System Shock Remake

Throughout the years, many attempts were made to remake System Shock 1 in a modern engine (including the currently-ongoing Night Dive clusterfuck).

All those remakes attempts and failures finally get to leave Tartarus. The original source code has been ported to a modern executable with some modern bells and whistles, and I’m happy to say that it runs just fine in its new 21st century home. This is pretty much all I wanted fifteen years ago when I naively decided to make my own remake. The same old textures and geometries, but all running at 60FPS with mouselook.

You can pick this up by grabbing the “Enhanced Edition” (the old DOSBox community hack) at Steam and GoG, which has been replaced by the source port update.

Nice! The original was even pre-mouselook, which made it really hard to play.

This is fricken SWETE

Wait…what? Are you serious?

Time for another install…the original would be right up there with my favourite ever games.

I backed a project with a clear design goal that ended up wandering deeply into cloud cuckoo land, and then was restarted once more from scratch (!!) with a release date half a decade from the original KS. Thus my charlie foxtrot designation of the whole fiasco.

The source port is basically what I wanted, anyway, so something good has happened with all this.

Isn’t this old news? Like, 2 years+, minimum? I vaguely recall reading about a SS1 with mouse look ages ago.

That was a hack of the original EXE. This is a full source port, running hardware-accelerated, up to 4K native resolution, adjustable FOV, mod support, etc.

Yeah I gotta say I have zero faith in that Kickstarter being “back on track.” They got their money, used it, came up with zero, and now are “re-focusing.” Good luck. Their intentions may be good, but reality is a tough opponent.

I am not going to count on anything coming of it long term, but they’re updating regularly, have what at least looks like evidence of work being done, and while they’ve used up the Kickstarter funding, they are also an existing studio with an ongoing revenue stream. I mean, I’m sure it would have been very helpful to still have that money, but it’s not like it’s some independent creator whose entire ability to work on the project was tied up in it. So I am cautiously willing to give them the benefit of the doubt.

(I mean, Hero-U came out!)

They’ve posted literally dozens of hours of video of their current work on the remake.

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL4M5hD35geYH1cr0UUkreKFwZYDzLio1w

I hope it comes out! Meantime, the Enhanced Edition looks like it’s on sale for $5 instead of $10 until tomorrow.

It’s even cheaper on the Humble Store, I grabbed it for €1.99

Oh! This game must have been inspired by BioShock.

I got this from GOG because I’m a System Shock fanboi but it doesn’t seem to want to work. It crashes after the opening cinematics, with an entirely uninformative message that says “ERROR!”. At the end of the videos when it’s supposed to transition to the actual game, it goes boom. No clue what to do about that. Ah well, it was less than five bucks.

EDIT: Doh. It was the “can’t install in a path with more than 64 characters” bug. Installed it into /games and it works fine. But man, I had forgotten how Byzantine the control scheme was from back in the day pre-mouselook.

I just installed the Steam version of this source port update on a whim, to check it out (I’ve had it since the Humble Freedom Bundle early last year) and when I go to start it, literally nothing happens on my Win 10 machine. No error message or anything. Anyone else seeing this?

I ran the GOG version briefly on my Win 10 machine and it worked okay. It starts with a video. Maybe it’s choking on that?

Maybe. I wonder if turning off GeForce Experience or the Steam overlay ahead of time would help.

Have you tried running as administrator and compatibility settings? Admin can do what you’re describing and has caught me out a few times.

I found I had to install it in a place where the total path characters < 64 characters.

Blank screen? Just type 451.