KickStarter System Shock 1 Remake by Nightdive Studios

[Haba]

it... looks good?

w-what i-is g-going o-on?

 

[DalekFlay]

To me the demo had a lot of potential, as long as you understood the budget and scope of the project, so it looking better after some feedback, polish and tweaks wouldn't be a crazy thing.

 

[JDR13]

The demo was pretty good. People's expectations are unrealistic though because it's System Shock.

 

[Venser]

The demo was pretty good. People's expectations are unrealistic though because it's System Shock.

No, because the Unity demo was much better lol.

 

[JDR13]

The demo was pretty good. People's expectations are unrealistic though because it's System Shock.

No, because the Unity demo was much better lol.

Except that it wasn't. I'm not sure why anyone would even try to claim that. The demos were roughly on par with one another. The Unity demo just ran a lot smoother than the Unreal demo until it was patched.

 

[Nyast]

So improving the lighting was indeed just a polish pass on the level ? Doh, didn't expect that. I guess I should continue sucking dicks then, heh, unfairlight ?https://rpgcodex.net/forums/index.php?members/unfairlight.24218/

 

[Venser]

Except that it wasn't. I'm not sure why anyone would even try to claim that. The demos were roughly on par with one another. The Unity demo just ran a lot smoother than the Unreal demo until it was patched.

I'm just saying it was the Unity demo that set high expectations and I still prefer it's visual style, not to mention the melee combat felt much better. I'm sure the game is gonna be good once it gets polished.

 

[LESS T_T]

Kickterview from Wireframe magazine (PDF is free to download): https://wireframe.raspberrypi.org/issues/31

Once System Shock is out the door, what next?

We have a backlog of remasters we’re working on, but there have been discussions about using our KEX Engine to create an original title to showcase the tools and features we’ve developed. As for the Shock team, there’s a high probability that a remake of System Shock 2 will be next

Spoiler

 

[HansDampf]

Kickterview from Wireframe magazine (PDF is free to download): https://wireframe.raspberrypi.org/issues/31

Once System Shock is out the door, what next?

We have a backlog of remasters we’re working on, but there have been discussions about using our KEX Engine to create an original title to showcase the tools and features we’ve developed. As for the Shock team, there’s a high probability that a remake of System Shock 2 will be next

 

[RoSoDude]

Oh god, please don't start on a tired remake of SS2 as well. The remastered Enhanced Edition they teased is pointless enough (has to fork off of the original source and compete with NewDark's stability and native mod support). I shudder to think what a modern developer would seek to "improve" about SS2, even considering their newfound level of caution with the first game's remake.

Honestly, I wish we could stop with this whole remake business in general. Either make something new or patch up something old while retaining as much as possible (old aesthetics, gameplay quirks, and all); this weird middle ground leaves little room for creativity while also overwriting the original work in public consciousness. The fact that a zombie imitation can find an audience that would never have played the original isn't consolation enough for the cynical futility of it all.

 

[Infinitron]

Oh god, please don't start on a tired remake of SS2 as well. The remastered Enhanced Edition they teased is pointless enough (has to fork off of the original source and compete with NewDark's stability and native mod support). I shudder to think what a modern developer would seek to "improve" about SS2, even considering their newfound level of caution with the first game's remake.

Honestly, I wish we could stop with this whole remake business in general. Either make something new or patch up something old while retaining as much as possible (old aesthetics, gameplay quirks, and all); this weird middle ground leaves little room for creativity while also overwriting the original work in public consciousness. The fact that a zombie imitation can find an audience that would never have played the original isn't consolation enough for the cynical futility of it all.

I think the remastered Enhanced Edition they teased is the remake being referred to here?

 

[vortex]

Stop with the remakes please. I want to nee new stuff in SS world.

 

[LESS T_T]

I think the remastered Enhanced Edition they teased is the remake being referred to here?

IIRC NDS has largely KEX/remaster team and SS remake team. SS2 remaster is being done by KEX team, and I'm pretty sure Kick talked about remake team's next project.

 

[DalekFlay]

Remake of 1 made sense for UI/controls if nothing else... remake of 2 makes zero sense. Minor mods already make it 100% great on modern machines.

