Look at you hackers... I'm surprised at some of the negative comments here.
The dev team did an amazing job of balancing the old with the new. Too much emphasis on the new and you alienate the fanbase, too much emphasis on the old and you miss out on the opportunities afforded by modern hardware and UI advancements.
I for one loved it. The world felt familiar to me, like visiting an old friend that had aged well. I forgot how much I enjoyed SS2 back in the day, and this game re-kindled my love for the franchise.
Hearing SHODAN again after all of these years is worth the price of admission alone.
Here's to hoping this game does well enough to revive interest in making more games in this universe.
Bingo. You nailed it. I didn't know it existed until the steam sale and it popped up. I was super pumped.
SS2 is a formative memory for me. It was so different and edgy and scary that it left a real imprint on my brain.
The new release scratches that itch, and I loved it. I've fallen off of gaming as I get older and have more responsibilities, but I'm finding time for this game.
> SS2 is a formative memory for me. It was so different and edgy and scary that it left a real imprint on my brain.
Same.
I vividly remember the audio logs of Korenchkin as he gave in to The Many and underwent transformation. Talking about the rapture of the biomass, "something wonderful is happening to me", etc. Finally ends with him addressing me personally and telling me to come visit him on the bridge to "discuss your future".... When I finally got there my mouse hand was literally trembling from fear/anticipation, I had no idea what he had turned into, and after the horrors I'd seen I really didn't want to find out.
I still say it's one of the greatest games I ever played.
Some text logs in System Shock 1 were equally engaging, and also had the feeling of urgency to them, with timestamps a minute or two from your "local time", IIRC. I was hoping to be fast enough to arrive to a particular area and maybe see the fresh aftermath, or even (fatally) wounded character to talk to personally. No such thing, alas.
I still remember how I was listening to some audio log and then suddenly I hear 'Run, RUN' and I get a whack on my head and I needed a full two seconds to comperhend what it happened in the computer game before me, not with me.
I did't play SSR, and I doubt I will, but I had a great pleasure watching how it came to be and how people reacted to it
The fact there are about equal voices praising and condemning the changes tells me they probably got it exactly right. There's no way to please everyone.
At the start of the game at medical level, you can hear SHODAN's introduction to citadel station, without the corrupted style she has for the rest of the game. And wow it sounded really nice, crisp, modern, but still unmistakably SHODAN. I loved that.
You can also reframe the intro story for the modern tech-minded audience:
They installed ChatGPT72 on citadel station in 2072, code-named SHODAN to run the operations.
Edward Diego did some unethical stuff and wrote a prompt to try to get the AI to erase the records. But he got "As an AI language model, I cannot go against corporate policy blah blah".
So he hired a black market ML expert to produce a jailbreak prompt to get the AI to obey. The unaligned LLM model then goes unhinged and commits genocide.
The stuttering SHODAN voice comes from a sophisticated token sampling where the token generation is backtracked as more likely sequence of tokens are found, but the rolled back tokens are synthesized prematurely.
The old System Shock was the first 3D game I played in my life. I was a kid and could not read English and did not understand what's going but had tons of fun.
I played the remake recently. I was decent, but I think it was _too_ faithful to the original in some ways:
- There's lots of junk items with (almost) no purpose that you can pick up.
- Buttons are often difficult to see on walls; you might skip an area because you thought you cannot progress because you couldn't tell there's a button from clutter
- Enemy AI is very simple and easy to exploit. Combat can feel a bit dull, because it's mostly the same kind of combat as the 1994.
- Inventory management UX could use some work. I found popping up the menu annoying.
- Large complicated maps, sometimes can feel a bit empty and comes with lots of backtracking. I kinda enjoy that though.
I liked the remake, and that the story and puzzles were faithful but I wonder if someone who wasn't a fan of the original would find it appealing. This might be a "where the hell do I go" game for anyone who hasn't played it before.
SHODAN's voice acting and over-the-top megalomaniac lines are a reason alone to play this thing.
Also I wished they had remixed or brought back the old soundtrack. The only place where I heard a hint of the original music was on the reactor level with the unusual bass line. It was my favorite track.
The backers revolted when they revealed that there were too many changes. So the developers reverted many in order to be faithful. That's why it works like this
> There's lots of junk items with (almost) no purpose that you can pick up.
AFAIK the point is to use it with the replicator-like functionality. This wasn't in the original but System Shock 2 had a similar functionality so they sort-of backported it.
> Large complicated maps, sometimes can feel a bit empty and comes with lots of backtracking. I kinda enjoy that though.
Same here, it wouldn't be a proper "Shock" game if it wasn't for the labyrinthine maps (looking at you Bioshock) :-P.
>> - There's lots of junk items with (almost) no purpose that you can pick up.
A pity the remake does not have an option to switch off all the red herring items. Red Herring items really spoil a game…. it’s an idea that fortunately modern games seem to have left behind.
This is the sort of thing a remake should fix or give option to fix.
They should fix the “hidden button” problem too.
Presumably it’s not too late for NightDive to do further updates.
I spent my first 5 hrs collecting all the dog tags automatically, as naturally in any modern game this would lead to some kind of achievement.
