System Shock remake development has been temporarily halted

Nightdive Studios, which raised $1.35 million through crowdfunding to make a remake of System Shock, has temporarily halted the project. According to the studio, this was done because the project started to deviate too much from the original idea.

Stephen Kick, CEO of Nightdive Studios, wrote this in a statement on Kickstarter. He has instructed the team working on the remake to stop doing so, with the aim of reassessing the direction of the game.

Kick emphasizes that this is a temporary stop and that the intention is to find the right vision again, and then continue. The CEO himself states that he is responsible for deviating from the original plan. He mentions, among other things, the switch from Unity to Unreal Engine, partly because of that change the team started to get bigger and bigger ideas and as a result a completely new game was made, instead of a remaster of the original.

After the concept changed and the team grew, the studio also got more budget and started discussions with potential publishers. As the plans got bigger and more elaborate, the concept strayed more and more from the original game, Kick says. He has no regrets about the switch to Unreal Engine, but he says that he let things get out of hand and that the project has taken a wrong turn.

It is not yet clear when the project will be resumed, what the changes are and what the new schedule is for the release of the remake. Nightdive Studios raised $1.35 million on Kickstarter in 2016 to remake System Shock. At the time, the goal was to release the game in 2017, but not much later, the release was already postponed to the second half of 2018.

Apart from the remake, another studio, OtherSide Entertainment, is working on System Shock 3. Development of the third installment in the series was announced in late 2015. A few months later, it was announced that Warren Spector, the chief executive behind the first Deus Ex game and System Shock, had been hired to lead the team working on the new game.

The first installment in the System Shock series appeared in 1994 and System Shock 2 came out in 1999. The cyberpunk themed action RPGs were well received at the time and are considered classics within the genre.