System Shock Remake’s Next Update Will Add Playable Female Hacker, Reworked Final Boss

Developer Nightdive Studios has revealed that it will be releasing a massive patch for its remake of System Shock that will, among many other things, also bring a playable female Hacker. For context, the ability to choose the protagonist’s gender was originally mentioned as one of the stretch goals for the game’s Kickstarter campaign.

Speaking to PC Gamer at the recent Game Developers Conference, studio founder Stephen Kick spoke about how, while playing as a female protagonist doesn’t really affect gameplay, it does add value to the game, allowing more players to get immersed in its first-person gameplay.

“[Hacker gender choice] was a stretch goal for Kickstarter oh, seven, eight years in the making,” said Kick. “We knew we wanted to patch that in, it was just one of those things that we knew wouldn’t have any kind of immediate effect on gameplay, but just having that option kind of adds to the immersive quality of the game.”

“You could put yourself in the shoes of the character and kind of project yourself into the world as opposed to there being a preset personality that you’re playing as.”

System Shock‘s next major update, numbered at 1.2, is also going to bring an “upgraded ending” to the game, which Kick describes as being different enough from the original to be worth revisiting.

“A lot of the criticism that we received was: you spent this whole game collecting items, gearing yourself up for this big battle, and then all of your stuff was gone,” Kick said. “You’re left with just this one weapon to play what boils down to a minigame. It’s just been completely reworked.”

Over on Steam, Nightdive Studios has also confirmed that the update will be arriving on April 11, and revealed full patch notes for it. The studio confirms that the game’s upgraded ending will entail a rework for the entire final boss fight, which will now come with “new mechanics and a unique flow”.

Other improvements coming with the patch include improvements to enemy AI, new attacks for certain enemy types, mission waypoints being added in Easy difficulty, major optimizations made on Steam Deck, and much, much more. You can check out the full patch notes below.

The remake of System Shock was originally released on PC back in 2023. Since then, the game has also been announced for PS4, PS5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S for a May 21 release. For more details about the game, check out our review.

PATCH NOTES:

A female Hacker has now been added as a playable character

– Select the Hacker’s appearance from the New Game Configuration screen

Reworked the entire final fight with new mechanics and a unique flow

– Face and defeat (?) Shodan once more in her new cyberspace domain

Cloud Sync support has been added

– You can now pick up and continue your game on whichever machine you find yourself on.

Other major changes

• Alpha Strain enemies have a new attack
• Avian Mutant enemies have a new attack
• Cyborg Diego has new movement options
• Continued refining enemy AI and behaviors
• Mission waypoints have been implemented for (Easy mission difficulty)
• Better Gamepad handling and implementation
• Major optimizations across the entire game — Steam Deck users rejoice!
• Achievements are properly awarded when completing the requirements
• Some first person Hacker animations have been corrected
• General combat and speed balance adjustments across enemies and weapons
• Credits added to the Title Screen
• Improved quest logic behavior across several areas of the game
• Players can now no longer save over the AutoSave, and the AutoSave will now only appear in the Load Game menu
• Game Over screen can now be skipped
• Recycle Station ‘inventory’ size has increased to 4×3 from 3×3 to allow recycling of bigger junk items. Scrapper rejoice!
• The max payout from a Recycle Station is now 120 Credits
• EMP stun duration has been reduced by 25%
• SHODAN will lock the Research control room door if the player fires the Mining Laser at Earth
• Detox patch now has a 25% protection bonus against environment hazards while active
• Fix a soft lock that could occur when dying while interacting with a Surgery Machine
• Items dropped inside of elevators should no longer disappear
• Pathfinding performance improvements in Flight Deck and Groves
• Fix a case where the player was able to clip through the world by loading games while crouched
• Fix a case where plasma projectile FX would spawn every frame and wouldn’t clean up properly, causing major frame drops

