• Hey, guest user. Hope you're enjoying NeoGAF! Have you considered registering for an account? Come join us and add your take to the daily discourse.

System Shock Remake is Almost Complete, Says Nightdive Studios

Lunatic_Gamer

Gold Member
system-shock-remake-audio-log.jpg


Larry Kuperman, director of business development at Nightdive, was on hand at GDC to give updates on System Shock, and said it's "largely complete." He referred to it as being in "pre-beta"; the PC version has all of the weapons, enemies, and other elements, but the team is still working on the console versions. Kuperman noted that the developers want to release the game simultaneously across all platforms.

system-shock-remake-plasma-gun.jpg


This remake has been rebuilt from the ground up, according to the project's Kickstarter. At first, the game was being built in Unity, but the studio decided to switch over to Unreal Engine 4 a couple of years in.

"Unity is not a great engine to use if you want to make an FPS on console," game director Jason Fader told Polygon back in 2017, citing fidelity and cross-platform support as some of the reasons why the team made the switch.

System Shock remake is expected to launch later this year on PC, Epic Games, and GOG. Console editions of the game for Xbox and PlayStation are also in the works.

 

Kuranghi

Member
I'm pretty excited for this one, because I wanted to play it before SS2.

Thank the lord of darkness they switched to UE, sure it's had some issues recently with shader whatevers but at least it's not Poonity.

I know I'm being unfair to condemn it totally, lots of games get released on Unity and are fabulous, but after buying 5+, maybe even 10 games the last few years or so that just don't run properly due to some quirks of Unity (that many devs fix). Then either having to refund them or more often than not just lose the money because I've spent over 2 hours trying to fix them, my patience has kind of run out and I'd just prefer devs use something else without these strange stuttering problems.

It's like a series of great plays but they keep being shown in this theatre where this drunk guy pisses on your head right when the play gets good, the show runners could have kicked the guy out but they can't find the right words to do it and ol' pissin' Jack continues to ruin it for everyone.
 

nemiroff

Gold Member
System Shock was an impactful experience to me at the time. Atmosphere seems nice, sound seems nice, animations seems nice, the team seems to do well for what I assume is a tiny budget. But it's 2022 now to be honest I don't really have much hope for this one. I need more production value on a title like this to make it worthwhile for me in this day and age.

Edit: Wait, they have 40 employees...? I'm probably missing something..
 

k_trout

Member
looking forward to this but I would have preferred it to be not so dark, OG was creepy without being dark
 

SF Kosmo

Al Jazeera Special Reporter
Switch version. You know it makes sense nightdive. What you don’t like money ?
Even though the game isn't that technically ambitious, porting UE4 games to Switch is tricky. They might do it but they probably don't want to risk holding up their launch to do it simultaneously.
 

Doczu

Member
UE5 port is quite an easy task.
And does UE5 support PS4 and how would it impact performance? I am not upgrading for this game and surely i don't want to wait any longer. It's been a tull fucking console generation since it's announcement...
 

MaKTaiL

Member
And does UE5 support PS4 and how would it impact performance? I am not upgrading for this game and surely i don't want to wait any longer. It's been a tull fucking console generation since it's announcement...
UE5 is fully scalable. It could run on Switch if devs want to optimize for it.
 
The one Warren Spector was working on is dead, but the rights were purchased by Tencent and presumably they are doing something with them.

oh damn, I didn't know that. Crapola. That's my second favorite franchise of all time, now in the hands of the chinese government? Cry.
 

SF Kosmo

Al Jazeera Special Reporter
oh damn, I didn't know that. Crapola. That's my second favorite franchise of all time, now in the hands of the chinese government? Cry.
If it's any consolation, it didn't sound like Spector's version was coming along well. By all accounts they were making something with a very scaled down vision that probably wouldn't have made diehard series fans very happy.

It was being developed by OtherSide entertainment, who made Underworld Ascendant which was a disastrous flop commercially and critically. It was a different team in a different city, so I don't say that to malign that team, but the fact is they were hoping to use the money from Underworld to pay for SS3, and there simply was no money from Underworld. And they damaged their reputation to such an extent that it made fundraising more difficult.

It really was a shitty situation. I think OtherSide had a lot of talent and interesting ideas but Underworld was forced out by it's publisher in a blatantly unfinished state. Like, one of the worst I have ever seen, it didn't even have a working save system. They did manage to improve it a great deal in post release patches.but too little too late to save their reputation or make it the game it should have been.
 
Last edited:

MaKTaiL

Member
I'm not sure what the benefit would be for a game like this with a deliberately retro aesthetic (low res, unfiltered textures, blocky models, etc).
Retro asthetic has nothing to do with this. Lumen would make a HUGE difference to graphics if they used it.
 

SF Kosmo

Al Jazeera Special Reporter
Retro asthetic has nothing to do with this. Lumen would make a HUGE difference to graphics if they used it.
I wonder how well Lumen would work in that kind of scenario, to be honest. Compared to a more robust raytracing solution. But I do see.your point, a lot of emissives and colored lights could look cool.
 
Top Bottom