The development of System Shock Remastered is going on a bit of a break. According to a Kickstarter update from CEO Stephen Kick, Nightdive Studios has put development of the game “on hiatus” to “reassess our path so that we can return to our vision.”
Kick went on to say that the scope of the project had drifted too far away from what they had originally envisioned, and that this hiatus will hopefully allow them to get back to that point:
Maybe we were too successful. Maybe we lost our focus. The vision began to change. We moved from a Remaster to a completely new game. We shifted engines from Unity to Unreal, a choice that we don’t regret and one that has worked out for us. With the switch we began envisioning doing more, but straying from the core concepts of the original title.
As our concept grew and as our team changed, so did the scope of what we were doing and with that the budget for the game. As the budget grew, we began a long series of conversations with potential publishing partners. The more that we worked on the game, the more that we wanted to do, and the further we got from the original concepts that made System Shock so great.
Backers pledged a total of $1.3 million towards System Shock Remastered’s crowdfunding campaign in June 2016. The game was in development for the for the PC, PS4, and Xbox One, and originally scheduled to launch sometime in 2018, but it’s possible that timetable will have to change after the hiatus.
