KickStarter System Shock 1 Remake by Nightdive Studios

[Spectacle]

He's pretty deeply involved with this.

First time I've ever used the "shit" rating with positive intentions.

 

[octavius]

That System Shock remake looks like it's made partially with vaseline.

 

[Infinitron]

SHODAN as a mysterious crone with mental powers who is strangely obsessed with you.

 

[Durandal]

Has Chris Avellone already played Marathon?

 

[tormund]

SHODAN as a mysterious crone with mental powers who is strangely obsessed with you.

If he ends up writing either GLaDOS or Kreia references in there, I'll strangle both of you with extreme gusto.

 

[Infinitron]

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1598858095/system-shock/posts/1793671

January Update

Hello everybody, I hope your New Year has been going as well for you as it is for us!

Project Update
Everyone here is working around the clock to prep something really great for the upcoming GDC! For those who don’t know, GDC(Game Developers Conference), is the world's largest professional game industry event.

http://www.gdconf.com/


As for Vertical Slice, we are hitting that halfway mark soon, so hopefully we will have some cool new stuff to show you next update.

Art

Here is some updated art on our Cyborg Drone done by the talented Robb Waters!
FAQ
Q: Will System Shock be Mac compatible?

A: Yes. Mac, Linux and PC

Q: Can I upgrade my backer level?

A: Yup, once we have BackerKit wired up and deployed.

Q: Will you be adding PayPal funding?

A: This should be supported through BackerKit.

Job Openings
-Lead Animator

http://www.nightdivestudios.com/careers/

Shout Outs
Pillars Of Eternity II: Deadfire by Obsidian Entertainment

The sequel to one of the highest-rated PC games of all time, Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire is a party-based, isometric role-playing game with a rich narrative, intricate world design, and tactical combat. Pillars II will be available on PC, Mac, and Linux platforms.

You can check them out and help fund here:

https://www.fig.co/campaigns/deadfire

See you next time,

(ﾉ´ヮ´)ﾉ*:･ﾟ✧ Karlee Meow~

 

[pippin]

Here is some more art from our very own Robb Waters, we present the Cyborg Surgeon:

He really needs at least a couple of sharp fingers, or some kind of built-in cutting tool.

cyborg toilet cleaning employee

 

[LESS T_T]

Some tidbits from recent Fragments of Silicon interview (part about SS starts around 1 hour):

- Currently roughly around 15 people are working on this.
- They've hired another concept artist who worked on Game of Thrones TV show.
- Robb Waters is also actively working with them.
- There will be press previews and a Kickstarter update to show their progress around GDC.

 

[Latelistener]

 

[Infinitron]

 

[Infinitron]

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1598858095/system-shock/posts/1813345

♥ February Update♥

February is here and it is time to feel the love for System Shock!

♥ Project Updates
The team is working so hard this month to bring something really great to show you all next week!

In the meantime, we are headed to GDC from Feb.27th-March 3rd(http://www.gdconf.com/aboutgdc/), for those who may be attending look for us in these shirts:

♪ Audio
This month we have something a little different to share. Audio guy Jonathon Peros has been working on something really neat with creating ambient music!

♥ Art
As always, we have some awesome art from Robb Waters and Robert Simon to share. Check out these super cool environments:

Concept art of Citadel Station Medical Deck entrance.

Concept art of Citadel Station's eerie vent system.
♥FAQ
Q: Will System Shock be Mac compatible?

A: Yes. Mac, Linux, and PC

Q: Can I upgrade my backer level?

A: Yup, once we have BackerKit wired up and deployed.

Q: Will you be adding PayPal funding or Slacker Backer opportunities?

A: This should be supported and available through BackerKit.

Q: Can I change my address?

A: Yes, once surveys are sent and Backerkit is up.

Q: When will Backerkit be available?

A: We are aiming to have it up in the next week!

♥ Shout Outs
Subset Games of FTL fame announced their next release - Into the Breach!

As with FTL, our very own Chris Avellone is assisting the Subset crew – he originally helped them out with encounters for the FTL: Advanced Edition.

He’ll still be leading our narrative efforts for us, of course... at SHODAN’s insistence.

Congratulations to the Subset team on the announcement – can’t wait!

Please keep an eye open for another update coming next week!

Also, make sure to follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and the System Shock Twitter.

Signing off with love

(๑╹ڡ╹)╭ ～ ♡

Karlee Meow

 

[LESS T_T]

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1598858095/system-shock/posts/1813345

Heh, he unintentionally (?) confirmed they've switched to Unreal.

 

[Infinitron]

Heh, he unintentionally (?) confirmed they've switched to Unreal.

Haven't they revealed that already? Or am I confusing this with another game.

 

[LESS T_T]

Haven't they revealed that already? Or am I confusing it with another game.

