System Shock - Interview with Devs

Epic has interviewed Nightdive Studios who are the developers of System Shock Remake, which is being remade in Unreal Engine.

Stephen Kick, CEO of Nightdive Studios and Game Director for System Shock, talked to us about bringing a classic game back. A process that, at times seems, as challenging as dealing with S.H.O.D.A.N. herself. They weren’t just making a game, but working with a historical document, and a genre that’s since evolved across a number of decades. 

“Updating System Shock, a 30-year-old game, was challenging, but at the same time incredibly rewarding,” Kick said. “We had over three decades worth of games that were released between 1994 and 2023 to look at and evaluate. How did System Shock inspire other games? How did future games improve on the immersive sim formula? How do we condense all the original controls onto a modern controller? There was an unending series of questions we had to answer along the way and it was a daunting task.” 

“We had a few false starts along the way,” Kick said. “We even restarted development about two years into the project, and while it was an incredibly painful experience, we feel that we made the right decision. I believe the first Unity demo we released as part of our Kickstarter campaign was a great first step, and the Unreal powered version we have now is exactly what we were looking for.”

In remaking System Shock, Nightdive had to identify what made System Shock so memorable. A lot of games have added to the formula, bringing tech trees, huge open-worlds, and guiding hands that lead you through them, but modernizing the original title didn’t necessarily mean overhauling the experience to that level. The remake retains System Shock’s DNA. 

“When we started development, we outlined core pillars of the experience that we had to maintain,” he said. “Those pillars included keeping the level design, story, and difficulty intact. System Shock doesn’t hold your hand and trusts the player with the information it presents. There are no quest markers, no objectives recorded in a log, no breadcrumbs to follow—it’s all up to the player. We also felt it important that any additions we made to the narrative only complimented the already incredible story that the original Looking Glass team crafted.”

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