Warren Spector Talks System Shock 3 Ideas and Early Development

Polygon has published a brief but very dense interview with Warren Spector that focuses entirely on his return to game development and his role as lead on the upcoming System Shock 3, which was announced last year by OtherSide Entertainment. Obviously, the game is still very, very early in development, but Spector appears to have a good idea of what he wants to accomplish with the title and how.

Two passages, in particular, struck me as interesting. In one section of the interview, Spector notes that he wants to do something that is more ambitious than the original System Shock in terms of player agency and “shared authorship”. The Deus Ex executive producer hopes to accomplish that by applying the game design lessons that developers have been learning for the last 20 years:

“Over the last 20 years we know a lot more about allowing players to create their own unique experiences so recreating the experience of playing System Shock would frankly be a waste of time and I have no interest so what we have to do is bring System Shock into the 21st Century using everything we’ve learned over the past 20 years.”

While Spector claims his academic experiences have been positive and that he learned just as much from his students as they learned from him, he still intends to surround himself with veterans. Because of his very precise idea of the concept of “shared authorship” and its importance in the game’s design, Spector will reach out to members of the original System Shock’s team, in the hopes that this will save him time he’d otherwise have to spend mentoring team members:

“I’m certainly going to put the word out and see if I can find people who worked on the original games because there aren’t a lot of people in the game business who understand the idea of player empowerment in the way that’s important to me. There aren’t a lot of people who understand the concept of shared authorship. I need to reach out to people who understand those things. I don’t want to spend the next year teaching people those things.”

In the full interview, Spector also talks about how he hopes to achieve AAA quality with a small team, the conceptual work he’s done so far, his familiarity with the System Shock universe, and his thoughts on the development process in general. I highly recommend giving it a read, it likely won’t take more than 5 minutes at most.