System Shock remake's next update will rework the final boss battle and add a female character option
Update 1.2 cometh next week
A big 'ol patch is coming to the System Shock remake next Thursday, headlined by "[reworking] the entire final fight with new mechanics and a unique flow" and adding a female character option for our hacker. Update 1.2 will also tweak and fix and fiddle with heaps of other things. Our System Shock review called it "a breathtakingly beautiful and astonishingly faithful remake that proves the enduring power of Looking Glass design" when it launched last year, though I would say System Shock's final battle is one of the most dated parts, so I'm curious to see the new form.
Even more than most 90s shooters, the System Shock games have stumbled with big boss battles that are a bit bum as it becomes a whole other type of game. "A lot of the criticism that we received was: you spent this whole game collecting items, gearing yourself up for this big battle, and then all of your stuff was gone," said Stephen Kick, founder of remakers Nightdive, in a recent interview with cheery RPS fanzine PC Gamer. "You're left with just this one weapon to play what boils down to a minigame." So, he added, it's "just been completely reworked".
Nightdive offered a female character as an incentive for hitting marketing milestones as part of the remake's 2016 Kickstarter campaign, and blew past it. Now the option is finally arriving, almost a year after launch, Kick told PCG that "it was just one of those things that we knew wouldn't have any kind of immediate effect on gameplay, but just having that option kind of adds to the immersive quality of the game." While your hacker doesn't speak and you only see them in a few cutscenes, it's still welcome. I do hope Nightdive also add such an option to their upcoming remastered System Shock 2: Enhanced Edition, not least of all because the smouldering romance with Shodan would be even more powerful as a Sapphic one.
Other newness coming in 1.2 includes enabling cloud save support, improving AI, optimising performance, giving the Alpha Strain and Avian Mutant enemies a new attack each, and adding mission waypoints for the Easy difficulty mode. See Nightdive's blog post for the full list of changes. Though a confusing promo image attached to the blog post in some Steam systems say the update is out now, no, System Shock update 1.2 is scheduled to launch on Thursday the 11th of April.
If you're still on classic System Shock, mind, you can still have a female hacker thanks to this neat mod from 2020. Along with the small business of replacing your grunting pain noise and rewording one lorelog (though not any spoken audio), it impressively drops a retro low-poly lady into all the cutscenes through a combination of splicing and recreating scenes. Here, have a look:
