System Shock Remake Team Downsizes as it Returns to "Original Vision"

After a breath hiatus, we reported last month that Night Dive Studios was returning to development [...]

By Tyler Fischer

After a breath hiatus, we reported last month that Night Dive Studios was returning to development of its crowd-funded System Shock Remake. At the time, the developer admitted the team got carried away, and the project was increasingly straying away from its original vision of a faithful remake, and looking more and more like a new game entirely.

That said, slowly but surely Night Dive Studios is correcting course, and returning to said original vision it pitched to its Kickstarter backers back in 2016.

Whilst outlining its future plans in its latest Kickstarter update -- which is said to be inspired by the team's time with the game's community -- the developer most notably revealed that it has downsized to match its reduced scope. How significant the downsize was though, wasn't revealed.

The update post reads:

"Hey everyone, it's Stephen from Nightdive with the latest update. The last few weeks have been challenging, but at the same time it's been enlightening. As some of you know I've been spending more and more time with the community in Discord answering questions and making reassurances that yes, we are still developing the game. I've also been speaking and interacting with many of you one on one so as to better understand how the latest news impacted you and your feelings towards the project. The vast majority of you agree that we are doing the right thing and that what you want is a high quality game that adheres closely to the vision of the original System Shock rather than the reinterpretation that we were previously working toward.

"We had a brief respite, and took the time necessary to make some tough decisions which included saying goodbye to some of the developers that you've come to know through past updates. What we're left with is a concentrated team that consists of the original developers who worked on the Unity demo."

According to later in the post, while the team has gone back to the original vision the Kickstarter campaign pitched, it is now with "more reliable performance and higher fidelity visuals" that are made possible with usage of the Unreal Engine.

The post also notes that none of this means the team is starting over, in fact, it has been able to salvage and re-use the majority of work it did over the past year. Because it was able to do this, Night Dive Studios expects the game to be fully playable, from start to finish, sometime this September.

System Shock Remake is slated to release sometime during Q1 2020 -- two years after its original launch window -- for PS4, Xbox One, PC, Mac, and Linux. The Kickstarter update, which was linked above, also notably contains a few new environment screenshots, in case you want to check those out. Spoilers: it looks like System Shock, but pretty.

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