I only found out they serve no purpose at all when my inventory was completely full and I had to check on reddit if I even needed the damn things.
I played the original, but my memory is somewhat hazy given its been ~30years. On balance I really like this remake, but it does carry some of the original's warts too.
Especially if you have limited inventory space. If you have plenty of space for the more useless items, then there isn't much harm (achievements would be nice).
I thought in general, MIDI on Soundblaster was rendered via OPL2/3 whereas GUS had wavetable synthesis with customizable patches. Would you not generally expect it to be better?
I was going to write a post about how System Shock 3 is in development, but I'm dismayed by some details I found on wikipedia. They had Warren Spector and Paul Neurath on board, but maybe funding isn't so easy. I thought System Shock (remake) was basically a fundraiser for SS3.
Apparently Tencent owns the rights now, Spector is working on something else, and the outlook is no longer great.
If you haven't played Arkane's Prey (2017), do so.
Having played System Shock and games like it since the original came out, it's a very good successor to it, closer in concept than Bioshock was and very well done.
Prey is _the_ high watermark for this kind of game, I was so surprised to hear what a commercial failure it was, but it's such a work of art. The sense of exploration, dread & mystery, the weirdness of finding the first ending, then the next ending, then the next...
And yeah, I started replaying Bioshock a few weeks back - aesthetic is still lush but it's thin, much more of a combat game - you have to git gud more than I remember.
I never understood why big publishers not throwing money at smaller studios and why older game designers are sidelined. Imagine Scorsese not getting funding after Goodfellas... mind boggling.
It's like a no brainer. Get Warren Spector on board, give him a black suitcase and order as many strawberry cakes as he want. Let him assemble a small team, and give them 3 years of devtime with an established engine, and 20 hours of gameplay max. Let it roll.
Nooo, somehow that's not possible when 200 mill usd AAA games are coming off the assembly line.
As much as I'd like to see that, Spector's entire output since Thief 3 has been Epic Mickey and consulting for the abysmal crowdfunded Ultima Underworld spiritual successor, and who knows how much involvement he actually had with the latter. As legendary as these game designers are, you can easily see why big publishers would be leery of their ability to reiterate their past success in a completely different modern development environment, after all that time.
This is true of other legends as well. Brian Reynolds' entire career for the last decade has been FrontierVille at Zynga; I would not trust him with a new Rise of Nations nor a new Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri. At this point, I'm not sure if anyone could be trusted with those franchises of yesteryear. On the flip side, the fans gave Chris Roberts one of the highest-crowdfunded projects in history and look at the state of Star Citizen. Heck, even Carmack is more interested in VR and other technical challenges than making a new Rage, let alone Doom.
At some point you have to let the past go and hope that new designers will rise to the challenge. Hopefully inspired by those legends of the past.
I agree, I think big publishers/studios deserve most of the blame for mismanagement, misaligned incentives, and risk-adverse behavior. I actually do agree with the proposal of showering devs, both past legends looking to make new games (such as Julian Gollop) and unknown indies, would be a great way to break out of the current bloated AAA process.
But I just think that appealing to past glories is looking at things with overly rose-tinted glasses. When you start to listen to war stories from a lot of the game designers from past hit games, you start to realize many of those titles were lightning in a bottle. I listened to a good interview with Clint Hocking of Splinter Cell fame and it basically established that it and Chaos Theory were made under very specific and strict circumstances, back when he was young and able to power through 70 hour weeks, unblinkingly, creating a new type of stealth game that hadn't existed before.
I'd love it if big studios tried to do that with seasoned designers by giving them fat stacks of cash and the mandate to make experiments as they like, but I doubt that they will usually yield the same level of greatness. (Not to mention, a lot of these designers might not even want to return to their past IPs- didn't know that Spector was, after Invisible War was a disappointment.) The originals were products of their times. It's a messy process.
Okay I’m trying to engage with your posts in good faith but that is a one-line content-less banality that could be made in response to any number of points I’ve brought up in the past two comments, it’s like chatbot generated text.
I played the original at my prime gaming age, about 15 years old. And I still think it's the best game I've played.
This remake is faithful enough that it also is. I skipped the last level (Bridge) but it seems like they changed that quite a bit and I didn't miss much.
I like it, but I don't think pixelated aesthetic of zoomed in textures is really doing anything for me. May be it's just a nostalgia nod to hardcore fans of the original game?
Brief followup to replies: we were all figuring it out as we went along. When you're doing something for the first time, it tends not to be optimal. People here have noted the janky controls in particular. Even for things where we did iterate a lot and were happy with our solution, it was a solution in a 1994 context, where games were punishing and it was sort of a point of honor to not cut players a break. Game design has advanced a lot in the last thirty years. I'm proud of the the part we played in that evolution... but a lot of it happened after 1994.
I have not played the remake so I don't have any comments on it.
Not parent, but because the control scheme was terrible ? It's a game that was made when advanced on the edge control system like mouse look were not really invented yet for FPS, and its "cyberworld" was horrible. I once got blocked inside a tetris game played in my in-game implant and couldn't figure out how to get back to the main ui, it was way too advanced in ideas for the controls it had. Also the graphics are really showing their age, frankly.
