What just happened? Fortunately for diehard System Shock fans, the tides have seemingly turned as Nightdive recently published a new demo for the remaster. The alpha demo reportedly remains "true to the classic experience, keeping all the things you loved while giving today's gamers the modern look and feel expected from a AAA title."
A subset of System Shock fans were a bit concerned to learn last week that Tencent was taking over development of System Shock 3 for OtherSide Entertainment. Franchise owner Nightdive Studios chimed in on the matter but that wasn't much consolation as the dev has faced its own set of problems with the System Shock remake it is working on.
To kick off the launch, Nightdive also shared a 40-minute walkthrough over on YouTube complete with developer commentary. And if that weren't enough, the Shacknews team caught up with the Nightdive crew for an in-depth interview should you want to dig even deeper.
In it, Nightdive CEO Stephen Kick explained that one of the reasons they chose the System Shock remake as one of their first games built from the ground up was because the original got overshadowed by the launch of another game around the same time - Doom 2. Questionable design decisions didn't help matters, either.
"From a casual perspective, both games look very similar in how they should play, but they're completely different," Kick said. "You go into Doom and anybody can pick it up almost instantly and start playing it, whereas anybody who tried System Shock for the first time was bombarded by text and instructions on how to use the UI, which was very cumbersome and difficult to use at the time."
The alpha demo of the System Shock remake is available for free over on Steam and GOG, arriving on the latter platform as part of its just-launched Summer Sale.