I don't think they've officially announced it. They just alluded it with job postings.

 

[Unkillable Cat]

I've learned a long time ago that when it comes to System Shock in particular, LESS T_T is MORE T_T, so I'm not disputing that one.

 

[LESS T_T]

Trailer in Unreal Engine 4:



http://www.polygon.com/2017/3/1/14784082/system-shock-reboot-unreal-engine

After raising over $1.3 million on Kickstarter last summer, the team at Night Dive Studios has been working to make good on updating the first-person classic System Shock for today’s audience (and the game’s backers).

Part of that process involved reevaluating Night Dive’s approach to the game’s technology after discovering that “Unity is not a great engine to use if you want to make an FPS on console,” game director Jason Fader told Polygon at the 2017 Game Developers Conference this week. “So we spent a few weeks researching other engines, really diving deep with Unreal and Lumberyard, and we made the decision to pull the trigger and move forward with Unreal.”

When asked why the shift was necessary, Fader explained that because of a combination of fidelity, cross-platform support, content-creation pipelines and performance reasons, “Unreal was the smarter direction to go.” So with that decision made, the team set about staffing up and working on a new vertical slice — a sort of proof of concept prototype.

Night Dive is releasing a video of the game running in the new engine to backers, which you can see at the top of this post. And here are some images, if that’s more your speed:

With this new investment in Unreal Engine and with audience expectations set by the Kickstarter, I asked how the team now thought of the game — is it still a remaster, like it was called when it was a Unity project early last year, or a remake? Fader instead calls it a reboot.

"We’re making a ‘faithful reboot,’ meaning the spirit of the game is the same, but how we present it may be different,” Fader told Polygon in a follow-up email. “We’re not touching the overall story (other than fixing plot holes). All of the characters you know and love will be back, but with more refined dialogue thanks to our lead narrative designer, Chris Avellone. Most of the classic creatures, weapons, items, and areas are being kept, but we will be applying modern game design principles and visuals to better introduce System Shock to current gamers that might not have had the chance to appreciate the original game.”

The team has been looking at the original game and assessing when to bring back components and when to “modernize or revamp from a level design standpoint,” as well as from an art standpoint, said Fader. But this doesn’t mean filing the edges off of what made System Shock so unique.

“We’re actually going to throw you even more in the deep end than System Shock, slightly,” Fader said. “System Shock 1 did have a lot of openly explorable environments, but some of them were gated or limited. We’re going to be opening up more of the station. We see this as more of a Metroidvania-style game.

“At one point I wanted to call it open world, but it’s not a world. But it is openly explorable. Once you get out of that starting area, the station is your oyster.”

With a targeted launch date of “mid to late 2018,” you still have plenty of time to back the game before release. You can find all the details on the game’s BackerKit page.

 

[LESS T_T]

And KS update: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1598858095/system-shock/posts/1820162

At GDC, a "Shocking" Announcement

A word from our Game Director.. actually a lot of words...

Hi everyone! Jason here this time to share some really important news. As some of you may have heard (http://www.polygon.com/2017/3/1/14784082/system-shock-reboot-unreal-engine), we have officially switched our engine for System Shock to Unreal Engine 4. I know this seems like a risky move, and in some ways it is, but we’ve mitigated that risk by switching over early. To shed more light on how we reached this decision, I’ll need to go over a timeline.

August: After listening to everyone during the Kickstarter campaign, it became clear that console support was very important to a lot of you. We took a hard look at what Unity could do on consoles, and what we wanted to achieve for both visual quality and performance. While Unity is a great engine, it was clear that we needed to use an engine that fit our project goals more closely. We took a few weeks to research various engines (mainly Lumberyard and Unreal).

September: After the engine research and evaluating feedback on our visual style, we decided to try out Unreal and see what it had to offer. Around the same time, we needed to fill critical spots for the leads team. Recruiting takes time (actually, a lot of time, especially for the senior positions). I think we went through about 30+ interviews for various candidates from Sept-Dec. Most of the folks we selected were developers I had worked with on Fallout: New Vegas, so it made getting them up to speed on things pretty quick.

October-December: During this time we focused on getting the nuts and bolts of the content inside of Unreal. Around the end of October, we were confident Unreal was the right way to go, but we didn’t want to announce the change just yet, since we wanted to prove to our backers (and ourselves) that we could deliver a slice of the game in Unreal with the updated visual direction. Couple that with the lengthy time recruiting/onboarding takes and we were steadily making progress towards our goal by the end of December.

January: The next step before being ready to reveal our efforts was to establish a proper level using everything everyone had built up for Unreal. This is essentially for the “Vertical Slice” phase, but the early stages. I like using an iterative corner approach to vertical slice, meaning we would work on a small section of the vertical slice content, iterate and refine it until we were happy with the end result (typically finding problems and correcting them, tweaking things here and there, etc). Once the corner (in this case it was actually a series of rooms, a vent shaft, several hallways, and a lovable mutant named Marty) was finished, we would be ready to expand on the rest of the vertical slice content.

