Last month, it was reported that the development of the System Shock remake was being put on hold while the team “reassess [their] path”. Well, at GDC 2018, Nightdive Studios CEO Stephen Kick reported that things have started back up with the development.

“We understood based on the backer feedback, especially, that we weren’t going in the right direction with the game, what we promised to them,” Kick said. “That’s what really caused the shift in what we’re doing now, which is going back to what we’d established and represented with the Unity demo.” Nightdive’s business development director Larry Kuperman also elaborated on the team’s straying from the original goal, stating that as the team geared up and began moving forward with the project they had begun running into feature creep.

“All of those things like ‘you know what would really be cool, how we might reinterpret this’,” explained Kuperman. “Various people wanted to put their imprint on it. As this process evolved over a period of time, it grew in complexity, and it veered away from this original representation. That doesn’t mean that interpretation would’ve been bad, but it wouldn’t have been true to the System Shock vision.”

While it’s great that the team is back at it, the question is: When is the game coming out? According to Kuperman, the team is going to ship “exactly the game that was promised, with as much of the features that were promised as we can, in a timeframe that will get it out as fast as we can. Our expectation is probably Q1 of 2020.”

“Q1 of 2020”? Well, at the very least they’re back on track. I suppose we’ll see just what Warren Spector and the team working on System Shock 3 have in store to tide us over.