A game from 1994: >Stealth Mechanics >sleek inventory system >you can change the amount of power energy weapons take >energy weapons overheat but draw from your energy reserves rather than solid ammo >energy stations littered throughout levels to make it viable to use energy weapons >60fps
>lore friendly game mechanics >great combat >fully functioning physics engine that lets you: -Arm grenades and throw them, then shoot them while they are arcing -Plant a timed grenade, drop lots of unarmed grenades near it so they all go off at once -set the timer on a timed grenade -change ammo types for weapons -throw physics objects to kill enemies -the main villain harasses you and emails, yes EMAILS, you throughout the game, giving you an insight to their character and motivations rather than just "bbeg wants to destroy the world"
The market changed. The average player was willing to read a manual in 1994. Also controls have to be simple enough to work on a gamepad.
Jackson Butler
Probably because times changed. Now you are connected to everyone 24/7 with mobile phones and internet. Also video games were way more niche back then, now they are just a novelty of the masses that play them in toilets. Its really pathetic.
Benjamin Cruz
>PS4 >60fps Not on the hardware it was released
Isaiah Wright
We have a gay character.
PROGRESS.
Alexander Taylor
I would argue that the market did change, but it didn't come from the change in audience. just a reminder that SS1 floped hard on release. Compare sales figures for kiddie home console games or major PC titles like DooM to SS1's.
The market changed because the companies changed - PC games in the 70s and 80s were made by small teams on tiny budgets which they could manage to scrap up on their own. As the market grew so did the budgets and the risks which lead to outside investments. This brings in the businessman as the decider not the creators. Businessmen only wants to minimize the risks and maximize the profit, not because they are evil, it's just who they are and what they do. The 90s were a transitional time after which the PC game market switched to the console game market size and behavior model completely.
Kevin Jones
To be fair, you are putting it way nicer than it actually is. I fucking love System Shock but most of the things in it are very primitive, with good reason, I mean it's a game that came out the year after fucking DOOM and actually has real geometry meshes and a real plot that ends on a real high note.
I think that it doesn't get as much praise today because people are just used to more direct experiences, to get the plot and understand the objectives you have to get very invested in the game and very few people that play it today will put that much effort into it and end up lost. The market for games like it still exists, it's just that most people are used to a more streamlined experience.
Kayden Foster
>Stealth Mechanics They're pretty half baked honestly, a lot of the enemies notice you automatically for example. Doom had better AI in this regard. >sleek inventory system Looks cool but it's too cluttered and has a lot of useless shit on it instead of getting to the point quick and effectively. >you can change the amount of power energy weapons take Kinda cool but a lot of times you won't need to actually bother with that since easy enemies can't be easily killed without wasting resources and you'll just use the higher energy levels for stronger foes, hell you can even use that since you can recharge pretty often your energy weapons. >energy weapons overheat but draw from your energy reserves rather than solid ammo >energy stations littered throughout levels to make it viable to use energy weapons Both of these make cheesing very viable, damaging the challenge of the game and making weapons that waste ammunition a bad option in comparison. >60fps Only on the newest ports and the fan port in which this version is based. >great combat It's pretty bad even compared to games of it's time. Enemy behavior is too basic so it doesn't have the sense of speed or variety you would see in Doom for example and since you can cheese them with the previous method then the resource management aspect is also weak. Tl;dr This game was experimenting with new ideas but most of them had lackluster execution, other games including newer ones prefer to actually polish some of it's shit instead.
Hudson Torres
System Shock 1 sucks balls.
Oliver Murphy
LGS games are complexity for the sake of complexity. Little to no depth overall and very pretentious.
Jace Peterson
don't forget the part where it looks like shit and has an ugly anxiety inducing HUD
Cameron Brooks
>Little to no depth overall I only agree if you compare it to your mom's vagina :^)
Jayden Ward
Redundancy in video games for sake of player interaction with the universe IS NOT A BAD THING. Video games will continue to suck until people learn.
Watch this entire video, only five minutes. These guys go over the mistakes they made, and their revelations from their failures on Deus Ex Invisible War (same leads that made System Shock 1)
tl;dr: If you want to make a shitty game, listen to your close personal developer friends instead of the audiences actually enjoying your products.
