the final big set piece in deathhead’s fortress on the hardest difficulty in the new order requires masterful balancing of stealth and confrontation. I was really disappointed that the sequel allowed quick saves.
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I had no idea Zwei allowed quicksaves and (consequently) certainly never used them.
There were a couple times where I thought the checkpoints were a little ungenerous, but that’s an eternal balance problem.
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my favorite take on stealth mechanics is from the guys who do the only non-sb game podcasts i like which is simply that good stealth makes it just as fun to get caught, so you feel good rolling with the punches and don’t just quickload
Though as far as that goes quickload/quick save enablement would be a very good difficulty toggle. Sometimes you want to let things ride, other times you want to goof around or futz with probabilities to get a perfect result. Being able to reload your mistakes is a strength of games, not a weakness
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I am haunted by this question. DOES system shock 2 sucks…???
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it’s way, way less historically notable and somewhat less well designed than the original despite having been bigger and better remembered in the 2000s when they had just stopped being able to make these games (pretty much exactly like Fallout and Fallout 2) so it has an outsized reputation. it’s not bad but (also with Fallout) I would categorically recommend the original first.
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I am one of the people who think system shock 1 is better in every way that matters but I think system shock 2 is completely fine when considered from the perspective that it’s basically just the original system shock fangame of which there are now many
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i think system shock 2 blow chunks, there was a review that pretty much explained everything i hated about it, though the writing style in the review is annoyingly obnoxious and probably drops sluts because it was written in the early 00s. let me see if i can find it…
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i would never trust someone who was so irresponsible with sluts
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i bet this guy hated a lot of games in the late 90s good lord
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SS2 definitely sucks
Infinitely respawning enemies (ss1 had respawns but they were both limited and tied either to scripted events or to a security level) and the ability to respawn yourself just saps the horror mood that the sound design works so valiantly to establish
It also features the first ken levine “you were actually being manipulated by the villain all along” twist
The horror mood also doesn’t really survive contact with the rpg mechanics. The monsters, already easy to deal with, stop being scary altogether once you have upgraded your combat skills a couple times. This turns the endless respawns into annoying speedbumps rather than inspiring a feeling of constant peril. If you’re gonna copy the character creation from traveller, you should also copy how traveller doesn’t feature skill advancement.
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it has nothing to do with security level
I was playing the remake today exploring a previously cleared part of Medical and the floor in front of me raised up like an elevator to reveal one of the basic cyborgs spawning in like a Doom level lol
here is how the ss2 spawns work
I don’t really like this system, but to be fair, this is literally how the first game works too, and in the second one there’s actually a penalty for dying because it costs money.
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The resurrection bays cost time in SS1, which is pretty limited on difficulty 3, and they’re often fairly hidden (rather than the first thing you find and activate on every level in ss2)
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my point is, many of the things system shock 2 does wrong is also something system shock 1 does, it’s just way more forgivable because it’s from 1994
the time limit only matters if you’re playing on difficulty 3 which i doubt is a commonplace decision for the average person playing system shock in modern times
the enemies respawn a lot in ss1 too even on combat difficulty 2 but ss2 has way more ways of spawning enemies like alarms and fucking up hacking and whatnot so it happens WAY more
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And it makes what was fine in the first game worse. Monsters respawning a limited number of times is fine, monsters respawning infinitely sucks. Resurrection bays having a meaningful cost is fine, resurrection bays costing a trifling amount sucks.
Many of the things system shock 2 does wrong were things the first game did right and the sequel fucked up
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all I was saying is that resurrection bays have zero cost except if you’re playing on the highest mission difficulty so idk it doesn’t really seem particularly balanced either
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this is actually one of my biggest problems with ss2, I think polito bitching you out all the time is just totally unnecessary along with the gathering chemicals from the supply closet phase of the plot (speaking of bioshock lol that they did this again with arcadia but it sucks way less there), and then the other problem for me is how awful the level design gets on the rickenbacker and in the body of the many. but other than that it’s a cute thief total conversion project
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Not a fan of the constant D’n’B but the sound design of SS2 is off the charts. The twisted synths, the chatters of the midwives and the audio logs of humans slowly overtaken by The Many juxtaposed with the shittiest soda slurp FXes and stick monkey screech .wavs, good lord. This game along with Deus Ex deserves all the meme treatment it gets
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The best part of SS2 is when SHODAN offers to make you a demigod in her new world order and the whole time you blankly look at her. And then you say “nah” and shoot her and her face goes crazy like a youtube poop.
I just watched my friend play the remaster and i played it as a kid. Cemented my feeling on it which is that it’s good, not as good as SS1, and they run out of ideas / time at the end. Ken Levine is a hack.
The respawning enemies doesn’t bother me, it’s not like Doom Eternal or Call of Duty or whatever where it’s very egregious, and you can always just turn it off.
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“the best part is the ending FMV” not exactly a great endorsement for system shock 2 here
whenever I think about it in my head I hear the camera sound → alarm → monkey screeching → hybrid death noise
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