KickStarter System Shock 1 Remake by Nightdive Studios

[Cpt. Dallas]

Not sure if this is headcanon or not but I thought Shodan was "female" because she decided to start creating new life. Which would in fact make her the anti-tranny, as we all know from the copypasta.

You will never be a real AI.

 

[LarryTyphoid]

They do, however, change up shit in the intro and ending to try and make her more of a sympathetic villian...

Retarded. System Shock 1 is SHODAN at her most menacing, before she gets emasculated by the hacker at the end of the game and spends SS2 as more of a funny sidekick than a threatening antagonist (and getting completely humiliated in the ending of that game as well). SHODAN's really gonna lose her reputation as this big all-time intimidating AI villain for video games at this rate if she can't even stay pure in the remake of the first game.

 

[Infinitron]

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1598858095/system-shock/posts/3819487

2 Important Announcements​

Hello Hackers,

As we near the final days to the PC launch of System Shock, we have two quick announcements.

Announcement #1: PC Keys Status​

For those of you who have selected a copy of the PC game, you WILL NOT have to purchase the game again. Many have seen a message that your Beta key has been removed. This was a decision by our publisher.

Today, eligible Kickstarter backers will receive access to your new and permanent key that will unlock the full version of the game. However, and this very important, the keys will not unlock the game until the official date and time of launch, May 30th at 8 am PST | 11 am EST.

Announcement #2: Shipping Address Changes​

This is just a reminder that if you need to change your shipping address you can do so by contacting BackerKit support at the link below.

https://system-shock.backerkit.com/faq#contact-us

These changes can be made up until July 1st, 2023. After that addresses will be completely locked to prepare for shipping. Any changes, after that date, will be the receiver's responsibility. (We suggest mail forwarding for those who've moved or are moving.)

The console release date is still to be decided as we continue polishing work - we'll update you when we have a date.

Thank you

- Team Nightdive Studios

 

[Tweed]

I wager 50/50 that something goes wrong with those keys and backers are forced to wait a week before they get to play the game.

 

[Daedalos]

i aint gotten shit so far.

where do i view my new key?

 

[Tyranicon]

I wager 50/50 that something goes wrong with those keys and backers are forced to wait a week before they get to play the game.

I still remember when they shotgunned out all the beta or whatever keys in a single doc and some bot scraped them all.

 

[randir14]

Gonna be playing this on GOG, I pre-ordered it with a Russian VPN for $5 years ago.

 

[Jenkem]

anyone got a spare key from the kickstarter they don't want? thanks

 

[Bester]

anyone got a spare key from the kickstarter they don't want? thanks

Yeah, here you go.

RUTR-ACKE-RORG

 

[SlamDunk]

After a few months long break I just replayed the demo on Steam, found it again promising and am interested to read your impressions on the full game.

 

[flyingjohn]

 

[Zombra]

Forgot this existed until I saw a review.

https://www.pcgamer.com/system-shock-remake-review/

SYSTEM SHOCK REVIEW​

Nightdive has done an excellent job modernising the original game, although it might have stuck a little too faithfully to its formula.​

Let me tell you about the one that got away. She was pitiless and cruel, narcissistic and delusional. She unfurled through Citadel Station in a thousand security cameras and as many cyborg slaves, their meat taken from the bodies of the outpost's former staff. She made pustules and blisters, mutants and monsters. She was the death of me a million times over, and I've missed her more than words can say.

She is SHODAN, of course, the malevolent AI goddess who was the centrepiece and proudest creation of 1994's System Shock, now rebuilt in sparkling Unreal Engine 4 in this remake from Nightdive Studios. It suits her. Gone are the sprite-based enemies and screen-eating UI from the original game, replaced by clanking, three-dimensional automatons and an inventory that—while not exactly sleek—is certainly easier to use than the original's rolling shopping list of weapons, explosives, and stimulants.

Both System Shock and SHODAN are legendary; they're iconic symbols of an era and philosophy in game design, and remaking them must have been a daunting task for Nightdive. How do you change-up the game that first used the 451 code, the one that every immersive sim still uses to mark itself as part of the tribe to this day, without being accused of sacrilege and blasphemy?

