System Shock Reboot Chooses Unreal Engine

Nightdive Studios is now making a ‘faithful reboot,’ using the power of the Epic’s engine.

Nightdive Studios, the studio that is updating the classic System Shock, has discovered “Unity is not a great engine to use if you want to make an FPS on console.” The studio studied several game engines to find out that Unreal Engine is the one. 

The developers have even released a new video to show Unreal Engine prototype:

Game director Jason Fader explained that this shift was necessary because of a combination of fidelity, cross-platform support, content-creation pipelines and performance reasons. “Unreal was the smarter direction to go.” 

It is also worth noting that the game is more of a reboot than remake now.  

We’re making a ‘faithful reboot,’ meaning the spirit of the game is the same, but how we present it may be different. 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.

We’re actually going to throw you even more in the deep end than System Shock, slightly. 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.

Game Director Jason Fader

The game has a targeted launch date of “mid to late 2018,” so the studio still has time to change things. 

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