Following last week’s news of a June release date for Nightdive Studios’ long-in-the-works System Shock 2 remaster, the developer’s been talking about the future of the beloved series – suggesting a full-blown System Shock 2 remake could potentially also be on the cards.
A System Shock 2 remaster was initially announced back in 2019, midway through the development of Nightdive’s System Shock 1 remake. And while the remake’s road to release was a rocky one, the end result was very positively received – to the point there’s now enthusiasm for fully fledged System Shock 2 remake too. Something Nightdive’s well aware of.
“I’ve been asked twice earlier today why we didn’t do a remake,” Nightdive director of business development Larry Kuperman told VGC in a recent interview. “And I said, ‘Are you somehow under the impression that because we do a remaster that we won’t be able to do a remake in the future?'” Kuperman’s comments could, of course, be easily dismissed as purely hypothetical, if he hadn’t then added, “That might be something that I can either confirm or deny. But there’s going to be content coming out.”
What that “content” might be is unclear, but given Nightdive owns the rights to the System Shock franchise, it’s technically free to build on the games however it pleases. Where things get murkier, however, is the situation surrounding the series away from System Shock 1 & 2. System Shock 3, for instance, is currently in limbo, with the rights to the game now with Tencent following a complicated series of events that saw the project fall off the rails.