Night Dive Studios is reviving the original System Shock as a remastered edition courtesy of the crowd-funding platform, Kickstarter. During the hectic and turbulent time of June – when all the E3 shenanigans will be full and well and underway – Night Dive has plans on launching the Kickstarter campaign.
According to Game informer, this is not to be confused with System Shock 3, where the developers tapped Warren Spector to make a return to the franchise he helped popularize back when Looking Glass Studios was a thing.
No, this System Shock Remastered project is a rekindling of the original game made in HD for today’s consoles and PC platforms. They plan on giving gamers a take on the first game that helped spawn the eventual release of the BioShock series.
Over on their official Facebook page, Night Dive let loose a teaser for the eventual campaign launch set to take place on June 29th. The teaser really is a no-nothing teaser but you can check it out below.
https://www.facebook.com/NightDiveStudios/videos/739735999501823/
The game will be for the Xbox One and PC.
Previous to this teaser trailer, they did release a proof concept in its pre-alpha state back in mid-March of this year. It’s a two minute long trailer featuring various environments and locations and how they would look running on today’s technology. You can check that out below.
I do like the dark color tone set against some of those bright, deeply saturated highlights. It gives the game that true 1990s feel.
Sadly, though, if this were a couple of years ago I think they would have an easy go of the Kickstarter campaign. However, gamers have been burned one too many times – even from larger game developers – who used Kickstarter in wanton fashion.
With various high profile projects either incomplete, still in limbo or perpetually delayed – like Comcept’s Mighty No. 9 – it’s not hard to see why Kickstarter is now supported in a fairly sparingly way. Worse yet is that the exposure of journalists utilizing cronyism to help friends get ahead left a lot of gamers with a bitter taste in their mouth after #GamerGate exposed so much of the corruption swirling within the veins of the video game media industry. Disillusioned and despondent is now a good way to sum up how a lot of the core audience feels about crowd-funding some projects.
Nevertheless, there is still hope.
If Night Dive Studios is true to their word, honest in their estimations, and they can maintain some good communication with their audience and the crowd-funding community at large, I think that they just might be able to pull off a successful pitch with a steady inflow of cash from people wanting and needing to a see an HD version of System Shock made for PC and home consoles.
