System Shock Remake

[Keanu] Whoa [/Keanu]

Grabbing.

I like it already.

Made a friend.

Inventory seems pretty nice.

Probably just the first level. I imagine recalling that when System Shock first came out it also had just a level 1 demo.

This is really good.

Dang that looks good. So is the game proper out?

N/m, I see “alpha build” so I guess not.

Hopefully Beta and Release are just a few weeks behind us, cause this needs to be played :-)

I really like how they did the textures high-res low-res … sort of.

Only thing I would’ve liked to see would be physics on the bodies.

This is the same demo that the backers got a while ago I take it?

Unknown. It seems like it is pretty much the entire first level of the game from what I got to before it crashed when I threw a few nades.

The Win64-shipping exe has version tagg “4.25”.

At a glance, it looks like yes. I only briefly touched the backer demo, and haven’t touched this, so I can’t tell you if there is more content here or what. I just wanted to see the engine in action and save it for release.

Oh, man, that interface looks great.

This is the one thing I absolutely hate. If I want to play pixelated System Shock I’ll play the original. The entire point of this remake is to bring the graphics and UI up to modern standards. Just… what the hell are they thinking with this? This is supposed to be an immersive sim, not some lolretro FPS like Strafe or Ion Fury.

I though it looked quite good tbh, I think with some of the pixelation it looks better than “clean crisp” 2070 4K textures or whatever - and it would take a lot more work to make that look good, imo. Since they on Unreal Engine 4 I guess they need to bump to 5 to get support for Raytracing etc?

And, being on GOG and with Unreal, its not like it cant be modded to look any way you want it to.

The 3D models look a lot better than the walls, also the corpses etc.

BTW, was there also an SS2 remake coming? I think I remember hearing something about that.

You might be thinking of System Shock 3, which was announced (from a different studio) and IIRC has since been cancelled.

Perhaps, but this comes from the Wikipedia page for SS2:

Night Dive Studios were able to secure the rights to the game and System Shock franchise in 2013 to release an updated version of System Shock 2 for modern operating systems, including for OS X and Linux, and announced plans to release an Enhanced Edition of the game.

So maybe not so much a remake as a remaster.

Ahh, yeah, sounds like the Enhanced Edition was announced a bit under a year ago. Wouldn’t be a remake, I’d think - you can look at the System Shock: Enhanced Edition for the sorts of things that they did to that and I’d expect similar from a System Shock 2 version…except of course 2 is newer tech, so won’t have as many weird idiosyncrasies to tweak. Maybe we’ll get more GFX stuff instead or something.

LOL. System Shock 2 runs on an early version of the original Thief engine. Think about that for a second.

Like almost all of Nightdive’s remasters, a remaster of SS2 would probably be built on community code. In this case, a mysterious update and drop of the Dark Engine source that happened some years back.

Yeah, but, look at System Shock 1 sometime. Without the Enhanced changes. :P

Oh, absolutely. The original controls killed it. The Enhanced changes (against, almost all two decades of community work) mainly focus on the controls.

Those worried about the graphics, since it is UE4 I guess it is not out of the realm of possibilities that this can be added somehow?

https://news.developer.nvidia.com/getting-started-with-real-time-ray-tracing-and-dlss-in-unreal-engine-4/

Not quite.

The Dark Engine was never delivered to the System Shock team as a finished piece of code, nor were we ever presented with a final set of APIs that the engine was to implement. Instead, we worked with the same code base as the Thief team for most of the project (excluding a brief window of time when we made a copy of the source code while the Thief team prepared to ship the game). Remarkably, it is still possible to compile a hybrid executable out of this tree that can play both Thief and System Shock 2 based on a variable in a configuration file.

Postmortem: Irrational Games' System Shock 2

The SS2 branch of Dark is more advanced than Thief’s in a lot of ways, most notably that it supports colored lighting.

As for any theoretical System Shock 2 Enhanced Edition, I have no idea what Night Dive is intending with that. SS2 running on the NewDark patch basically already is SS2:EE

So the backer email on the SS remake posted some somewhat vague screenshots of cyberspace! I wasn’t even sure if it would make it into the remake but glad to hear that part is still coming and looks good! Now if only they would make you put on VR googles to complete the experience.