One of the most exciting things that can happen in gaming is the announcement of that sequel or spiritual successor you’ve been begging for. There’s no shortage of those kinds of announcements these days, but sometimes those announcements can feel like mistakes, particularly when a game is nowhere near ready.
Sure, the hype is exciting, but there’s no real purpose to announcing a game years and years ahead of time other than marketing, of course. If a game enters what’s informally known as development hell, that announcement can sting a lot, both for the studio behind it and the fans excited about it.
In Part 1 of this series, Game Informer detailed the development history of games like Pikmin 4, Dead Island 2, Skull & Bones, and more. Part 2 explored the development hell of five more games, and Part 3, the final part of this series, examines another five projects.
System Shock 3
System Shock 3 is a game many have clamored for and asked about for years. It’s no surprise, either, as its predecessor, System Shock 2, is one of the most important sci-fi games of all time. System Shock 3 was expected sometime following System Shock 2, but nothing ever came of it. Instead, we got BioShock.
However, Nightdive Studios, which would go on to succeed in a massive Kickstarter fundraiser for a remaster of the first System Shock, bought the rights to the franchise from Star Insurance in 2015.
Then, later that year, Otherside Entertainment (formed by Paul Neurath, the creative director of Looking Glass Studios, the studio that originally created the System Shock series) announced that it was developing System Shock 3. Wait, how is that possible? Didn’t Nightdive Studios own the rights to the franchise? Well, it turns out Nightdive Studios simply gave Otherside Entertainment permission to make the threequel.
Two years passed with nigh a word, and then in March of 2017, Starbreeze Studios announced that it had signed a publishing deal with Otherside Entertainment to bring System Shock 3 to PC and other platforms. Two more years passed, mostly void of System Shock 3 information, but in 2019, we got a teaser featuring the evil AI, SHODAN.
That teaser was the last we heard about System Shock 3. Is it canceled? Nothing seems to indicate that. Is it stuck in development hell? Considering we haven’t heard a word about it in over two years, almost certainly. Will it make it out? Who knows, but Nightdive Studios seems committed to making System Shock a mainstream franchise, especially if the live-action System Shock television series it’s making is any indication.
Red Ash: The Indelible Legend
Remember when Mega Man creator Keiji Inafune and his new studio, Comcept, teased what appeared to be a Mega Man Legends spiritual successor called Red Ash: The Indelible Legend? That was way back in 2015. It was one of the first games Comcept was going to develop after Mega Man spiritual successor Mighty No. 9.
Red Ash’s Kickstarter was a touch slower going than Mighty No. 9, which came out the gates red hot, but it eventually did hit its Kickstarter goal. Yay! That means Red Ash is going to get made. You would think, but that doesn’t appear to be the case.
We’ve not heard a single thing about it since basically 2015, other than a short film funded by Kickstarter and some additional funding for the game’s development by way of Chinese entertainment group, Fuze. Red Ash obviously never came out, Inafune hasn’t really provided any updates about it, and considering Comcept has released other games since that Kickstarter – looking at you, Mighty No. 9 and ReCore – it seems Red Ash is no more, or at least, he has zero desire to tell us anything about it.