 

[Lyric Suite]

Last time i checked this tread they were talking about changing the levels to make them simpler. Is this confirmed decline or not?

 

[Lyric Suite]

Remake of 1 made sense for UI/controls if nothing else... remake of 2 makes zero sense. Minor mods already make it 100% great on modern machines.

If they pull this off Ultima Underworld should be their next move.

 

[SpaceWizardz]

Last time i checked this tread they were talking about changing the levels to make them simpler. Is this confirmed decline or not?

They rebooted development some time ago, the latest December Demo map layout was 1:1 for the most part.

 

[Stinger]

I shudder to think what a modern developer would seek to "improve" about SS2, even considering their newfound level of caution with the first game's remake.

If nothing else a better ending cutscene that isn't a schlocky joke that is completely at odds with the rest of the game would be nice.

Spoiler

inb4 Nah!

 

[Efe]

Stop with the remakes please. I want to nee new stuff in SS world.

Otherside entertainment and SS3 got you covered

 

[Infinitron]

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1598858095/system-shock/posts/2750421

♡February Update♡

♡✧An update full of love✧♡

Well, these barrels aren't full of love, they will kill you.

Spoiler

Concept Art
The topic of concept art is buzzing a lot in the comment section, so let us explain. Yes, concept art is often a big part of the early stages of development, however, concept art is something constantly being created. Concept art can help sort out design, establish a mood, assist modelers with functionality as well as perspective. Needless to say, it is pretty important and we are very lucky to have Robb Waters on the team!

Here are a few things that help build the environment of Citadel Station.

Character Proxy Models
Proxies are autogenerated topology created from near-finished hi-poly models. Though rough and untextured, proxies represent the overall shape of the character well enough so that they can be handed off to our rigging and animation team; that way they don’t have to wait for the time-consuming low-poly, UV, and texture phases before they can get started. Proxies are also useful in that they can be seen in motion and potential issues with proportion or clipping can be looked for and adjusted in the hi-poly model before a character’s look is fully nailed down. Once the modeler is finished with the final textured models, the skeletal rigging of the proxy can be copied over, essentially swapping the proxy mesh out with the final.

Below are some animations made using proxy models of our more bizarre characters: the Cyber Mantis, a Cyber Assassin with the bladed arms of an Autosurgeon grafted on,

Then there is the bizarre Plant Mutant species that infests the Groves.

Proxies
Here are two more proxies just about to be handed off to the rigging and animation team, the Execbot and the Gorilla-Tiger.

The Gorilla-Tiger will get a coat of poly strand hair after the final low-poly mesh completed, but for rigging purposes, his basic underlying anatomy is all that’s needed.

Backerkit
Reminder to join our Discord if you need further Backerkit assistance! Community Manager Karlee will be able to assist!

You can also update and close your survey here at any time:

https://system-shock.backerkit.com/

Be sure to follow us on:

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See you next time!

 

[Venser]

Plant monster? You mean walking dildo

 

[LESS T_T]

Looks like they're pretty confident about 2020 release.

There’s no firm release date for the remake yet, though everything looks like they’re on track to release this year. They have even released a demo to backers that features a fully functional first level.

“Right now, we are in full production, and we are building the final content for the game. There really are no more hurdles,” said Arkin. “We just have enemies to add, animation — we’re just cranking out all the widgets and snapping them into place. We’ve got a plan. Everything is designed and ready to go.”

From another article about Kick's journey: https://www.escapistmagazine.com/v2/system-shock-remake-nightdive-studios-faithful/

Nightdive Studios Is Dedicated to Delivering the System Shock Remake Everyone Wanted

“I say this all the time: The longest journey in gaming starts with the words, ‘Hey, you know what else would be cool?’”

That proverb, offered by Night Dive Studios’ Larry Kuperman, is a good way to sum up System Shock’s woes.

When it launched on Kickstarter back in 2016, it was sold as a faithful remake of the 1994 cult classic that pitted a player against the rogue AI, Shodan. When Nightdive started the project, that was exactly what they intended to make. Today, that’s again what they intend to make.