The answer, to the remake's benefit and detriment, is 'faithfully'. Nightdive's System Shock is still very much that game from 1994. It's a project that aims to upgrade, beautify, and smooth down some rough edges. There are a few new additions, but this is no sweeping overhaul, and it leaves most of the best and worst of the original game intact. I suppose it's only appropriate: SHODAN demands faith above all else.

Remember Citadel​

System Shock's setup is classic cyberpunk fare, as easy-to-grasp today as it was 29 years ago. You're a hacker, a future ne'er-do-well who gets caught trying to sneak their way into the servers of the TriOptimum Corporation. In the prologue—a new, semi-playable version of the original game's opening cutscene—you barely make it through the login screen before thugs with guns kick down your door.

Not to worry, one of the worst people in the world—a corporate executive—has an offer for you: Use your talents to break the ethical restraints on the AI, SHODAN, that runs TriOp's Citadel Station facility near Saturn and he'll not only let you go, he'll furnish you with the military cybernetics you were trying to steal in the first place. You do it. You regret it.

Then the game begins, and the remake's devotion to the original becomes immediately apparent. After a six-month post-surgery convalescence, you awaken in one of Citadel Station's medical bays, an almost one-to-one recreation of the same starting area from the first game. There's the health pack on the shelf to your right, the steep ramp down to the exit and storage closet, and you even—for no identifiable reason—have to hit a button next to the closet door to open it, rather than simply clicking on the door itself like you usually do.

It feels like Nightdive is trying to convince you that you're in safe hands: "Don't worry, we won't do anything drastic to this thing we all love."I suspect it's exactly what a lot of nostalgic fans want to see, and honestly? It mostly works. My memory of the original game isn't good enough to tell you if every map is an exact recreation of its 1994 counterpart, but I experienced repeated deja vu—usually positive—through all my 20 hours playing.

Citadel's hallways are a joy to roam in the remake, just as they were in the original, and exploration will reward you with new weapons, new cyberware, new reserves of your ever-dwindling supplies of ammo, or most precious of all, literal trash, which you can exchange for credits at the game's recyclers to buy mods (a new addition for the remake) for your expanding roster of guns.

That addition aside, it's still the Citadel Station I remember, but where before those hallways were bright, wobbly, and flat, now they have a fully-realised physicality, all dark and brooding, made of materials that clang or thud or ding as stray shots glance off them.

Punching Deck​

The station is only one part of System Shock, the other being the tremendously '90s idea of Cyberspace. At certain points you run up to a terminal, jack in, and find yourself in an area that shares that newfound sense of space.

It actually makes it feel a fair bit different in this iteration of System Shock. In place of the sparse and confusing wireframe of the first game, Nightdive has created a mode that is, well, basically Descent. It's colourful and fast-paced, especially compared to the non-cyberspace parts of the game, electronic music blares, and the unrelenting relativity of up and down will likely have you feeling a little seasick as you dodge spiralling patterns of energy projectiles from thick throngs of enemies.

The cyber-vibes are immaculate: Hacking as an extended hallucinatory episode, and it immediately had me thinking of 1995's Hackers and the cyberspace scenes from 1996 FMV game Ripper (though it's slightly less kickin' rad than both).

It's not perfect, and sometimes cyberspace combat amounts to holding strafe while keeping your crosshair trained on an enemy that looks disconcertingly like an anthropomorphic octopus. The way the final cyberspace encounter has been dramatically changed is more of a sidegrade than anything, but the studio has done a great job of bringing this segment of the game up-to-date and simplifying it while keeping its vibes intact. I can't help but wonder what the result would have been if Nightdive had adopted a similar willingness to change things up with the rest of the game.

Tedious anarchy​

Because, although it tickles my nostalgia centres, there are downsides to Nightdive's reverence for the first game. Citadel was a maze back then and it's a maze now, a mess of switchbacks, nooks, and crannies.

At first, that just makes for fun exploration, but it becomes laborious when you have to navigate through its mazes again, and again, and again. One of the artefacts of the original game's design that Nightdive has brought over unchanged is a wearying amount of backtracking. Citadel Station is built vertically into nine floors, and no-one at any point decided to just build one elevator that goes to every single one.

