammering down on the gameplay style that made the first two games so compelling.

Or they could just rehash old setting/story stuff for nostalgia and move away from the excellent gameplay formula of SS2 for the sake of "innovation", which is exactly what I don't want...

 

[agentorange]

Would be interesting to see it take place back on Earth; I always enjoyed getting a brief glimpse of Earth during the introductory/character creation section of System Shock 2. One element from SS1 that I would like to see them bring back are the difficulty levels which, unlike the difficulty settings in most games, changed the game considerably, as well as allowed the player to select exactly what was changed. You could set the mission difficulty to the highest setting which activated a time limit, but change the cyberspace difficulty to low if you didn't care for the cyberspace segments and so on.

 

[ciox]

Some stuff from Sam: https://www.othersideentertainment.com/forum/index.php?topic=1909.msg25624#msg25624

Can confirm that SS3 is still pre-production. The in-house team is still quite small (I think less than or a little more than 10?), and they've been working hard on whittling down what concepts they want to move forward with.

I understand you're excited for the game and want to see what's been going on since, but when we DO have something prepared to show, you KNOW it'll be worth the wait.

https://www.othersideentertainment.com/forum/index.php?topic=1903.msg25430#msg25430

My jaw DROPPED looking at some of the concept art areas!! I'm excited just looking at the ideas conveyed in the concept art, and the environment design is very promising. Lots of space to drop in hints of what the space station was like before things went wrong, and SO much can be done with the lighting alone...

Definitely want to see how the Citadel looks in another few months!

That second post is intended or the System Shock remake rather than SS3, no?

But it does remind me -- I hope SS3 chooses a setting and circumstance with as much novelty as SS2. The comment from Warren about wanting to go back to Citadel Station and play as the Hacker... meh? We've been there and done that in SS1, and that's also being remade. SS2 echoed much of the same spirit of waking up in a hostile environment in space teeming with mutated monsters and deadly machines, but managed to explore some completely new terrain as well. The fiction of the Shock universe is rich enough that they should be able to go in a unique direction while hammering down on the gameplay style that made the first two games so compelling.

Or they could just rehash old setting/story stuff for nostalgia and move away from the excellent gameplay formula of SS2 for the sake of "innovation", which is exactly what I don't want...

I think it's intended for SS3, or could be. Warren's original plan was to bring back all the surviving major NPCs and PCs from both System Shock games, and bring the Von Braun next to the Citadel to have them both in the game. No idea what other areas might make it in there though but Earth would be a nice change of pace.
Gameplay wise I assume they'll do something like the original Deus Ex.

 

[RoSoDude]

Would be interesting to see it take place back on Earth; I always enjoyed getting a brief glimpse of Earth during the introductory/character creation section of System Shock 2. One element from SS1 that I would like to see them bring back are the difficulty levels which, unlike the difficulty settings in most games, changed the game considerably, as well as allowed the player to select exactly what was changed. You could set the mission difficulty to the highest setting which activated a time limit, but change the cyberspace difficulty to low if you didn't care for the cyberspace segments and so on.

No thanks. I'll take SS2's cohesive difficulty settings over SS1's individual component selections any day. They possess a few distinct and enormous advantages:

1. You can have a finely-tuned experience in which all pillars of gameplay are appropriately configured to work together to provide a certain level of challenge. SS2's difficulty affected nearly everything about the game, from player health to damage dealt to loot tables to replicator costs to cybernetic upgrade costs... really the list goes on. Dorian Hart slaved over spreadsheets to get the numbers right for all of the difficulty modes, but if he had had to work with the multiplicative complexity of say 4 x 4 = 16 different difficulty configurations a la SS1, he wouldn't have had a chance of getting it right. This is because the elements of the game work together, rather than existing independently (this is another criticism of its own that could be leveled at SS1).
2. They assure that the player doesn't have a stilted experience. In SS1, picking a lower Plot difficulty than 2 meant you didn't have to complete all of the game's objectives or deal with locked doors, leaving the designer with little control over what you'll see and experience and as a consequence what information they can teach you (picking 0 even removes audio logs, so you have no clue what's even going on). Similarly, picking a 0 combat difficulty has enemies just standing there, never attacking the player. At some point, the game doesn't even resemble itself anymore, and the design unravels. This is like going into the console commands in a game and turning noclip or godmode on. Braindead players will actually be MORE confused by the experience, since they're given even less direction and instruction.
   
3. It doesn't offload the work of designing an appropriate difficulty mode to the player. With a range of sliders for each aspect of gameplay, the player is asked to understand and evaluate their skill with a number of gameplay elements before they've even stepped foot into the shoes of their character. This is much less reasonable than simply asking the player if they think they can handle "Easy", "Medium", or "Hard".

While there are many aspects of Shock 1 that the industry should have learned from, I think this is one idea that was rightfully dropped by its successors.

