System Shock is now back to Nightdive’s ‘original vision’

Status update

After a brief hiatus and some soul searching, Nightdive Studios is back on track with System Shock.

The developers shared a status update today on Kickstarter to assure that the overly-ambitious project is now “back to the original vision we shared with you at the start of our Kickstarter campaign – this time with more reliable performance and higher fidelity visuals thanks to the Unreal Engine.”

New screenshots from @SystemShockGame oozing atmosphere and color! pic.twitter.com/Z4wjIpx7dR

— Stephen Kick (@pripyatbeast) April 6, 2018

“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,” said Nightdive CEO Stephen Kick. “What we’re left with is a concentrated team that consists of the original developers who worked on the Unity demo.”

He added that despite some sweeping changes, the team isn’t starting fresh. “We have been able to re-use the majority of work we’ve done over the past year and we’re making significant progress in a very short amount of time. With that said we’ll be inviting our highest tier backers to privately test the game beginning in September at which point we estimate that the game will be fully playable, from start to finish. The majority of the art won’t be finished, but we’ll be ready to start high-level testing.”

If all goes according to plan, we’ll be playing System Shock in 2020. That seems fitting. The full backer update is worth a look, particularly for a word on the game’s newly-refocused music direction.

April Update [Kickstarter]