An effort to revamp the classic 1994 space station thriller System Shock for a new generation has hit a few stumbles since raising $1.35 million via Kickstarter in 2016. Developer Nightdive Studios officially put the project on hiatus last month, citing a loss of focus and a too-ambitious project scope.

Now, in a new interview with PC Gamer, Nightdive Studios Business Development Director Larry Kuperman says the project is back on track, with an "expectation" of a launch in "probably Q1 of 2020."

Nightdive's Kickstarter was originally conceived as a "faithful reboot" of the original game for modern hardware, following the more limited "Enhanced Edition" which Nightdive released on GOG in 2015. After receiving funding, though, the project expanded into a complete recreation of the game, with new concepts and features. The team showed off a pre-alpha demo in the Unity Engine back in 2016, but Nightdive has since shifted over to the Unreal Engine, a move the company describes as "a choice that we don’t regret and one that has worked out for us."

Following the brief February hiatus, Nightdive seems intent on reining the project back in. "As we geared up and started moving forward with it, we began to run into feature creep," Kuperman told PC Gamer. "All of those things like, 'You know what would really be cool, how we might reinterpret this.' Various people wanted to put their imprint on it. As this process evolved over a period of time, it grew in complexity, and it veered away from this original representation. That doesn't mean that interpretation would've been bad, but it wouldn't have been true to the System Shock vision."

Kuperman went on to insist that two additional years of development time wouldn't put a strain on the company's finances and that there has been "renewed interest from some publishing partners" for the more streamlined reboot effort. That said, a delay to 2020 isn't exactly encouraging for a Kickstarter project that was originally promised a December 2017 launch. As so often happens with crowdfunding , there is reason to believe the initial pitch was the most optimistic view of the project.

The System Shock reboot project is separate from a planned System Shock 3 sequel , which Nightdive has licensed off to outside developer Otherside Entertainment. System Shock veterans Warren Spector and Paul Neurath continue their work on that project, which is being published by Starbreeze.