Minor changes

• Easier to see total counts of collected Media items
• Added a button to the entrance of the Security level to ensure you can backtrack to the rest of the Station
• General FX improvements and tweaks
• New artwork on monitors across Citadel Station
• Enemy callouts and vocals are less frequent now
• Better text sizing for all languages
• Jump Jet behavior improved
• The color of some projectiles were tweaked
• Sped up animations of using Dermal Patches
• Enemies who are near Restoration Bays will be teleported to their spawn location to ensure the Hacker doesn’t get softlocked by being killed repeatedly
• Save files are now counted incrementally
• Fix ups of various Cyberspace levels and enemy placements within
• Better handling of Hacker death in unlikely scenarios
• SHODAN now has a surprise for the player when Diego is killed on the Security level
• Total Enemy Reinforcements have been increased across all levels
• Reduced the number of enemies that can bunch up in the same Reinforcement Volume
• Enemies will remember the player for longer on all difficulties
• Enemy line of checks include the projectile collision radius whenever possible so that their attacks fail less often
• Fixed an enemy ambush that wasn’t activating properly in the Medical CPU room if the player comes back later in the game
• Kickstarter corpse tokens added to enemies
• Enemy awareness in the Flight Deck trap room after saving and loading has been fixed
• Diego boss AI adjustments, largely in the first encounter
• Cortex Reavers can now perform a strafe jump to more quickly engage the player
• Mutated Cyborg and Tiger-Gorilla dismemberment has been fixed
• Cyborg Mantis walks faster, will sprint more frequently, and HP increased slightly
• Flier-Bots now have an Autocannon in addition to Gas Grenade attacks
• Striker-Bots now have a Laser Cannon in addition to Homing Missile attacks
• Flier-Bot and Striker-Bot textures have been improved
• Fix for Hoppers and Mobile Lasers not being able to hit the player while leaning behind a wall
• Security-1 Bot now has a rapid fire attack pose
• Cyborg Warrior now has a moving attack similar to the Security-2 Bot
• Cyborg Elite Guard head-mounted laser attack damage increased from 60 to 80
• Alpha Strain long range attack now has a unique animation
• Skorpion default inventory size has been reduced from 4×2 to 3×2
• Assault Rifle damage increased slightly from 24 to 25 per round
• Plasma Rifle now has an animation to unload the active Plasma Core
• Abe Ghiran’s Head inventory size has been increased from 1×1 to 2×2
• Missing character portraits have been added
• Cyberspace I.C.E Shield FX has been improved
• Wire Puzzle has new FX to more clearly indicate the required power level to solve it
• Fix for Circuit Puzzle dead-end nodes filling from the wrong side in some cases
• Fixed holes in the walls in Research tiles,
• Berserk patches now cost 5 Tri-Credits from a dispenser instead of 4
• Shotgun ammo cost in Ammo Depots has been reduced from 15 to 14 credits
• Loot table adjustments to reduce quantity of ammo received from Exec-Bots, Flier-Bots, Striker-Bots and Cyborg Enforcers
• Ammo adjustments in Reactor, Alpha Grove, Delta Grove, Engineering, Security, and Bridge
• Reduced the number of First Aid Kit pickups in Flight Deck, Security and Bridge
• Assigned the correct idle animation to the Cyborg Drones (No more hovering guns while they are charging)
• Jump Jet improvements while in Low Gravity Volumes
• Loading a save while falling will properly restore the player’s velocity
• Barrel dispensers will no longer drop their dispensed barrels when the player leaves and comes back to a level.
• Energy Drain Mines will no longer prepend multiple “Destroyed” strings to their name after being repeatedly destroyed
• Fix for player losing Low-Grav/Repulsor mods when switching to certain weapons
• Improvements to how the enemy AI handles changing Repulsor Lift direction
• Reactor’s Repulsor Lifts have been adjusted slightly to fix potential soft locks
• Fix for the player being able to exit the Diego V1 arena by blocking main doorway
• Doors will more elegantly restore their collision state when loading a save
• Shotgun shell texture has been fixed
• Crack-O’s are now no longer considered Junk
• Fix for certain wall monitors not breaking when attacked
• Fixed small animation issue with the Isolinear Chipset on the Bridge
• Fixed sparking cable issues on Maintenance
• Fix for several achievements not completing properly
• Small text adjustments and spellings
• Music playback adjustments
• Fixed a potential audio component memory leak when concurrency limits were reached
• Added a Controller Vibration accessibility option
• Improved gamepad support on MFD
• Improved automap performance
• Fixed several visual artefacts on the automap
• Automap will always update the map info bar with the data for the currently selected level
• Implant tooltips will no longer display off the edge of the screen on certain display configs
• Fix for the ‘Back’ button on gamepad causing the player to crouch when exiting menus
• Credits updated
• Other minor improvements, adjustments and balance tweaks