Every once in a while, some Kickstarter project ends up failing so bad that it makes potential backers suspicious of future endeavors. It seems that this has happened with the System Shock Remake that was being handled by Nightdive. This is a project that had garnered quite a bit of attention and money due to the excitement of long-time fans of the original game. Now, it has been revealed that the project is on hiatus.
The game was originally set to release in 2018, but hardly any information had been shared with backers about the state of the game. Nightdive CEO Stephen Kick explained the situation as follows, “Maybe we were too successful. Maybe we lost our focus. The vision began to change. We moved from a Remaster to a completely new game. […] As our concept grew and as our team changed, so did the scope of what we were doing and with that the budget for the game. We began a long series of conversations with potential publishing partners. The more that we worked on the game, the more that we wanted to do, and the further we got from the original concepts that made System Shock so great.”
This is certainly an issue we have heard of often from several developers who games went through development hell in the past, however Stephen Kick said he will take on the responsibility for letting down the backers of this game.
As of now, the plan is to release a game within the next 18-24 months, but it remains to be seen if Nightdive will be successful in doing so. Of course, a lot of backers are bound to be annoted with the company after their failure to deliver on their promises, so we’ll have to see if Nightdive can handle the pressure and deliver on their commitments in the future.
