When you look at the original System Shock compared to its competitors, you immediately understand why the immersive sim struck a chord with so many. While not a sales juggernaut, the game’s systems would be emulated by a horde of other games and reused by its creators in later games, but never usurped.
Since the release of System Shock, there have been a few immersive sims that have caught on. Deus Ex—helmed by System Shock lead Warren Spector—is one of the key examples, but Arkane’s Dishonoured, Prey and even Deathloop are more modern options. While the genre almost always brings in critical acclaim, new games are very rarely greenlit. In fact, just recently, a new Deus Ex game was cancelled by Embracer Group.
In an interview with FRVR, Nightdive CEO Stephen Kick, the director of the official System Shock remake, and technical producer Justin Khan explained that immersive sim titles are essentially kryptonite for games publishers. As extremely complex games built upon a nest of interconnected systems, they never feel or look done until they actually are done.
“I think the short answer is, strategically, it’s just very, very hard to make Im-Sims,” Khan explained. Games in the genre are always systems-based, so much so that the remake of System Shock on Nintendo Switch was a huge burden due to its real-time light sources being core to the gameplay.
“Rob [Fermier] shared some interesting anecdotes [from] during his time at both Looking Glass and Irrational,” Kick chimed in. “He said that, basically, the game would come together at the 12th hour, and it really wouldn’t feel like the sum of its part accounted for much until the last month of development when it all clicked.”
Kick explained that developing games like that is “a big risk, hoping that all takes place”. Nightdive itself has struggled with this. While the studio’s remake of System Shock is largely a 1:1 recreation of the 1994 visuals, at one point it was a massively different beast with its own mechanics and additions, something that simply didn’t work and had to be scrapped a second time.
While Nightdive didn’t touch on the project, simply explaining they have nothing to say “at this time”, the in-development System Shock 3 has also seemingly hit a roadblocks over the years. With little more than a tech demo shown for the game, it’s clear that developing a new immersive sim from scratch is a huge burden.
“[If] you make an Im-Sim game you’re going to be appealing to a very small, niche group of fans that are going to love it.”
Nightdive Studios CEO Stephen Kick
The Nightdive CEO explained that they “don’t generally take in financial performance as a metric for whether or not we work on something or not, but we do it because we love these games and we consider them to be works of art, and we don’t want that art to be lost”. For Nightdive, they deem their remaster work as culturally significant to gaming: who else would remaster Killing Time to the level of quality you see in its recent remaster?
Nightdive Studios was founded specifically to bring System Shock 2 back to the masses in a playable state, but even the studio knows that immersive sims simply do not perform as well as other types of games.
“I will say, Im-Sim games, they don’t perform financially the same way that other genres do,” Kick said. “It’s a known fact, you make an Im-Sim game you’re going to be appealing to a very small, niche group of fans that are going to love it, they’re going to be very vocal about it, and they’re going to try to convince their friends to play it, and they may or not be successful.
“That’s the hurdle from a studio perspective you also have to clear. Thankfully, we’ve been in a position where we could invest the money and the resources and the time to do the game that we wanted ot because we love it and we want other people to experience it. But when you start getting up at AAA budgets, it’s not a luxury that many could afford to take a risk on.”
Unfortunately, with video game budgets ballooning into the hundreds of millions, a AAA immersive sim appears to be completely off the table—although, Arkane’s upcoming Marvel’s Blade could scratch that itch when it eventually launches. As Kick says, they’re too risky, and they’re barely functional until the very end.