For a while in the middle, though, Nightdive Studios lost sight of this goal. It seems clear that the developers had nothing but the best intentions, but the $1.3 million they made off their crowdfunding campaign… kind of messed with their heads.

“With the massive success that we experienced on Kickstarter, we did have the opportunity to increase the scope of the game,” said Stephen Kick, Nightdive’s CEO. “That’s what led to that initial departure of the original style that we had developed and used to promote the Kickstarter campaign.”

More money meant that Nightdive could do more with the project. So, the developers took the opportunity to expand on the game in some ways, streamline it in others, and try their hand at evoking the spirit of System Shock without being hamstrung by the limitations of early ‘90s game design.

“You get influenced by the last game that you played that had this really cool feature — and wouldn’t it be great to add it to the one you’re making?” Kuperman explained.

The game’s backers didn’t see it that way. They didn’t back the Kickstarter because they wanted a new game with new features, new weapons, or new, well… anything, really. What they wanted was System Shock. They wanted the landmark 1994 immersive sim recreated faithfully with modern graphics and controls.

“You start off adding one thing, and that inspires something else, and pretty soon you’ve gone far afield from your original vision,” said Kuperman.

Every new level design, every new weapon, every change in the puzzles — to backers, it was all proof that the game Nightdive was working on wasn’t the game that they had promised — they were working on something else entirely. Eventually, Kick came to the same conclusion and chose to put the project on hiatus in February 2018.

There was no shortage of backers who assumed that this hiatus would mean the end of the project — yet another example of a failed Kickstarter that would run off with the money and leave its backers with nothing. Thankfully, their hiatus really was just that, and Nightdive came back with a new approach.

“It took a little while for us to get back on track and realize that this wasn’t what we had initially envisioned, and it wasn’t what we had promised our backers,” said Kick, “and that’s what ended with us kind of re-evaluating where we were, switching gears, and going back to that original vision.”

That vision meant sticking to the design of the 1994 original as closely as possible.

“The story, the gameplay, the puzzles — all of that was great. It was perfect,” said producer Mike Arkin. “There was no reason to change any of that.”

It’s easy to be skeptical when a company swears that they’re going to deliver exactly what everyone hopes that they will. But it pays to mention that Nightdive Studios is a bit of a special case, since they wouldn’t even exist without the founder’s love for the System Shock series.

Spoiler

It all started when Kick, having just left his job at Sony Online Entertainment, was on a vacation in a jungle hostel in Guatemala. He had brought a low-powered netbook with him, hoping to play some classic games. One night, he decided he wanted to replay System Shock 2.

It wouldn’t install. There were no unofficial patches that would make it work. There wasn’t even any place that he could legally buy it.

“When I went to go purchase the game on GOG, where I assumed it would be, I couldn’t find it,” Kick said. “It wasn’t for sale. But it was their top most-requested game.”

It was at that point that Kick realized there was a problem at play that was much more daunting than driver issues or system compatibility. He was dealing with an issue that has long been the bane of retro gamers: intellectual property rights.

The creators of System Shock, Looking Glass Studios, closed down in the year 2000, and the rights to the company’s franchises ended up getting more or less scattered to the winds. The rights to Thief are probably the easiest to track, as they were acquired by Eidos and later Square Enix. The rights to System Shock, however, were less simple to follow — EA filed for the System Shock trademark back in 2006, but the actual rights to the System Shock franchise weren’t even owned by a game company.

“I discovered that they had been acquired by an insurance company in the Midwest after Looking Glass went bankrupt,” Kick said.

Not to be deterred, Kick contacted them to see what was up.

“They immediately assumed I wanted to do a sequel,” Kick said. “They wanted to know if I was going to do System Shock 3.”

That, of course, was not what Kick wanted to do. He was living off of his savings in the Guatemalan jungle, and he just wanted to be able to play the old System Shock games. He suggested that they release the old games digitally, which apparently had never occurred to them. And it turned out he had called at just the right time to make that suggestion.

