Surprise! System Shock 3 is in the works right now.
But it’s not coming from Night Dive. On Monday, Otherside Entertainment—currently hard at work on Underworld Ascendant and helmed by Looking Glass co-founder Paul Neurath—posted this teaser page:
The Internet decided waiting was for suckers, and a member of the RPG Codex forum trawled the source code to find this page prepped for Sunday.
That’s pretty conclusive. System Shock 3 is real. It’s happening. Take a second to get excited, squeal a bit, maybe pump a fist, and then…
The question now becomes one of scale. Otherside turned to crowdfunding for Underworld Ascendant, raising about $850,000 through Kickstarter. I did some back-of-envelope math and, well, I don’t think a similar campaign would raise enough money to fund the System Shock sequel everyone wants. You’d need a crowdfunding miracle like Star Citizen to get a budget in line with most modern first-person shooters.
Ouch. Reality. We’ll see what Sunday has in store—perhaps System Shock 3 is happening with the backing of a major publisher, or Bill Gates has been waiting his whole life to fund this game. It's hard to know for sure.
We’ll keep you updated.