That means when, for example, the game decides it's time for you to go back to level 3 at the end of level 6, you have to navigate your way to different elevators on each floor in between them, sometimes at opposite poles of twisting areas. More than once, I found myself maximising the game's map and just playing that, guiding the arrow denoting my character through long corridors towards what I desperately hoped was the right lift.

Speaking of the map, by the way, let me take this moment to emphasise that you should play this game with a keyboard and mouse, at least until it gets its console release and Nightdive backports whatever controller modifications it makes to those versions. The game's UI—a marked improvement over the original—just isn't pleasant to navigate using a cursor controlled by your right analogue stick.

Likewise, between your suite of cybernetic powers and the game's myriad weapons, it sometimes feels like there's just too much of System Shock to fit on a gamepad's limited buttons, leaving you hunting through its inventory screen at a snail's pace to find the thing you want while enemies are bearing down.

The situation wasn't helped by another bit of painstaking fidelity to the original project: A complete absence of an objective screen or mission markers. Instead, you need to pay attention to the logs you pick up and emails you receive to figure out what to do next.

That doesn't sound too hard, but you'll often find yourself distracted—by puzzles or combat or something else—when they're playing. More than once I found myself arriving at a new floor not entirely certain of what I was meant to be doing there, but hoping that with enough aimless blundering I'd eventually hit the lever or hack the control panel that would progress the story.

That's less damning than it might sound. You can always pore through your collected audio logs to find the one that tells you where to go, and like I said, wandering a new area is rewarding all by itself. These are things that will occasionally irritate you or add unnecessary friction, not the kind of problems that ever seriously threaten to spoil your experience. But I did sometimes find myself wishing that in some parts Nightdive had tried to adapt the spirit, rather than the letter, of the original game.

Immortal machine​

Years and years ago, Nightdive's project to remake System Shock was put on hold so that the devs could "reassess" their path. They'd suffered mission creep, it was said, and strayed too far from their original vision of modernising the original game. Those new ideas ate up an already limited budget and risked angering Kickstarter backers who, more than anything, just wanted a modern recreation of a beloved classic.

Well they got it, and you know what? It's great. This is, I feel confident saying, the definitive way to play System Shock in 2023 and beyond, but I can't help but wonder what that other world looks like. The one where Nightdive had the budget and the goodwill to take a few more risks, make a few more changes, and dramatically reduce the number of times it asked me to make a U-turn.

THE VERDICT
80

SYSTEM SHOCK
It might be a little conservative, but this is a smart, faithful remake and easily the de facto way to play System Shock in the modern era.

 

[randir14]

 

[Jinn]

Whining happening about how it's too close to the original and feels outdated because of it. Yeah, sounds like they done good. Great excuse for a replay.

 

[Beowulf]

I guess we will see now which reviewers really played FPS classics, and which only read their description on wikis.

 

[Spacer's Nugget]

Same "reviewer" BTW

 

[Tyranicon]

Being "too faithful" to the original is absolutely a good characteristic. Last thing we need is some 2023-type "innovations."

 

[flyingjohn]

Being faithful doesn't make sense in this case. The things that you would expect(graphics,qol) have been fucked up. That leaves the gameplay changes(Tetris inventory and a better cyberspace) feeling like useless additions.
Fans of the original will stick to to the original and get a superior product. Anybody else is too few in numbers to actually recoup losses of years of development.

 

[Infinitron]

Forgot this existed until I saw a review.

https://www.pcgamer.com/system-shock-remake-review/

Years and years ago, Nightdive's project to remake System Shock was put on hold so that the devs could "reassess" their path. They'd suffered mission creep, it was said, and strayed too far from their original vision of modernising the original game. Those new ideas ate up an already limited budget and risked angering Kickstarter backers who, more than anything, just wanted a modern recreation of a beloved classic.

Well they got it, and you know what? It's great. This is, I feel confident saying, the definitive way to play System Shock in 2023 and beyond, but I can't help but wonder what that other world looks like. The one where Nightdive had the budget and the goodwill to take a few more risks, make a few more changes, and dramatically reduce the number of times it asked me to make a U-turn.