Parker Gutierrez
>anxiety HUD
Only if you're a drooling mental defective retard. The mechanics of their HUD and functional on screen widgets means it's fully playable on touch screens with no mods needed.
Aiden Collins
for fuck's sake it's literally ultima underowrld in space.
Ethan Flores
Isn't complexity synonymous with depth?
Isaiah Fisher
Well that's just a product of its time, you were expected to click everywhere to make certain things because there was no standard for games that were more than shooty shooty action games, like, if you get any version of the game now you can play it HUDless, with mouselook and with any bindings.
Lincoln James
And these are all valid points but only on Mission 2, without the time limit. You're able to get more energy for your weapons and implants anytime you want, any where you want, unless you're under the gun and having to count your steps, plan your routes, and avoid dying as much as possible to beat the game within the seven hour time limit.
That's the challenge you can't otherwise get from having easy access and infinite respawns.
Good to know Nightdive are trimming out all that unnecessary rubbish so that the remake can be as great as Bioshock.
Logan Williams
Doom just had a longer shelf life because of full mod support and awesome developers open sourcing their engines.
In hindsight I am glad Doom won out, but SS1 was terribly underrated I felt.
Reminder that there's a map editor for Shock 1 out now, but to get the best version of it, you need to clone the latest commits off of github and build the program yourself. Requires Go and bash dependencies.
Jackson Mitchell
They're having to do that because they blew their kickstarter money on their failed reboot of the game that nobody wanted, like incompetent fuckwits.
Imagine defending the removal of content...
Adrian Cooper
What's that? System Shock 1?
Michael Wood
Making it more like Bioshock was the plan even before they went full reboot. It's always been about making the game "accessible" to "modern" audiences.
Isaiah Cox
If they were always going to do that then I'd rather they make it like System Shock 2 instead but either fixing psi or just not having it in.
To make them like either one is stupid, imo, considering they're a different type of game, but making it explicitly like Bioshock would go too far I'd think.
You're going to absolutely, perfectly nail the aesthetic and art style of the game, where traditionally that all gets totally shat on for a remake or reboot, but then you're going to push the mechanic design into something it isn't supposed to be?
My question to that is why not just make another Bioshock under an original iP since that's what people want?
They made the original demo in Unity, which was tight as fuck, made the kickstarter from it
Then they decided to change to UE4 because growing the game in Unity seems like it was going to be hard and they had the chance to hire some UE4 gamedevs that knew the engine and could work fast in it, because of this they brought a new producer that I think had some experience managing UE4 proyects. The guy then got too excited about the project and decided to get "experimental" because the original System Shock was experimental, which goes against what the kickstarter was for and adds a lot of budget
Then they decide that it was a bad idea, fired the guy, dunno if they brought someone new then, kept using UE4 and have been since, game looks like it looked in Unity back then, the hiatus they took was just a couple of weeks and they seem to have been going hard at it since then.
The game will just System Shock experience but with smoothed edges, no floaty controls, no overclutered HUD, a clearer inventory and log system, probably a casualized quest log which I'm ok with. It's not that it'll be a Bioshock clone, it's just that it will play like a modern game. There will still be the rollers, there will be jetpacks and they'll just get rid of dated shit like the camera on the back of your head.
Luis Russell
The camera in the back of your head had a function. In the original they infinitely respawn enemies in blind spots and places you're not looking, to keep the tension up. That headcam implant is supposed to be "a talisman against those surprise spawns" in the words of one of the devs. It was crucial for the time limit on mission 3 setting, to keep enemies from spawning and make getting around the station easier. In the context of the story, Shodan can't actually harm the player character, only slow them down.
Jack Cooper
They aren't capable of doing something original. Even doing something derivative almost overwhelmed them.
Besides, the majority won't care about all the mechanics in the original. All they care about is the name and how highly regarded it is.
Angel Lewis
Going to play this for the first time, just bought on steam sale. Should I read the player manual first? Or even the strategy guide which comes with the gog bundle?
