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?
Comments
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.
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.
Funny way to summarize it. Totally loved the game and can't wait for the SS2 Remake.
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.
Reactor level music in the original (loud warning): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=up80FfzySFA
New reactor level music from the remake: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cxku9cbIcMQ
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
Ugh, I wonder if they made it worse. Do you know a link where I can read what kind of things were rolled back?
Is the kind of thing where no matter what you do there is going to be a sizable group of unhappy people.
You don't listen to Bruce Willis albums in 2023. Because, just like the original SS OST, it was a product of that time.
IMNSHO you need a genius to bring it to the modern times and not be that irritating.
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.
Same here, it wouldn't be a proper "Shock" game if it wasn't for the labyrinthine maps (looking at you Bioshock) :-P.
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.
Easy to imagine a "no useless items" option in gameplay settings.
If a game has Red Herrings then I just stop interacting with items entirely.
When items always have a purpose then they attract attention.
Working out what is useful/useless isn't fun.
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).
That original is the Gravis ultrasound version, which wasn't that good compared to the basic soundbaster midi.
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?
Depends on the composer.
To this day I prefer ugly, but fun, ESSFM to GUS in DOOM/2.
Duke3D sounds better on a wavetable board but AWE32/64 version (at least with a stock bank) is meh.
ADD: if you never heard "Asphyxiated Soul": https://ocremix.org/remix/OCR01865
Well, it's a matter of preference. That's like amiga music vs c64 music. C64 music was much more closer to my heart.
Okay, that's a fair point. Truth be told, I actually really do like the sound of those FM chips like the Yamaha OPL2, and the SID.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4EcgruWlXnQ
or
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CoGFV_xxR64
And Matt Grey did an awesome job with the remasters
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hrxPzxOwI_4
High praise for what was already described as one of the best games of its time.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_Shock_2#Sequel_projects
However, from that page, I also learned this exists: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_Shock_Infinite
So I guess I'll be playing System Shock Infinite this weekend :)
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.
If I remember right WS always wanted to do a third game, but EA (I think they had the rights back then) never gave the green light.
Btw, it's a team effort. Most of the time the unknown team members matter a lot.
There are ample good indie games/designers pop up every year who could use some funding.
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.
It's a bit like dark matter. It's there, it's not visible, yet somehow pulls the fun out of games.
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.
https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2009/09/actiblizzard-ceo-koti...
Yes, that is a very banal truism which is a teeny tiny subset of my post.
this year the game and other unreal engine games should be vr compatible the VR developer just had a breakthrough which makes games 6dof compatible
https://youtu.be/7naAVTGp7mM
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.
System Shock and the very underrated Terra Nova: Strike Force Centauri.
ohh man I remember that!
good times :-D
Sadly sales did not match the effort - was one of the reasons that Looking Glass closed shop :(.
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?
FWIW i've played the original game several times and i don't like the pixelated textures either.
Heh... I backed this Kickstarter years ago. I got to pick one of the villain names. Great to see it launch.
^ We got the guy who named SHODAN here