System Shock Remake Still Happening, Now Coming in 2020

Back in July 2016, the System Shock remake from developer Night Dive Studios took to the scene via Kickstarter, where it successfully raised over $1,300,000 across 21,000 backers.

Not long after, the remake of the 1994 classic was poised to release sometime in 2018 for PlayStation 4, Xbox One, PC, Mac, and Linux.

2018 then arrived, bringing not more details on a release date, but bad news. In February Night Dive Studios announced that the project was being put on hitaus, after things got out of control and the vision for the project began to morph from a remake to almost an entirely new game.

History lesson aside, Night Dive Studios CEO Stephen Kick and business development director Larry Kuperman recently spoke to PC Gamer at Game Developer's Conference this week, where naturally the topic of the System Shock came up. The pair offered up further details on what went wrong with the project, as well talked about its hopes to get back on track.

"As we geared up and started moving forward with [the System Shock reboot] we began to run into feature creep," said Kuperman. "All of those things like 'you know what would really be cool, how we might reinterpret this', various people wanted to put their imprint on it. As this process evolved over a period of time, it grew in complexity, and it veered away from this original representation. If the project had continued to follow that particular trajectory, It wouldn't have been true to the System Shock vision.

Kick added that the Kickstarter backer feedback is ultimately what spurred them to go back to the drawing board.

"That's what really caused the shift in what we're doing now, which is going back to what we'd established and represented with the [original] demo."

"Our intention is to ship exactly the game that was promised, with as much of the features that were promised as we can, in a timeframe that will get it out as fast as we can."

Speaking of a timeframe, the expected release date is no longer 2018, rather its Q1 of 2020. Despite being an additional two years of development, Night Dive Studios is confident therewon't be complimenting with financial difficulties. According to Kuperman, there has been "renewed interest from some publishing partners," who previously weren't very excited about the game's scope prior to the hiatus, but are now happy with the vision of the project.

Source: PC Gamer