Development on the new System Shock has been paused

Stephen Kick, CEO of Nightdive Studios has written up a post on the System Shock reboot Kickstarter, to state that development has been paused. Pretty strange, considering how positive their post was in January…

I won't quote all of it, just the parts that aren't rambling:

Maybe we were too successful. Maybe we lost our focus. The vision began to change. We moved from a Remaster to a completely new game. We shifted engines from Unity to Unreal, a choice that we don’t regret and one that has worked out for us. With the switch we began envisioning doing more, but straying from the core concepts of the original title.
[…]
The more that we worked on the game, the more that we wanted to do, and the further we got from the original concepts that made System Shock so great.

Changing engine wouldn't have been a quick thing to do, so they lost time with that. Then it just all reads like they kept wanting to add more and more and lost all real focus on what exactly they were making. Sounds like a classic case of feature-creep to me, too little focus.

He does say very clearly it's not cancelled, just that they're taking a break:

I have put the team on a hiatus while we reassess our path so that we can return to our vision. We are taking a break, but NOT ending the project. Please accept my personal assurance that we will be back and stronger than ever. System Shock is going to be completed and all of our promises fulfilled.  

So it's going to take longer, let's just all be glad it's not another time I'm having to write about Linux specifically being delayed or cancelled.

This is probably going to sting a little for the people that pledged to it, having the CEO of a respected developer come along basically saying they all screwed up. Could this be the next Duke Nukem Forever? I joke of course, but there's a fair few unhappy backers making themselves known. They had some pretty high pledge levels too, it's going to be very interesting to see what happens here.