System Shock 2 Remaster Interview: Nightdive Discusses The Significance Of Preserving A Classic

Stephen: I think System Shock 2 really helped solidify the blueprint for what we now call the immersive sim. It wasn’t just about shooting things or solving puzzles, it was about giving players agency in how they approached the world. That idea of systems interacting in surprising ways, of player-driven storytelling, of environmental narrative, those threads run through BioShock, Prey, Dishonored, even Deus Ex. The DNA is everywhere. What’s amazing is how forward-thinking it was — you can still feel its influence in modern game design.

Stephen: One of the big ones is trust — trusting the player to explore, to experiment, to fail and try again. System Shock 2 didn’t “hold your hand.” It respected your intelligence. That kind of design is risky today, but I think there’s still huge value in it. We saw that with the release of System Shock Remaster. Those who took that challenge found an unforgettable experience that is hard to find these days.

Stephen: In some ways, we’ve seen incredible innovation, especially in indie spaces and systems-driven games. However, the industry at large has become more risk-averse, especially at the AAA level. Back in the late ’90s, budgets were smaller, teams were more agile, and you could afford to take risks. A game like System Shock 2 might not get greenlit at a big publisher today. I’m overjoyed we have the opportunity to work on games like this to help remind people of where our medium has come from and hopefully shine some light on where it’ll go.

Stephen: One of the hardest things was walking that line between faithfulness and playability. The original mechanics were deep, but they could also be difficult to navigate by today’s standards. We wanted to preserve the flexibility, the hybrid classes, the hacking, and the RPG depth without overwhelming new players. They should feel free to experiment without the risk of ending up in an unwinnable state, so a lot was done to rebalance the game so that it wasn’t as unforgiving.

Stephen: The original Dark Engine was a brilliant engine for its time, but it’s notoriously finicky under the hood. Porting that to modern systems while maintaining compatibility with old mods, fixing bugs, and making it scalable across today’s hardware was a huge task. We leaned heavily on our in-house KEX engine, but even then, there were legacy quirks, and spaghetti code that we had to carefully unravel. Sometimes it felt like digital archaeology.

Stephen: When we developed System Shock Remake, we took the UI and control scheme from System Shock 2 and implemented that into our version of the game. It was a massive improvement over the original UI from System Shock, but still required a ton of tweaks to make it feel familiar to modern audiences and even more work to get it working on a controller. With all those lessons learned, we applied that to the SS2 Remaster, and we hope it’s an enjoyable experience on either a PC or a Console.

Stephen: In a game like System Shock 2, some of the rough edges are part of the charm, and the design, while a product of its time, has held up incredibly well over the years. We’ve even seen a resurgence in appreciation for Shock with some fans saying that it’s the pinnacle of the “Shock-like” games. We were very careful about not modernizing it into something else entirely and opted to let the original design drive the gameplay experience.

Stephen: We want to present System Shock 2 not just as a classic game, but as an experience with historical significance. That means contextualizing it — through developer interviews, bonus materials, and behind the scenes assets we’ve uncovered throughout development. We’re not trying to compete with modern shooters, we’re offering something from a bygone era that served as a foundational pillar for the games that exist today.

Stephen: It’s crucial. We don’t just want to make old games playable, we want to make them live again. Remasters like System Shock 2 give new players a way to experience the past, not as a static artifact but as a living, playable piece of history. If you care about games as an art form, preservation isn’t optional. It’s my ultimate goal to preserve these games in hopes that new generations of game developers can learn from them and hopefully be inspired to tell their own stories and make their own games.

Stephen: As more games go digital-only and as platforms and games disappear, we’re at real risk of losing access to key parts of our cultural memory. When companies start talking about games as “services” rather than products, that gets even scarier. We need more studios thinking long-term, and more support for open standards, archival efforts, and backward compatibility. We’re seeing a lot more effort put forth in preserving source code and assets now than we did in the past, and that’s a step in the right direction.

Stephen: We’d love to, and we’re definitely talking about it. There’s still a passionate collector audience out there (myself included) and physical media is one of the best safeguards against digital loss. We created a Big Box Collector’s Edition for both System Shock Enhanced Edition, as well as the System Shock Remake and those were real highlights of the project for me. For us, it’s not just about the disc in a box, it’s about celebrating the legacy properly.