 

[Infinitron]

I think it's intended for SS3, or could be. Warren's original plan was to bring back all the surviving major NPCs and PCs from both System Shock games, and bring the Von Braun next to the Citadel to have them both in the game. No idea what other areas might make it in there though but Earth would be a nice change of pace.
Gameplay wise I assume they'll do something like the original Deus Ex.

No he's right, that thread was about the remake, my bad.

 

[agentorange]

I think it's intended for SS3, or could be. Warren's original plan was to bring back all the surviving major NPCs and PCs from both System Shock games, and bring the Von Braun next to the Citadel to have them both in the game. No idea what other areas might make it in there though but Earth would be a nice change of pace.
Gameplay wise I assume they'll do something like the original Deus Ex.

Sounds remarkably similar to what they did in Invisible War. Brought back every NPC and JCD and combined every possible ending from DX1 into a single scenario.

Would be interesting to see it take place back on Earth; I always enjoyed getting a brief glimpse of Earth during the introductory/character creation section of System Shock 2. One element from SS1 that I would like to see them bring back are the difficulty levels which, unlike the difficulty settings in most games, changed the game considerably, as well as allowed the player to select exactly what was changed. You could set the mission difficulty to the highest setting which activated a time limit, but change the cyberspace difficulty to low if you didn't care for the cyberspace segments and so on.

No thanks. I'll take SS2's cohesive difficulty settings over SS1's individual component selections any day. They possess a few distinct and enormous advantages:

1. You can have a finely-tuned experience in which all pillars of gameplay are appropriately configured to work together to provide a certain level of challenge. SS2's difficulty affected nearly everything about the game, from player health to damage dealt to loot tables to replicator costs to cybernetic upgrade costs... really the list goes on. Dorian Hart slaved over spreadsheets to get the numbers right for all of the difficulty modes, but if he had had to work with the multiplicative complexity of say 4 x 4 = 16 different difficulty configurations a la SS1, he wouldn't have had a chance of getting it right. This is because the elements of the game work together, rather than existing independently (this is another criticism of its own that could be laid at SS1).
2. They assure that the player doesn't have a stilted experience. In SS1, picking a lower Plot difficulty than 2 meant you didn't have to complete all of the game's objectives or deal with locked doors, leaving the designer with little control over what you'll see and experience and as a consequence what information they can teach you (picking 0 even removes audio logs, so you have no clue what's even going on). Similarly, picking a 0 combat difficulty has enemies just standing there, never attacking the player. At some point, the game doesn't even resemble itself anymore, and the design unravels. This is like going into the console commands in a game and turning noclip or godmode on. Braindead players will actually be MORE confused by the experience, since they're given even less direction and instruction.
   
3. It doesn't offload the work of designing an appropriate difficulty mode to the player. With a range of sliders for each aspect of gameplay, the player is asked to understand and evaluate their skill with a number of gameplay elements before they've even stepped foot into the shoes of their character. This is much less reasonable than simply asking the player if they think they can handle "Easy", "Medium", or "Hard".

While there are many aspects of Shock 1 that the industry should have learned from, I think this is one idea that was rightfully dropped by its successors.

Yeah these are all good points, I think I even said most of the same stuff when arguing for why Souls games and other titles shouldn't have difficulty settings. I suppose I really just want them to reinstate a time limit.

 

[Azazel]

Sounds remarkably similar to what they did in Invisible War. Brought back every NPC and JCD and combined every possible ending from DX1 into a single scenario.

I mean, every piece of info that leaked out of old Ion Storm over time has made it clear that Warren is a hack and the games were successful mostly despite him, so him wanting to rehash the exact same mistakes he made nearly two decades ago isn't spectacularly shocking.

 

[Daedalos]

Please, no more Unity games. Jesus fuck. For the loving ever god of death.

 

[Deathsquid]

Wait , WHAT ?

They're going to make a System Shock, in Unity?

LOLOLLOLLLOLLLOOOLOLOLLOL

Wow hey at least it'll look, feel and run like the originals.

 

[OndrejSc]

...and now Technical Director Jason Hughes left Otherside Austin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasonhughes/

More like Otherside Autism.

 

[V_K]

They assure that the player doesn't have a stilted experience. In SS1, picking a lower Plot difficulty than 2 meant you didn't have to complete all of the game's objectives or deal with locked doors, leaving the designer with little control over what you'll see and experience and as a consequence what information they can teach you (picking 0 even removes audio logs, so you have no clue what's even going on). Similarly, picking a 0 combat difficulty has enemies just standing there, never attacking the player. At some point, the game doesn't even resemble itself anymore, and the design unravels. This is like going into the console commands in a game and turning noclip or godmode on. Braindead players will actually be MORE confused by the experience, since they're given even less direction and instruction.

Only this has nothing to do with customized difficulty per se, and everything with the fact that this particular game goes overboard with some ill-thought out options.

It doesn't offload the work of designing an appropriate difficulty mode to the player. With a range of sliders for each aspect of gameplay, the player is asked to understand and evaluate their skill with a number of gameplay elements before they've even stepped foot into the shoes of their character. This is much less reasonable than simply asking the player if they think they can handle "Easy", "Medium", or "Hard".

