System Shock 3 gears up with Starbreeze involvement

Be afraid: Shodan is the nimble, powerful AI villain of the System Shock franchise.

Franchise game designers were already back on board; now Starbreeze Studios has backed the Arthur C. Clarke-esque sci-fi thriller System Shock 3 to the tune of US$12mil (RM52.2mil).

Swedish publisher Starbreeze has made a name for itself in a number of ways.

There's the success of intense heist game franchise Payday, whose 2013 entry Payday 2 generated huge commercial success, numerous paid add-ons, and, at times, no small amount of controversy among enthusiastic players with some of its post-release design tweaks.

Then there's the narrative-driven Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons, an award-winning game from film director Josef Fares (his own brother, Fares Fares, held a small but significant role in 2016's Star Wars blockbuster Rogue One.)

And its US$2mil (RM8.87mil) acquisition in 2015 of bold French VR startup InfinitEye, whose headset was subsequently renamed StarVR, alerted onlookers to Starbreeze's hardware ambitions, going up against Facebook's Oculus Rift and HTC's Vive with a super wide field-of-view and a 5k display; adventures in cinema-grade virtual reality continued with 2017's big name movie tie-in and multi-studio project John Wick Chronicles.

It's not the first time that Starbreeze has backed an outside project as its publisher –  in February, it contributed US$8mil (RM35.4mil) to Psychonauts 2 which, like System Shock 3, is the sequel to a cult favourite, though one that had already come through an US$3.8mil (RM16.8mil) crowdfunding round.

As for System Shock, the franchise started in 1994 and became hugely influential, merging sci-fi themes of offworld isolation, space-station disaster recovery, and powerful rogue AI assistants, and achieving new levels of immersion in the interactive, video game experience; a second game arrived in '99 and only served to heighten the series' reputation.

Both Paul Neurath and Warren Spector were involved in leading design work on the original System Shock and both are among those back on board for the threequel, which is being developed by Neurath's OtherSide Entertainment studio.

Also in on the project is Terri Brosius, who voiced the games' malevolent AI, Shodan, and artist Robb Waters of System Shock (and spiritual successors BioShock and BioShock Infinite.)

Previously announced in December 2015, System Shock 3 is (still) in the "early concept stages," according to Starbreeze and OtherSide. That said, its chances of completion have now shot up inestimably. —  AFP Relaxnews