Pfft.

A bit sad that Shamus Young didn't live long enough to see this.

 

[Wirdschowerdn]

Being "too faithful" to the original is absolutely a good characteristic. Last thing we need is some 2023-type "innovations."

This is neither. It's straight regression.

 

[Nifft Batuff]

I am curious to see what has been simplified, reduced or removed from the orignal this time.

 

[toughasnails]

 

[Infinitron]

4/5 https://www.eurogamer.net/system-shock-review-shodan-steals-the-show-in-this-faithful-remake

System Shock review - SHODAN steals the show in this faithful remake​

Who says AI can't be funny?

A remake that closely follows the original classic, with a slightly different overall effect.

As a newcomer to System Shock, I'd like to take a moment and declare my undying love for SHODAN, aka Sentient Hyper-Optimised Data Access Network, aka the murderous AI villain who engulfs the entire remake. Literally. As a captured hacker onboard the Citadel space station, you've been asked to remove the "ethical constraints" from the station's artificial intelligence (that's SHODAN) in an obviously shady exchange. You get back your freedom plus a cool cybernetic implant, and the megacorp executive who's in charge of the operation gets to do evil things with the new ethically unconstrained station.

Things don't work out for either of you. Months pass by and you've woken up, still on the Citadel, but this time the humans have turned into bloodthirsty mutants, killer robots and cyborgs attack with a vengeance, and my beloved SHODAN runs the whole bleak party.

The System Shock remake begins in much the same way as 1994's original game. Exactly the same events take place, but they've been rejigged. The opening cutscene to the original System Shock has this noisy, head-bopping beat playing in the background. The retro animation was kind of surreal, almost like it was straight out of a fever dream. The remake blunts some of that energy in exchange for something more palatable.

I'm focusing on the introduction because I think it's emblematic of the entire remake. Developer Nightdive's updated System Shock is a very faithful remake - sometimes shockingly so - recreating much of the Citadel's zig-zagging layout as it was three decades ago, but the original's somewhat intimidating quirks have been ironed out, replaced, or straight-up removed. That faithfulness means that System Shock (2023) doesn't quite stand up next to the many great games that System Shock (1994) inspired. Though it does mean that the classic's pleasures are now easier to enjoy than ever, made more approachable for a modern audience.

The overall structure here is the same, though. After adjusting a few difficulty sliders for combat, puzzles, cyberspace, and more - as you did in the original - you start the trek through the Citadel's steely levels in an attempt to thwart SHODAN's humanity-cleansing schemes. Emphasis on the plural, SHODAN's a crafty one. Sneaking under crawl spaces and across the labyrinthine corridors, you'll hop to destroy SHODAN's cameras, find access cards, flip switches to unlock newer areas, and eventually make your way up and back down the station's various floors. You're slowly unravelling and learning about these knotted environments as you go.

System Shock.
The first change that's immediately noticeable is, of course, how the Citadel looks this time around. Or rather how it feels. System Shock remake's environments have a decidedly darker, scarier look than they did in the original. Some walls still have a few blocky pixelated textures, recapturing that retro charm. So even when the remake isn't striving for realism, it still looks damn cool. Regardless, thick shadows, silvery pipes, and abrupt corners are everywhere in the System Shock remake, leaning into that horror-adjacent atmosphere very effectively.

Sound effects largely help with this as well. Taking a page out of Dead Space's blood-soaked book, you're never quite sure whether or not distant groanings are coming from the station's creaking parts, the grunts of nearby enemies, or your computer slowly overheating. The sometimes ear-splitting soundtrack is gone too, replaced by quieter ambient beats that incorporate a lot of clicking, clacking, and thumping synths - because it wouldn't be cyberpunk without thumping synths. And the end effect makes you stop, turn, peek out of corners, second-guess if you're truly alone in a room.

