Warren Spector: "If immersive sims disappear, I disappear"
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While the System Shock 3 director can't speak for other companies' games, he does know Underworld Ascendant has "done well enough to get our next game funded" -- although he said he doesn't know the exact sales figure.
"My business partner handles all this stuff because I just want to make games," he said. "I do not want to think about it. I spent a few years with Disney thinking about the studio as much as I was thinking about the game, and I don't want to do that anymore. I suspect you're right, that sales weren't quite what we hoped for, but I really don't know."
Regardless of whether his company's latest release sold well enough to fund another, it's impossible to ignore the number of companies struggling to sell this type of game in sufficient quantities. Given how risk-averse this industry can be, particularly at the top, does this mean the end is nigh for immersive sims?
"It's not going to disappear," said Spector. "Well, if it does, I'm going to disappear. By choice.
"One of the ways to address this on System Shock 3 and at OtherSide in general is we're trying to keep our budgets in line with our expected sales. Given our budget, we don't have to sell 100 million copies, we don't have to make $1 billion for a major publisher to succeed and to make money. Our budgets now are by choice more modest, and that means we don't have to sell as many copies. We have a dedicated audience, people who love these games. We have people who love making them. So all we have to do is adjust our thinking to reach that audience."
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The real challenge with System Shock 3 is living up to the legacy of its forebears. It's been 20 years since System Shock 2, 25 since the original, and striking the balance between staying true to the old games but adopting the advancements of newer ones is "terrifying," according to Spector.
"We're not even competing with System Shock and System Shock 2; we're competing with people's memories of them. And their memories are not of terrible-looking 2D animation, blocky graphics, simple levels.
He continued: "But it's interesting and strange to have the opportunity to go back and give Shodan some sensible motivation. In the earlier games it was like, 'Why did I do it? Because I'm mad of course.' It's a great character; people love Shodan and she's a terrific villain, but that's not the most sophisticated motivation you can come up with. So the opportunity to explain who she is, let her become something is kinda cool.
We're also going to bring back Citadel Station in some form -- was it entirely destroyed? If you go back to the original game, you can find the answer. There were some survivors of those early games, so being able to tell people what happened to those characters is fun.
"But the thing we always have to remember is that it's a balancing act. We have to make sure we reach beyond the core fans. The original System Shock and System Shock 2 were re-released in their original form with no changes about three years ago and sold over a million copies -- so we know there's an audience out there, but we need to reach beyond that. We're finding the balance between pleasing the existing fans and giving new fans something to grab onto without knowing all the lore."
System Shock 3 and Underworld Ascendant have given Spector the chance to revisit and improve on some of his earliest creations, although the rights to his other past works now lie in the hands of other publishers.
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As mentioned, Spector remains confident that immersive sims won't disappear. Instead, he believes developers' ability to create more complex simulations of things like physics and other elements of the world will only improve the scope of them. Players will be able to "apply actual logic" to a world and the decisions they make, using these simulated systems as a tool to solve the in-game problems they face.
"Also, it's probably time for us to go multiplayer," he concluded. "I think we have to see that. We've been talking about it for years, nobody's done it right."
The history of the immersive sim is one of single-player campaigns, so how on Earth would a multiplayer version work?
"If I told you, I'd have to kill you," Spector said. Or perhaps use a stealth takedown, or hack this article -- there's always another choice.