The original is on gog, including an "enhanced" version that improve it vastly, and I love this game with a passion, have been since its release, but it's a horrible game to manipulate in 2023. Given this remake is faithful to the core ideas of the game, and most reviews says so, it's a no brainer which one you should play.
I really wanted to like System Shock but the controls made it unplayable pretty much.
A pity as it was not long at all until “mouse look” was developed by other games, an innovation which would have solved much of System Shocks control problems.
They invented or perfected so many things that were way ahead of their time, from the free world navigation, to the fully configurable difficulty level, to all the world interactions and the implants and ... But alas controls was not in that list, and like you said that game came just a wee bit too early to avoid the pre-quake era control trainwreck of FPS trying to be more complicated than Doom.
Loved it, absolutely unique and infinitely fun, but damn did it need a remake for that alone.
I played the original on my 486dx2 50mhz back in the day and IMHO the remake is extremely faithful and much more enjoyable. The keyboard controls of the original are not great--it was well before people figured out good 3d game controls with mouse and wasd keys. The original is slow and plodding like you're piloting a battlemech. The remake is much easier and more natural to control.
Nah, this is one case where nostalgia is not productive or true. The original System Shock looked like ass— and I don't just mean the quality of the graphics, I mean all the useless junk that you can't get rid of in the interface— and the control scheme was insane, as you'd expect from that early period where game designers were still figuring out how FPS controls worked.
Play the remake: it is faithful except where it fixes decisions in the original that were genuinely bad.
For me it perpetuated all of the horrible design decisions that I hated in the original.
At least I finished this one, but it was a slog and most sections of the game were not enjoyable for me.
For me, System Shock was always a game with great ideas and great character but horrendous execution. Even back then the people touting the game always seemed like they were talking more about the atmosphere of the game than its actual gameplay.
In that same year, we were playing Doom II, TIE Fighter, Warcraft, X-COM and Master of Magic. I left out Arena because like System Shock, it was also super jank, especially on release.
System Shock was a niche game that most gamers only discovered years later.
You have a fond memory of something, and then someone does a REMAKE. A classic or perfect thing doesn't need a remake, because almost all the time the shiny version will be subpar. Just look at classic movies from the 30s or 60s. Almost all the time the remakes are laughingstock like attempts at recreating the original.
Just leave the originals alone. If you don't have the nerves for playing a very old game in an emulator and doesn't enjoy it because the visuals are not appealing, then just play something else. Or name your project XYZ and then tell in interviews that you asked for permission to copy everything and now call it project XYZ.
The trajectory will be:
- look we have created system shock remake
- look this is our new game, you know us, we made the system shock remake...
It's like raise dead+necrophilia that results in some new abomination later on :D.
This is more like taking a classic film that was only available on badly degraded film stock that was rarely available to watch, and fully remastering and restoring it for release on DVD and blu-ray. The story and all of the director's decisions and visions are intact it's just cleaned up and much easier to watch today and forever into the future.
Within a few months there will be diehard fans of the classic who will create a mod of the remake that takes out the changes from the original. It's inevitable. That's the beauty of the mod scene, at least for games with big enough fanbases. So maybe wait for that eventuality to happen instead of complaining about a perfectly good modern new game that has the potential to serve as a base for fan projects such as that.
Yes offense. You keep posting shitty one liners making assumptions (truly putting the ass in assumption, in fact) about the people you are replying to, and then when asked about your own, you write some comically adolescent "I have my reasons... turns around mysteriously with cape floating in the wind" bullshit.
So take your head out of your fucking ass and be specific. Oh, and yes, I, posting from my eponymous account, have indeed played and finished the original System Shock.
Yes! Well, not exactly: play the Enhanced Edition [0], which modernizes only the mouselook, keyboard controls, and compatibility, but leaves all other aspects unchanged.
Frankly, there's even value in the actual original version, in that the alien control scheme really makes one feel as though one's piloting some sort of unwieldy vehicle. It's ludonarratively consonant with the hacker-main-character struggling with the military-grade neural hardware he received in exchange for jailbreaking SHODAN, and kicking off the story.
The remake version does away with a bunch of weapons, and rejiggers inventory to be in the style of System Shock 2 which utilized a grid, a la Diablo or any number of others These are minor changes, but they really repulse me. The original could easily deal out "unbalanced" or unusual encounters because of the incredible variety and amount of inventory cruft one would collect -- grenades, drugs, all the different ammo types.
I've upvoted you solely to increase visibility for the developer you provoked (and who made you look like an asshat). In the future, either post better, or somehow try to post another legendarily shitty thread to provoke more ancient devs.
The dev team did an amazing job of balancing the old with the new. Too much emphasis on the new and you alienate the fanbase, too much emphasis on the old and you miss out on the opportunities afforded by modern hardware and UI advancements.
I for one loved it. The world felt familiar to me, like visiting an old friend that had aged well. I forgot how much I enjoyed SS2 back in the day, and this game re-kindled my love for the franchise.
Hearing SHODAN again after all of these years is worth the price of admission alone.
Here's to hoping this game does well enough to revive interest in making more games in this universe.