Even a run-in with the tutorial enemies - the hollow-eyed mutants - can be terrifying thanks to their inhuman stares. Most combat encounters actually instil a sense of fear thanks to tight resources and an even tighter inventory - which is on double-duty with Tetris-management. System Shock remake's shooting and whacking have been brought up to snuff and feel more like a modern shooter, but your general lack of supplies adds a tinge of survival horror scrambling. Cautiously matching the right bullets with the right foe can make all the difference, and your future self will thank you for saving ammo.


My inventory was usually lacking in either ammo, health-restoring items, or grenades, but never all three. So, as an immersive sim, there's normally a scrappy way out of difficult situations. Running low on ammo? Just chuck an EMP grenade at your foes, disable them, and run up with your wrench until they break apart. Combat almost always has you on the back foot, but this desperation can inspire clever thinking (or clever cheesing) and lead to some massive sighs of relief. Just how I like my horror.

Last-ditch struggles are right in line with the game's tone, but compared to other modern immersive sims, combat can occasionally come across as stilted. You're not given the plethora of options you might expect from an Arkane game, for example, so once you're fully loaded on supplies, a lot of encounters devolve into long-distance shootouts. Which is all well and good, though it doesn't inspire the consistent creative problem-solving that truly makes an im-sim sing.

Those im-sim-isms do come out to play in the way you discover and chart the maze-like world, happily. Most levels are a series of interwinding corridors and you're pretty much free to tackle these knots from any direction. Naturally, plenty of doors have been locked, either by SHODAN, faulty wiring, or a lack of access cards, and the remake trusts you to detangle everything. Seriously, a complete map of any level resembles what I imagine Area 51 floor plans look like.

System Shock.
That freedom leads to plenty of satisfying a-ha moments. While you can't chain stealth kills or throw out plasmids, you can find a way to disable respawning drones. Or maybe you want to prioritise unlocking the level's respawn point for yourself. Or perhaps you want to find a crawlspace to side-step a precise enemy completely. The game gives you plenty of freedom in the order that you tackle objectives, opening up opportunities for decisions and discoveries, big and small.

System Shock remake's structure is largely unchanged from the original, and (again) this can be freeing, yet some of those vague objectives usher in annoyance. You see, progress is regularly tied to access cards, levers in specific rooms, and other items of interest but the game rarely puts special focus on these. So I'm split between loving the process of deciphering objectives through environmental cues and emails, and feeling frustrated when running laps around indistinguishable corridors, only to finally find my key on the body of a long-dead enemy.

Oh, and cyberspace is back. These were the abstract areas in the original where you'd float through a confusing space and shoot at colourful shapes. Now, they're neon-tinged abstract areas where you shoot at colourful angry faces. They're a fun and unexpected distraction, and while these shootouts aren't the highlight, I'm glad they're still around. Cyberspace is odd and helps this remake retain some of that weirdness from the original. Actually, come to think of it, there are a lot of weird things here - from the mutants moaning "I'm hungry," to a mournful audiolog dedicated to a crew member's cat.

System Shock.
Overall, there are some new and old annoyances in this remake, mixed in with some new and old pleasures. And the crux of those pleasures comes from SHODAN, a villain that's so delightfully wicked and creative, it almost makes the whole game. The AI literally is the whole game. Citadel and SHODAN are now one and the same thing - think of the Citadel as the body and SHODAN as the brain. That means when you're stalking through the station, you're also walking through SHODAN's innards which creepily reframes all the visible pipes and creaking noises throughout the place.

System Shock leans into this horror, hard. Audiologs constantly remind you about this relationship between technology and our environment, from the enemy cyborgs that repeat "nothing" in a monotone voice, to SHODAN itself. The maniacal AI is always there. It is the ship, and it'll celebrate your small victories with deadly traps, sly remarks, and hidden alternate plans. I was constantly surprised by the way SHODAN manipulated the world, either by disabling a bridge from under me or by opening up doors to more baddies.

And, oh boy, the voice. It cracks and contorts in genuinely unsettling ways. Weird static effects sometimes make it sound like it's crying, or someone else is screaming. Inflections simulate curiousity, small moments of joy, something vaguely human. Quickly followed by casually ultraviolent threats. And every ugly part of this station is a reminder of the greed needed to create something so evil. What a marvel.

