System Shock Reboot Project is Back In Development, Targeting Early 2020 Release

[Shawn Zipay]

The System Shock reboot/remaster/remake is back in active development, according to a report from PC Gamer. This is rather noteworthy because the last we knew, development was halted after they apparently ran out of funding. It was also a matter that the team felt they had diverted too far from the original vision of what they had hoped to accomplish with the remake.

How will things differ now? For starters, Nightdive CEO Stephen Kick said that they are shifting their focus back to what they first established with the Unity demo back in 2016. It doesn't mean that the game is going to switch away from using Unreal Engine, a switch that was made in early 2017, only that the focus will shift back.

"As we geared up and started moving forward with it, we began to run into feature creep," business development director Larry Kuperman said. "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. That doesn't mean that interpretation would've been bad, but it wouldn't have been true to the System Shock vision."

With this new focus in mind, the two expect the System Shock remake to hit around the first quarter of 2020. Kickstarter backers will get their first look at System Shock running on Unreal Engine some time in April.

"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. Our expectation is probably Q1 of 2020."