You could have both difficulty presets and customization options, they're not mutually exclusive (IIRC Expeditions:Conquistador did just that). I would even argue that having difficulty customization system in place would make the designer's work at balancing difficulty presets much easier.

 

[RoSoDude]

Only this has nothing to do with customized difficulty per se, and everything with the fact that this particular game goes overboard with some ill-thought out options.

You could have both difficulty presets and customization options, they're not mutually exclusive (IIRC Expeditions:Conquistador did just that). I would even argue that having difficulty customization system in place would make the designer's work at balancing difficulty presets much easier.

See my first point. I'd rather have tightly designed difficulty settings where every element works together. This reflects two of my desires for SS3: that more aspects than enemy health or damage are affected by difficulty, and that the systems interact with one another on a deep level. In SS2, the scarcity of resources, high replicator prices, and cybernetic upgrade costs worked alongside the deadlier enemies on Impossible. This is in part because the numbers were painstakingly tweaked (balance issues notwithstanding), but also because the elements didn't operate distinctly from one another. Hacking and research weren't separate things you did in between moments of combat and exploration, they were interwoven with those core elements by the security systems and respawning enemies that kept you on your toes. While this is partially true of SS1, the puzzles and especially the cyberspace sequences were almost entirely separate from the rest of the gameplay loop, which is why it was even remotely reasonable that they could have their level of challenge controlled independently. I think we can agree that the "Plot" difficulty setting was pretty silly either way, since it plays such a large role in motivating the rest of the player experience (On 0 or 1 there's little compelling you to experience the puzzles, cyberspace sequences, or scripted enemy traps that would block your progression through Citadel Station and on 3, the time limit imposes stringent requirements on how you choose to interact with all three of those elements).

As for offloading difficulty customization to the player, again I claim that this presents more problems than it solves. In giving up high level control of difficulty modifiers, the designer leaves a much wider space for an unbalanced and dissatisfying user experience, even if there is potential for the player to come up with something good. While I can appreciate such options in cases where the initial level of challenge was too low, it isn't a suitable replacement for well-thought-out and properly implemented difficulty presets, and can mean that the difficulty settings are underdeveloped overall. A few options here and there are fine (chiefly, the ability to toggle hardcore elements on), I'm just against sliders for every gameplay element.

For some examples of good, cohesively designed difficulty modes, these come to mind:

• Doom 1/2 -- difficulty affects loot, level features, and enemy placement, behaviors, and damage
• Goldeneye/Perfect Dark -- difficulty affects aim assist (lel), enemy health and damage, enemy placement, loot, level features, and the objectives to be completed
• Thief 1/2 -- difficulty affects player health, enemy placement (and AI?), loot, level features, and the objectives to be completed
• System Shock 2 -- difficulty affects player health and psi, enemy stats and damage, loot, replicator costs and cybernetic upgrade costs
• Deus Ex with GMDX (vanilla difficulty settings only modified damage) -- difficulty affects player damage and accuracy, enemy damage and AI behaviors, loot, level hazards, and Hardcore adds features like restricted checkpoint saving

There are plenty more examples out there -- this list is entirely first-person games because that's what I prefer -- but I think I've made my point. With more control over the high-level aspects of the game, the designer can assure that the player is appropriately challenged and thus engaged.

 

[V_K]

With more control over the high-level aspects of the game, the designer can assure that the player is appropriately challenged and thus engaged.

But this is bogus. What constitutes "appropriate challenge" for different players isn't uniform. Particularly in this kind of games that are build upon allowing a variety of approaches. For example, I have crap reflexes, but good lateral thinking. A "balanced" easy difficulty would leave me with managable combat, but boring puzzles, high difficulty - with engaging puzzles, but frustrating combat. I'd probably drop the game halfway (or hexedit my stats) in either case.
And as I've already set - why not have both presets and sliders?

 

[Ash]

1. Because designers often have a challenging vision they specifically want the player to succumb and submit to. To conform to it and git gud. I probably would have never came to appreciate challenge of varying forms in games were I not forcefully exposed to it by old school games. And when the select few scrubs whine about the hardest difficulty in my project, I simply think of them as not up to the (relatively not all that hard) challenge. think of it as sports: no special inclusiveness. Get good and follow the same rules as everyone else, or go home. It's bad enough there may or may not be lower difficulty presets as it is.
2. Because it's easier to balance the overarching experience this way. With easy - medium - hard - extra hard it's four presets to design for, rather than thousands upon thousands of permutations as a result of even slightly scaleable sliders.
3. To a much lesser extent, because asking the player to actually truthfully/accurately evaluate their own skill level on a granular scale is probably asking too much from the majority, and it's better to just keep it simple and not shove a slider questionnaire in the player's face upon install.

That's what comes to my mind first anyways.

 

[V_K]

But that's missing the point. The whole appeal of RPGs, and immersive sims in particular, is their ability to accommodate for different playstyles. Granular difficulty sliders just take this approach a bit further.