System Shock 2’s 25th-anniversary remaster recently launched for PC, and console owners won’t have to wait too much longer to get their hands on it. Developer Nightdive Studios has announced that it’ll land on PS5, PS4, Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One, and Switch on July 10, following its short delay for those platforms.
First released in 1999, Nightdive first teased that it was remastering System Shock 2 back in 2019. Since then, the first System Shock got a massive remake that blended the aesthetics and gameplay of the ’90s with modern design features, creating a unique blend of old-school gaming with high-definition visuals. Essentially, it was System Shock almost exactly as you remembered it, but with sharper visuals, better sound, and some nice tweaks under the hood.
Nightdive’s remaster of System Shock 2–previously known as System Shock 2: Enhanced Edition–proved to be a challenging project. The developer didn’t have access to the game’s complete source code, and piecing everything back together required “extensive reverse-engineering,” the studio said.
“The codebase is a complex amalgamation of various legacy libraries developed by Looking Glass, along with some more recent contributions from both Irrational Games and Looking Glass,” Nightdive explained in a PS Blog post back in March. “There’s virtually no consistent coding standard. As a result, we had to depend extensively on debugging and breakpoints to understand its functionality.”
It also proved tricky to get the game working on modern consoles, but Nightdive managed to come through in the end. On console, the game features full controller support alongside all of the other visual and gameplay enhancements made to this sci-fi classic.
If you never played it, System Shock 2 is set aboard the spaceship Von Braun, and casts you as the lone survivor of a deadly infection that has transformed the crew into dangerous mutants. Engineered by the malevolent SHODAN AI, players have to find a way to escape the ship and stop SHODAN from achieving its ultimate–and sinister–goal.
