The developer Nightdive Studios has confirmed that the System Shock remake game will be expected to release some time within March 2023.
The Kickstarter campaign-driven remake of System Shock began back in 2016, with Nightdive Studios committed to releasing the game in 2017, 2018, 2020 and 2021. Yesterday, an update on the game’s Kickstarter page noted how the game’s development was in its “last major steps.” While the short little blog post did not provide too much more details on the game, the developer clearly stated that they will be sticking with the March 2023 release window.
One of the major updates from the post was the fact that Nightdive acknowledged they could accomplish more with Prime Matter backing them as a publisher—the post showed that Prime Matter was added on the Steam System Shock page. It read: “The scope and scale of the project has evolved dramatically and with Prime Matter joining the project it’s enabled us to focus on quality-of-life improvements, bug fixing, and localization support – the last major steps towards releasing a game we’re all incredibly proud of. This has also given us time to go back and polish various aspects of the game that needed that extra shine.”
Then, there was the sub-heading titled “Variants, Effects and Feature”, which looked at what game mechanics have changed and how the locations and enemies have improved. The post also confirmed that the iconic big head AI Diego would “be making numerous appearance throughout the game”, and it showed a picture of how its revamped look.
The post concluded with some videos revealing updated effects to the Plasma Rifle and demonstrated how players would be able to brutally dismember enemies (yuck!). It discussed how the developer team had created “custom dismemberment models” for each type of enemy.
The last major update on System Shock‘s development status was at gamescom 2022 where Nightdive had a booth with Shodan, and Larry Kuperman from the Nightdive dev team spoke more on the game and what was the status of the game. In terms of when System Shock 3 could be in the works is still unclear as Tencent has the power to greenlight the sequel.
The Nightdive CEO Stephen Kick said that the original Austin-based owners, Otherside Entertainment, sold the rights to the third game to Tencent. He said, “So Tencent currently has the rights to the third game, and we have the rights to do the remake of the first game and potentially a remake of the second game. That’s pretty much where it stands right now.”