February: After a lot of hard work, the corner was finally to a point we were happy with, which brings us to now! That pretty much paints a picture of where our heads were at with all of this. We didn’t make this decision lightly, and wanted to be sure we could do the game justice with this engine shift. Feel free to ask questions either in the comments or the Discord server. Let us know what you think! We want to ensure you feel we’re going in the right direction with all of this.

- Jason Fader, Game Director


and now for the video...




Slacker Hackers for BackerKit

As promised, BackerKit is live and you can now modify your pledges, as well as invite your friends to help support this awesome reboot at http://www.SystemShock.com


♪ Music ♪

Hey! Jonathan Peros, Audio Director of System Shock here! We released the Polygon video, and in it an alpha (emphasized!) version of the main theme of the game. The music is very indicative of the style that we are going for, and captures what was great about 90s sci-fi but in a very modern context. I figured some of you may appreciate being able to hear the music without the SHODAN voiceover! I've loved the ability to work on such a great soundtrack and I'd love to hear what you think!

- Jonathan Peros, Audio Director/Composer

 

[Zombra]

Woo! 7 months of development spent on changing to a console-friendly engine! Hooray! Oh, how wonderful!

In case you can't tell, I'm being sarcastic.

 

[RoSoDude]

Music is a huge disappointment for me so far. I'm not too interested in playing System Shock without the (nine inch) nail-biting cyberpunk techno blaring in my ears. That title track isn't bad, but compare with the inspired, frenetic chirps and twangs of Greg LoPiccolo's original OST (particularly the intro track):



In principle I'd be pleased to play an inclined version of System Shock -- a bit more development on the RPG side would be nice, but the original is basically a Metroidvania game at heart and it's more important that they just nail that aspect. However, I think style matters just about as much as substance here -- System Shock was so deeply playable and immersive to me on my first run (last few months) because I loved the colorful artistic design, music, and zany 90's cyberpunk atmosphere. Losing any of that drops my interest in this game by a ton. The original's horror came from its anachronistic juxtaposition of macabre vs. vibrant elements, inelegant vs sleek technology. Not banal Bioshock shit like flickering shadows and screeching violin crescendos:



Also, I think they should replicate SHODAN's voicelines as faithfully as possible, because the original audio design on her was simply incredible.

 

[Ivan]

the thing that bothered me most were the zombies' animations looking IDENTICAL to the headcrab zombies from Half Life 2 (the diagonal double-arm swipe move)

 

[Darth Roxor]

Woo! 7 months of development spent on changing to a console-friendly engine! Hooray! Oh, how wonderful!

In case you can't tell, I'm being sarcastic.

My name is Roxorowski and I laugh at every sucker who backed this.

 

[Unkillable Cat]

In principle I'd be pleased to play an inclined version of System Shock -- a bit more development on the RPG side would be nice, but the original is basically a Metroidvania game at heart and it's more important that they just nail that aspect. However, I think style matters just about as much as substance here -- System Shock was so deeply playable and immersive to me on my first run (last few months) because I loved the colorful artistic design, music, and zany 90's cyberpunk atmosphere. Losing any of that drops my interest in this game by a ton. The original's horror came from its anachronistic juxtaposition of macabre vs. vibrant elements, inelegant vs sleek technology. Not banal Bioshock shit like flickering shadows and screeching violin crescendos:

Also, I think they should replicate SHODAN's voicelines as faithfully as possible, because the original audio design on her was simply incredible.

I'm willing to give them the benefit of the doubt for now when it comes to the music, as it looks to me they've barely started work there.

Also, judging from the trailer they've spent the last 7 months just catching up to where they were before making the jump from Unity. Scheduling a mid-2018 release after that is only viable if the job is rushed, which is the last thing anyone wants. So expect further delays.

What they have screwed up though, is the audio work on SHODAN. She stutters way too much.

EDIT: Typo.

 

[Melan]

Feeling better and better about having pulled out of the KS at the last minute. Bullet dodged.

 

[Morgoth]

Trailer in Unreal Engine 4:

I don't know what this is, but it isn't System Shock.

I think PREY will be the closest we'll get to a Shock spiritual successor, barring Warren Spector ends up not fucking up his own System Schlock alongside.

 

[Siel]

I don't know what this is, but it isn't System Shock.

I think PREY will be the closest we'll get to a Shock spiritual successor, barring Warren Spector ends up not fucking up his own System Schlock alongside.

I disagree. Latest revelations tend to confirm Prey to be ultimate decline, at least when it comes to space station games.