iirc this is a regression from the first one but still if you want to quibble with “I can kill the NPCs” specifically you pretty much have to go back to fallout, no other campaign is as big-but-underspecified to achieve that and I haven’t seen any of these other titles try either
I was afraid we were going to come dangerously close to agreeing itt
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they weren’t just random npcs though there were people my character was specifically feuding with in their background that it let me engage in a fight with and when they show up again unharmed it’s not even mentioned
yeah 2 shipped bad that way we talked about it at the time
The first System Shock anticipated walking sims and first person horror games more than it anticipated the nebulous pseudo genre of “immersive sim”
Through that lens it is still an absolutely valuable and fascinating game. SS2 went wrong by failing to adequately mix rpg and fps design elements. (Deus Ex was of course a much more potent and worthwhile mixture of these genres)
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darn it we are in fact agreeing
The only real problem with System Shock 1 (and its not a minor issue) is that the UX and controls are awful, the sort of control scheme you get when designing a complex first person shooter while pretty much ignoring doom’s release
That’s why I think a straight up remake of the first game could work. Revamping the interface to something intuitive and effortless will make all of the qualities of system shock shine through.
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I need to go back and finish System Shock. The Nightdive remake is interesting, but I actually don’t mind adapting to antiquated interfaces so I might stick with the original. I remember enjoying the almost baroque nature of it once I got used to it. So many knobs and buttons and widgets to play with!
http://forums.selectbutton.net/viewtopic.php?t=33230
Hey System Shock was cool Prey is cool I hope this is cool those are some tasty screens Dracko posted /threaddriveby
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System Shock 1 shouldn’t have worked, but it did somehow. It throws so many ideas at the wall like the cyberspace in a completely different game engine, and the time limit on hard difficulty, and the hidden save points. All those chaotic half-baked concepts sell the idea of “everything in this space station is out of control”, and the grimy pixelated look sells “infested by bio-corruption”
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I love how faithful they were to the palette, that’s something they easily could’ve nah’ed and it’s the most standout aspect of the video
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that also goes some way to explaining why I didn’t quite get on with Prey; despite it being just about the only modern game to really engage directly with system shock and not embarrass itself, the progression is dead boring and I think it sinks the rest of the game unless you’re willing to grant it a lot of goodwill. I generally like skill trees in games and looking at Prey’s skill trees is like the game saying “OK, now, you won’t be able to do many of these prosaic things until most of the way into the game if ever, have fun!”
That and the space station layout is so predictable and its enemies are such a nuisance, it completely saps the mystery from a game for which they actually bothered to record different dialog for when you’ve encountered certain late game events out of order. Arkane wants to have that missing dialog with 90s PC games so badly and they struggle so hard to get there.
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Remember they started with this palette and then rebooted it under a modern palette, to much disappointment, then a few years later reverted to something closer to the original reboot art style.
Good to get a reception pushing for weirder.
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I think those are accurate diagnoses of its weaknesses, yeah, but even then it puts it higher than anything post Deus-Ex. It’s not what it’s best at, but I’m most impressed by the gutsiness it has in incorporating BioShock in its all-encompassing genre pastiche/rehabilitation.
let things stay dead
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Dishonoured also had terrible boring skill progression until Death of the Outsider so while I’m heartened that they finally figured this out I wish it hadn’t made so many of their games 10% worse
also I was curious if there was one of these going and the answer is yes
I also just confirmed my memory that Marathon 3, Warcraft 2, and Heroes 2 were all still supporting 040 Macs in 1996/97, I have no idea what Looking Glass was thinking only running on PPC back in 94
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I mean I guess their minimum DOS spec was a 486@33 which the fastest 040 only barely matched, which is a lot of work to support what was in effect a single CPU rather than a whole architecture and I have never known anyone who bought a quadra but there were lots of cheap aftermarket CPU upgrades for older 68k Macs by then
but maybe it was a situation where they were really hoping the PPC install base would grow further and the legacy architectures were supported by the later releases specifically because after 1994 it didn’t
I bet an 030 with an FPU could’ve squeaked it out though, it usually did with the minimum-040 titles
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