We’ll have to wait just a bit longer for Nightdive Studios’ long-awaited remake of System Shock. The PC version of the game, which was expected to launch this month, is now targeting a May 30 release date on Steam, GOG, and the Epic Games Store, according to an announcement that came in the voice of series antagonist AI Shodan. Nightdive added that the PC release will be followed by versions for PlayStation and Xbox consoles “in due course.”
“We had hoped to bring the game to market by the end of March, but that turned out to be just beyond our reach,” the developers wrote. “We are after all merely human (unlike Shodan!).”
The long road to this System Shock remake started back in 2016, when Nightdive raised $1.35 million via Kickstarter for what it called “a complete remake of the genre-defining classic from 1994, rebuilt from the ground up with the Unity Engine.” Active development later moved to the Unreal Engine but was put on hiatus in early 2018, shortly after the team missed its initial December 2017 target.
During the hiatus, Nightdive scaled back what it called “feature creep” in the project and refocused for a target release date of 2020. The first of a number of early demos of the game was released in late 2019, but the game would go on to miss expected release dates in 2021 and 2022 as development dragged on.
A nearly feature-complete demo for the game launched in February, leading Ars’ Kevin Purdy to praise the game’s updated-yet-familiar graphics and overhauled interface. “The feelings of dread, of being just slightly overwhelmed and under-resourced, of feeling like there really is a rogue AI working against you, should be easier to access in this game than the original,” he said of the demo.
Nightdive’s System Shock remake is completely separate from a System Shock 3 sequel project, which was officially confirmed as dead last March by series creator Warren Spector.
