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Nightdive’s System Shock remake is great. PC Gamer immsim guy Joshua Wolens gave it an 80% review score, and we later chose it as the Best Remake of 2023 in our annual Game of the Year awards. Three years down the road, Nightdive is following it up with System Shock VR, a VR game being developed by Flat2VR Studios.
This is, going by the Steam description, a straight VR translation of the original game rather than a Half-Life: Alyx-style spinoff: You were caught hacking into TriOp, Edward Diego offered you a deal, you took it, and six months later that whole Citadel Station thing has kicked off.
(If you have no idea what I’m talking about, go play System Shock. It’s on sale for $15 on GOG and the Humble Store, if you insist on a Steam key.)
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That’s fine, there’s no need to mess with success, and the Shodan origin story is a classic. But I’m a bit baffled about who this is actually for. VR adoption remains relatively minuscule: The percentage of Steam users with VR headsets, as reported by the Steam Hardware and Software Survey (which doesn’t reflect the whole of the Steam user base, but nonetheless “is incredibly helpful to us as we make decisions about what kinds of technology investments to make and products to offer”) remains well below 2%, and while the Meta Quest and PSVR2 headsets will also be supported, even with them in the mix it represents a tiny slice of the overall gaming audience.
Thief VR: Legacy of Shadow is an apt example: It looked pretty good (for a VR game, anyway), it’s based on a classic, beloved property, it was well received by players and critics alike—and it peaked at 233 concurrent players on Steam. Publisher Vertigo Games closed one of its studios in June, just six months after Legacy of Shadow launched, saying “the VR market remains a challenging space.”
It’s possible that converting System Shock from a conventional FPS to a VR game isn’t a big deal, and that the resources required are relatively minimal, but I’m not inclined to think so. I do think System Shock could be quite good (for a VR game, anyway), but whether that’s enough to make it a success is a different question entirely.
System Shock VR is up for wishlisting now on Steam. A release date hasn’t been announced.
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