Nightdive Studios CEO, Stephen Kick, had to humbly admit to PC Gamer at this year’s Game Developers Conference that the team ended up wayward from what it was supposed to produce with the Kickstarter funds several years ago for the remake of System Shock.

After abandoning Unity and switching to the Unreal Engine 4, the team began a feature creep ego trip that led them so far astray from the original task of simply remaking the 1994 first-person horror shooter that they ended up having to put the whole thing on hiatus earlier this year.

Kick told PC Gamer that they’re now done with the whole feature creep roundabout and have zeroed back in on the original vision for the game, saying…

“”We understood based on the backer feedback, especially, that we weren’t going in the right direction with the game, what we promised to them. That’s what really caused the shift in what we’re doing now, which is going back to what we’d established and represented with the Unity demo.”

Getting back to the Unity demo does not mean going back to Unity, though. The team at Nightdive are sticking with the Unreal Engine 4, but now have to build up everything from scratch to suit what was originally intended for the project: to remake the first System Shock.

This now monumental task that was originally supposed to be complete by the end of December of 2017, will now see the light of day during the first quarter of 2020.

Nightdive’s business development director Larry Kuperman told PC Gamer…

“Our intention is to ship exactly the game that was promised, with as much of the features that were promised as we can, in a timeframe that will get it out as fast as we can. Our expectation is probably Q1 of 2020.”

Doesn’t sound very promising, to be honest.

This comes after the project being put on hiatus back in February of 2018, where Kick announced to Kickstarter backers and the rest of the public that they had to reassess the direction of the remake because feature creep had taken over and the project had ballooned way outside of their development budget.

They state that now that they’ve shrunk the game back down to size, there are interested publishers who may help push the project along and eventually help move them toward the tentative 2020 release window.

It doesn’t sound like the project is moving in the right direction, but we’ll find out if they’ll be able to hit the first quarter 2020 release during the next major backer update. You can also keep track of some community announcements by visiting the Steam store page.