I'm a little upset about how some of this interview went. I don't have a huge bone to pick with Kick or anything, because I really am happy that he was able to put this studio together and bring games like this back. Of course it's awesome that somebody actually owns the System Shock IP and has intentions to do something with it, because fans were left in limbo for a very long time.

BUT

There was a TON of controversy of his acquisition of the IP and how it went with the fans that had actually been keeping the System Shock games alive in all the intervening years. Kick and Night Dive did not "bring back" system shock, they simply acquired the rights. When SS2 first "shipped" on gog it included a ton of fixes that were developed by the community over the years and did so without attribution or permission. That wasn't remedied until the outrage from the system shock community got loud about it. Something similar sort of happened with SS1 when it came out too, it had long been considered abandonware, and the community was the one who implemented things like mouselook. It was already there when Night Dive got the rights. They didn't add it in.

The new versions of the games on Steam and GOG have enhancements developed by the community, not Night Dive, they just packaged it together with some tweaks of their own. I find it disingenuous to claim that they "brought it back" and I think the fandom that worked on this only out of love, rather than expecting compensation still feel incredibly burned by Stephen. I still bought both games again when they came out on GOG, because I want development to continue. But the fact that all of this is a bit glossed over (I'm not blaming you noclip, you always do superb work), really bothers me. Especially if he says that System Shock 2 is basically why his company exists.

What happened with the initial launch of SS2 was tricky (This is Stephen btw) I had reached out to GOG and provided a patched copy of Shock 2 stating that it was using the recently released New Dark patch and that I had no success getting permission to use or communicate with, "Le Corbeau" who to this day has remained anonymous. At the time I assumed GOG would create their own fix for the game as they sometimes do, but instead they simply released the version I sent despite my reservations. We've been working on reverse engineering the game so we can port it to KEX and provide official support for Multiplayer and OSX and Linux ports respectively.
For Shock 1 we hired the modder who created the mouse look patch, had him develop an update and released that version. We later acquired the source code which he completely rewrote, ported to the KEX engine and that became the Enhanced Edition. I understand many of the Shock community members are still sore about how Shock 2 was handled, but we're doing our best to make amends. One of the things we did was release the original source code to the community, and my plan is to do the same for Shock 2 once it's complete.
Hope that answers some of your questions :)

Still want that degradation log.