Unfortunately, I'd love it if Alan Rickman could play SHODAN, but there are several impossibilities with that.'ĭespite the tragic impossibility of it (Alan Rickman died of cancer last year), Fader doesn't really mean that he'd want anyone else to voice the evil AI. 'System Shock to me is very much a Die Hard story,' says Fader, 'where it's one person against insurmountable odds, using their wits and craftiness to beat a manic. It's not changing-you're a hacker on a space station that's been turned into a death carnival by an AI gone evil-though the script has been slightly tweaked with the help of Chris Avellone.

One thing that remains the same is the story. I told him it shouldn't be that hard to just make two games, so we'll see. I asked Jason for the most outlandish idea one of their backers has offered, and his example was a game I very much want to play: a Dungeon Keeper-style game in which you play as SHODAN 'controlling all of her cyborgs and minions trying to kill the player.' Jason agreed that it would be brilliant, but noted that it would be an entirely different game. 'We want to slowly ease the player into learning how these guys function and behave, so that the player can defeat them,' he says. Tough enemies like the cyborg commander will be introduced in a 'showcase moment,' says Fader, sort of like a boss fight, before becoming part of the usual cast of enemies. 'The player is going to encounter this guy in typically in squads of four or five other cyborgs, where the commander is their leader, and the other cyborgs are the footsoldiers.' Kill the commander, and the other enemies will react by becoming more disorganized. 'The cyborg commander is a squad leader,' says Fader. The look of him hasn't changed much (see his concept art below), but he has changed. One of the fellows mutilated with all this research starred on the original System Shock's boxart: the cyborg commander, one of SHODAN's human-machine hybrids, called the Cyborg Elite Guard in the original. 'This is basically TriOptimum's version of Black Mesa from Half-Life, where there's some clandestine research experiments, things that are very, very secretive,' as Fader describes it.

The engineering deck concept above, for instance, emphasizes the orange and teal contrasts from the original level. As new and shiny as it all appears (and remember, these concepts don't necessarily represent the final, dilapidated state of the space station), it all looks System Shock-ey.

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