SHODAN is what makes parts of this game truly special, even with some warts. Thankfully, the original's impenetrable Excel sheet menus are gone. But Nightdive doesn't take the Capcom or Square Enix approach with this remake; they're actually pretty uncompromising in their mission to update the original. As a result, there aren't any wildly dynamic abilities or playful ways to move around the station (a la Prey) that some newbies might expect. But ultimately, the System Shock remake faithfully recreates a classic, retains most of its appeal, reframes everything with a horror tilt, and as a result, makes it more playable for everyone.

 

[Sykar]

So is this worth getting?

 

[Infinitron]

https://www.pcgamer.com/nightdive-o...-its-still-part-of-the-system-shock-pedigree/

Nightdive on the System Shock remake: 'Even though we're changing and we're updating it, it's still part of the System Shock pedigree'​

As the System Shock remake nears completion, Nightdive Studios talks about the game's long road to release.

Nightdive Studios' remake of System Shock has been in development for almost eight years. Originally announced in 2015, it's had a longer development cycle than both existing System Shock games combined, and that includes the gap between them. But Nightdive's long-incubated cyber-baby is finally preparing for birth, with release currently scheduled for March this year. Yet what kind of remake are we getting after all this time, and how does the final version compare to Nightdive's original vision?

"The game that we're going to be launching soon, is the game that I think we were all dreaming of making, but that we didn't initially set out to make." Stephen Kick, co- founder of Nightdive Studios and co-director on System Shock. "If you look at that early prototype versus what we have now, it's an entirely different game, but essentially the same experience you would have, just the level of quality and polishing and everything that we've been able to put into it is at a level that we couldn't have imagined back then."

If this sounds a little confusing, don't worry. The whole reason System Shock has been gestating for so long is Nightdive has constantly wrestled with what the remake ought to represent. What it should be, what it needs to be, what fans want it to be, and what Nightdive wants it to be have all factored into its design at varying points. Striking the right balance has been extremely challenging, to the extent where the entire project was rebooted three years into development.

Amidst all this is a question—why go to such effort to remake System Shock at all? "A lot of people have played System Shock 2 and not the first one, due to how pure it is, and how difficult it can be even to get in and control the character or use the interface," Kick says. While today System Shock is categorised as an immersive sim, it was designed as a sci-fi successor to the fantasy RPG Ultima Underworld, and used many of the same D&D- adjacent rules and conventions. System Shock also launched right before advancement in 3D graphics and first-person gameplay exploded, such that when the sequel released in 1999, the fidelity gap between the two was enormous.

In short, there's a clear case for remaking System Shock, and in many ways Night Dive is the ideal studio for the project. Kick's own journey with System Shock began with that technically advanced sequel. A kid in middle-school at the time, Kick was obsessed with Half-Life, when a friend asked him if he'd played System Shock 2. "The next day, he came in with the full big box, and he just laid it on the table and said, 'Play it,' and then he walked away again. It was very dramatic," Kick says. "I went home that night and I installed it and I remember just immediately being immersed in the world and the Von Braun. Hearing Terri Brosius' voice as SHODAN still brings chills down my spine."

Alongside Kick's personal history with the series, Night Dive as a business was founded because of System Shock 2, after Kick retrieved the rights to System Shock 2 from legal limbo. Since then, Night Dive has established itself as a specialist developer of remasters, having released improved versions of numerous '90s titles like Quake, Blood, Powerslave and Shadowman.

Shifting from remasters to a remake might seem like a logical next step. But as Kick explains, that shift involves less of a step and more of a leap. "Our remaster team, or the KEX Engine team, primarily deals with reverse engineering, code work, that type of thing," Kick explains. "We had to bring on designers, animators, character artists that were all familiar with current day pipelines and game development techniques in order to realise this."

Due to System Shock's age, the challenge in remaking it was sufficiently modernising it while staying true to the spirit of the original. In this, Nightdive had two design pillars that it hoped would ground the remake. The first of these was visual. "I knew that we wanted to have Robb Waters, who was the original artist back in '94, on this project," Kick explains. "We basically let him look at every aspect of the game and put his twist on it. That in itself has helped build that foundation of that familiarity with the original.

