Nightdive Studios is making good on a six-year-old promise: a remastered version of the classic Looking Glass game System Shock 2. Nightdive and Sony revealed a trailer for System Shock 2: 25th Anniversary Remaster, as well as a release date of June 26th for PC, Xbox One and Xbox Series X|S, and PlayStation 4 and 5 consoles.
As the name suggests, this is a touched-up version of System Shock 2, not a total remake like Nightdive’s (very good) 2023 take on System Shock. The trailer and screenshots on Sony’s announcement blog post show off some light visual updates, but they look like sharpened versions of things like enemy models — maintaining the feel of a 25-year-old game with a little less blur. (Your weapons have visible hands holding them now, too.)
A bigger deal for many people might be an updated, console-friendly version of its complicated mouse and keyboard interface, including DualSense support and a quickbar for weapons and abilities. If you’re nostalgic for the old RPG overlay look, though, the visual design appears nearly unchanged. There’s even cross-play support for the game’s notoriously rocky cooperative multiplayer mode.
According to Nightdive’s website and comments from a moderator in the studio Discord server, the game is supposed to include some of the original’s existing community mods on top of offering broader mod support. The Discord moderator says the remaster will ship with the SS2 Community Patch or SCP, which rebalances some frustrating features, among other patches. (This was discussed by Nightdive back in 2020.) We’ve reached out to Nightdive to confirm the details on what exactly mod support will look like, including how the remastered version might play with the ShockEd fan mission editor. The System Shock 2 community has been essentially remastering the game for decades, but an official version makes those efforts a lot easier to find.
