It’s easy to forget that System Shock is getting a remake. The project was announced all the way back in 2015 and received funding through a Kickstarter campaign, but it seemed to suffer from development troubles. In 2018, the project even went on hiatus, with developer Nightdive Studios needing to assure that it wasn’t canceled.
Related: What platforms will the System Shock remake be on?
Once Nightdive secured a new partnership with publisher Prime Matter, the game was scheduled for a 2022 release, eventually delayed to March 2023. Now, with that release window just two months away, Nightdive has assured that there will be no more delays and that everything is on track for the remake to launch on time.
In an update to the game’s Kickstarter page, Nightdive acknowledges that it announced tentative release dates that the studio couldn’t meet. But Nightdive states that the scope and scale of the System Shock remake has evolved quite drastically since work on it first began, citing Prime Matter’s involvement as the reason why it was able to focus on quality-of-life improvements and bug fixes.
If you head over to the Kickstarter page, you’ll find some new screenshots and brief snippets of gameplay to highlight development updates. For example, there’s now an animation of the player character swiping a keycard that plays when accessing locked areas, and Nightdive has spent a lot of effort on giving every enemy custom dismemberment models for when they take damage. You can also get a first look at recurring character Diego, or at least one of the incarnations he takes throughout the course of System Shock.
While everything seems to be looking up for the remake, the fate of System Shock 3 is another question entirely. Announced in 2015, this threequel has suffered even more development woes. Its director already appears to have moved onto something else, and Tencent, which now owns the rights to the IP, hasn’t issued any updates on the project.
