System Shock 2 Remastered took six years to develop and it's finally out today

Nightdive Studios is renowned for bringing back classic games, remastered and optimized for modern hardware. The list includes classics like Shadow Man, Quake, Turok, Star Wars: Dark Forces, and more. Nightdive's latest is System Shock 2: 25th Anniversary Remaster, now available on PC and coming to Xbox, PlayStation, and Nintendo Switch consoles in July.

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This one has been a long time coming, with development taking over six years to complete due to roadblocks like missing source code, bugs, and "completely non-functional" co-op multiplayer. System Shock 2 is regarded as an immersive sim classic and one of the genre's defining releases, alongside Deus Ex.

In a new post celebrating the announcement, the team at Nightdive Studios notes that bringing System Shock 2 back presented them with "some of our greatest challenges to date."

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"When we started on the multiplayer, it was completely non-functional," says Nightdive developer Sam "Reki" Piper. "Years of neglect due to changes from both NewDark and community mods left it in a really dire state. Add to that any errors introduced during reverse engineering, plus the infamous bugs already present in the original game, and... well, you get the picture."

System Shock 2 is, first and foremost, a single-player game, but to bring back multiplayer, the team had to update the game's networking features by 2025. According to the team, the original release's multiplayer involved players sharing their IP addresses and managing their save files, which led to a generally poor experience.

"System Shock 2 is definitely, for the first time playing the game, an experience that should be done in single-player," confirms Nightdive developer Daniel Albano. "You can only truly experience something for the first time once. But once you have experienced the tension of the station solo, then jumping in with friends for a co-op experience can be a true old-school experience."

Porting the game to consoles meant adding controller support to a game built from the ground up to be played with a keyboard and mouse, which added to the development time. However, in the end, the hard work paid off, with System Shock 2: 25th Anniversary Remaster launching today on Steam, GOG, Humble, and the Epic Games Store for PC and Xbox One, Series X|S, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, and Nintendo Switch "within the first two weeks of July."