The second grounding pillar was mechanical. "We looked at what [System] Shock 2 did, and how that was an evolution from the first game, and brought those systems back to System Shock 1. In that way, we still felt like even though we're changing and we're updating it, it's still part of the System Shock pedigree."

Nightdive hoped that such appeals to System Shock's history would ensure the remake stayed authentic. But as the project switched from Unity to Unreal 4 and the vision for the game expanded, new features began to creep in, and Nightdive was faced with a different kind of shock when it pushed an update to its Kickstarter backers in 2018. "Unanimously, the feedback was, 'Hey, this isn't what we backed. It's not what we wanted.'" Kick says. "We really had to take a long break, and we had to look at the team that we had built up to that point and what our goals were."

Nightdive began the process of rebooting System Shock with a fascinating project—rebuilding the entirety of Citadel Station—the setting for the original game—to its exact dimensions, in Unreal 4. This took seven months, with much of the project streamed live on Twitch. Rebuilding Citadel revealed to Nightdive how closely it could replicate the level design of the original, and the places where changes needed to be made. "Take doors, for example. Those are paper thin in the original, and that would have a surprising knock-on effect" says Daniel Grayshon, co-director, producer, and level designer on System Shock. "This corridor that was so close to this other corridor, because this door now has to be 3D... then that needs to be pushed back a little bit. It was a really interesting, fun process."

Combat was a more difficult element to rework. The shift from 2.5D to modern 3D graphics and animation inevitably necessitated some changes. But Nightdive has also looked at what tools the original game gives players, and how those shape up to modern standards. "It was a case of looking at what was there and thinking, 'How can we vary this up, while also keeping it interesting?'" says Grayshon. "For example, there's now a grenade launcher in the game. And that grenade launcher comes with benefits. But that grenade launcher also comes with a cost, it takes up room in your inventory."

One of the most contentious areas Nightdive has reworked is the soundtrack. Kick describes the original soundtrack as "a lot of bleeps and bloops" that are "kind of jarring" when you consider System Shock is a sci-fi horror game. But the System Shock community is extremely fond of the original soundtrack, which has made changing it a tricky prospect. "Our composer has been going back and forth quite a bit to find a balance," Kick says. "To create an oppressive atmosphere, one that would lend itself to a horror game. But also have throwbacks to that upbeat, fun, dancey soundtrack."

There are even areas of the game which are arguably more authentic than before. Kick points out that, when Looking Glass released the CD- ROM version of System Shock with added voice lines "the audio portion of it didn't match the written part". Hence, Nightdive has used this as an opportunity to re-record the game's audio logs, hiring a narrative designer to expand upon some of the characters you hear from in Citadel station. According to Grayshon, this includes "lines unused in the original game" which Nightdive has "utilised a fair few of" for the remake. "The beginning of the game is going to be fresh for everyone," adds Larry Kuperman, Nightdive's head of business development.

The debates and decisions over modernisation versus authenticity are fascinating, but they don't address how System Shock will ultimately play as an RPG/immersive sim, regardless of whether it's 'true' to the original. "We have a lot of things going on under the hood," Grayshon says. "If you're up against a cyborg, which is part machine part human, it can really depend on where you target a specific part of the body and the specific ammo that you're using. So if you hit the metal part with armour piercing rounds that will do more damage."

Grayshon also shares an anecdote from a recent play test. "I was facing two enemies in a corridor, and one tried to throw a EMP grenade at me, but he missed me and ended up hitting his friend who was also attacking me, which disabled him. I was like, 'OK, I can use this to my advantage.'" Regardless of authenticity, that sounds like a game I want to play.

It may have been a long wait for the System Shock remake, but it does sound like it's going to be worth it. Besides, System Shock fans are used to waiting, given how long it has been since System Shock 2. There have been spiritual successors of course, like Irrational's Bioshock and Arkane's Prey. But what of OtherSide Entertainment's System Shock 3 project, which despite a whole bunch of issues is, as far as we know, still in development? "I would urge both the press and the fans to wait and see a little bit longer" Kuperman says when I ask about that game. "Let's see what happens after the current System Shock game comes out."