“And then they go away and construct these things, almost like working with a digital set of Lego.” “What that means is that we have our environment artist creating tiles - chunks of a level, chunks of a hallway, wall pieces, floor pieces, ceiling pieces,” Fader explains. Rebuilding Citadel for the new System Shock couldn’t be more different - the team used a tile-based construction system reminiscent of the one Fader and much of his team worked with on Fallout: New Vegas. It was just something we wanted to put together to show that we were making something: it’s in Unreal, and Unreal will help us to get better visual fidelity at the same time on multiple platforms.”Īsk Ken Levine about working in Thief’s Dark Engine for System Shock 2 and he’ll tell you about carving passageways into the editor, as if space itself was made from dense rock. “I guess what we showed off in the Unreal trailer was more of a tech demo than a final representation of the art style.

“Overall, it’s been a pretty seamless transition,” Fader concludes. In March, less than a year after the initial reveal, Nightdive put out another trailer in Unreal. “The code doesn’t really translate, but the core fundamentals of the system we were working on definitely do map over,” says Fader.Ĭreature design, items, weapons, and to a certain degree environmental layouts - all were translated from the Unity demo with a minimum of time lost. Thankfully, Nightdive were able to pull over a “good chunk” of the work they’d already done in pre-alpha. “And instead of having them get up to speed on Unity, it made more sense with what we had in the pipeline to go with an Unreal ecosystem.” “These guys had more Unreal experience than Unity experience,” explains Fader. Nightdive have hired a bunch of “very senior” developers, a number of whom worked alongside game director Jason Fader at Obsidian on Fallout: New Vegas. And second, more pertinent for our purposes, was the team. First, after conversations with both Epic and Unity, Nightdive decided Unreal Engine 4 would be the better choice for hitting their performance targets on consoles. There were two important considerations behind the engine swap.

Nightdive system shock demo