“They were in the midst of acquiring the trademark, which Electronic Arts had let lapse, and in order to retain that trademark they needed to commercialize the products,” Kick said.

So, Kick’s long quest to get the dang game to play ended with he and his wife-to-be creating Nightdive Studios, so named because both of them enjoy going diving. At night.

“It just seemed to kind of fit,” Kick said, “the idea of diving down somewhere deep and enigmatic, mysterious, clouded by darkness, and trying to find something of value down there.”

Searching for buried treasures is pretty much Nightdive’s mission statement. They specialize in games and franchises that have been left to languish by their original creators. “Abandonware” is a term often used, though Kuperman was quick to chime in the moment the term was mentioned.

“My attorney would have me say there’s no such thing as abandonware,” Kuperman said. “There’d be several paragraphs of legal stuff after that, but we like to say ‘the lost and forgotten classics.’”

The classics they got their hands on extend far beyond System Shock 2, ranging from shooters like Turok and Blood to absurd adventure games like Bad Mojo and Starship Titanic. Their business strategy is straightforward: think of all the games they enjoyed as kids, and re-release the games that they can get the rights to.

Re-releases don’t just involve patching the game up and tossing them on Steam though. Many games are rebuilt from the ground up using the Kex Engine, which is designed to use games’ old assets while adding modern features like higher-resolution graphics, cross-platform support, and compatibility with modern systems.

They even ported an “enhanced edition” of the original System Shock to Kex, complete with its low-resolution sprites and low-quality audio. It’s not exactly a game that the average player will want to pick up at first glance. It’s that lack of appeal that drove Nightdive to remake the game in the first place. Even when the game was new, it wasn’t a blockbuster hit, losing out to the flashier, high-octane gameplay of Doom.

“Unfortunately it was overlooked considerably,” said Kick. “It introduced a lot of systems to the first-person genre that we wouldn’t see implemented for many, many years. Probably until, I would say, Half-Life, where you’ve got a story-driven narrative gameplay focus with different levels you can return to to solve puzzles. Even to this day, despite the enhanced edition we created, it still feels dated. It’s not going to connect with everybody.”

The entire point of the remake, Kick says, is to let a modern audience see just what made the game great. And with their current direction, the only thing they feel they need to do is update the controls and the graphics.

“For the most part, it’s the same game,” Arkin said. “We have guys on the team who’ve played the original System Shock with their eyes closed. They know every single puzzle and every single step of the story, and they’re kind of keeping us paddling in the right direction.”

There’s no firm release date for the remake yet, though everything looks like they’re on track to release this year. They have even released a demo to backers that features a fully functional first level.

“Right now, we are in full production, and we are building the final content for the game. There really are no more hurdles,” said Arkin. “We just have enemies to add, animation — we’re just cranking out all the widgets and snapping them into place. We’ve got a plan. Everything is designed and ready to go.”

The big question, of course, is whether the game will live up to four years’ worth of hype and expectations. With 14,000 people having played their demo, and over 200,000 people wishlisting the game on Steam, there’s a lot of people that they’ll need to please.

“When we looked at those numbers, you go from exultation to dread really quickly,” Kuperman said. “It’s like, holy cow, a whole lot of people are playing this game, and the feedback has been great, and then suddenly you realize how high the level of expectations are.”

 

[Naraya]

Dis gun be gud.

I love the atmosphere in these screenshots.

 

[Bad Sector]

Same. There are some stuff i'm not *too* fond of (i think there is a bit too much bloom in the post process and while there were several dark areas, the station was overall a bit brighter - and having both bloom and dark-ish areas looks weird), but honestly as long as it plays good i'm fine. Besides there is no way a 26 year technological gap (especially when half of that was during a very transformative period in gaming) wont introduce several changes.

 

[Fronzel Neekburm]

Even if the Codex had held a fundraiser and bought its way into the "Design your own monster!"-reward tier, we couldn't have come up with anything remotely as adolescent and immersion-breaking. A plant dick on spider legs...

Well done, lads!


PS: Lemme guess: Its attack involves shooting white goo at you? I thought this was a horror game, not an absurdist action comedy in the tradition of Duke Nukem...