Lucas Perez
If it's the current enhanced edition, you'll be able to jump right in and it'll be familiar. The OG versions used an older ASDX movement scheme to have room for lean and stance controls.
The new control profile breaks the dynamic of the on screen widgets a bit, but people don't really need to use those nowadays. They' do make the game playable on touch screens, though. Not necessarily practical, but neat.
Jaxson Adams
Prove me wrong
Thomas Turner
Its better than 2
Dominic Jenkins
The Colony (1988) did it first.
Leo Bell
LGS are hacks.
Sebastian Myers
Didn't know about it. Looks interesting
Matthew Rodriguez
You didnt know about System Shock 2?
Landon Morgan
Actually pretty tough to consider it's 1988 when looking at those visuals. It's like some missing link.
Cooper Moore
Reply for The colony isn't something I was aware of.
Lincoln Bailey
>The game will just System Shock experience but with smoothed edges The trouble with this sort of this is that it's the rough edges that made System Shock interesting. If you strip away all the clunky mechanics in SS1, there's really not much game left. And Shodan isn't *that* compelling a villain to carry a game when she's pretty cliche by modern standards.
I do wish Nightdive had gone for a 1:1 remake, or else stuck with their reboot, because they're unlikely to succeed by sitting on the fence and trying to keep the game the same while simultaneously changing practically everything about it.
The game is open source. People need to extend the engine and develop a multiplayer component first.
If you build it, they will cum
Jaxon Thompson
Oh but the problem is that it's only the mac version that's open sourced. You'd have to port all the code and fork it from the Kex engine that Nightdive either licenses or owns (not sure which)
Levi Bailey
>SS 1 remake from Nightdive takes fucking ages after stupid changes >SS 3 made by the people who made Underworld Ascendant We'll never get a proper SS game again, won't we?
Parker Flores
Atleast Prey was good
Nolan Nguyen
Given SS1 & SS2 had their own development issues and were flops in their own days, I can only conclude the series is cursed.
Nolan Hernandez
>Love ss1 >try to play 2 >The music makes me feel like I'm supposed to be playing it like Doom >Turn it off
Caleb Rivera
Did you enjoy Prey?
Jack Powell
Nah, somehow the enemy design doesn't click with me and from the looks of it, it looks just the same type but with different sizes. No fireball throwing monkeys or something like that.
Oliver Wilson
Yeah I think that was a bit of a weak point but otherwise I think its a better Shock style game than bioshock honestly.
Nathaniel Sullivan
>absolutely, perfectly nail the aesthetic and art style of the game I think the environments look great, but I can't say I'm a fan of the enemy design.
Back then it was >video games made by very enthusiastic adults for enthusiastic adults to enjoy and explore
Jason Nguyen
pathetic.
Jordan Lee
Don't worry, the eventually Nightdive remake of SS2 will replace the soundtrack with safe, generic atmospheric music again.
Jonathan Nelson
I want a slow creepy game. The starting music is legit like 'GO FAST GO GO GO WOOO' and it tonally does not fit the game
Owen Richardson
That's the ost only for the medicine area, later it gets more intense.
Lucas Gonzalez
And the worst controls in video game history. I fucking love System Shock 1 but the original control scheme was balls at the time and balls now. Playing it with the mouse-look mod fixes things somewhat but it's clear the game's combat/AI was designed with the shit controls in mind, undercutting the horror and turning it into a fairly easy shooter with exploration (less RPG more Metroid-ish) elements. It's an insane game with so much care and detail put into it and it's still decades ahead of its time but it's a shitshow to get into now.
Quick question though: is the new source-port version any good? Apparently they've fixed the clunkiness of the mouse-look and added a ton of improvements. Worth taking another look Yea Forums?
On the other hand the OG design was a more austere version of the Star Trek borg. This concept has to be new though, because I remember there being an older concept on thia guy that was more tuned to the OG design.
I wonder if they got a new art lead or something.
Jackson Lee
This. The rest of the music is really fitting, it's only the first track in the medical area that's completely out of place. A real shame because it causes loads of people to turn off the music before it gets good but that's System Shock 2 for you, it's a masterpiece but it's buried under one flaw after another. On the other hand the unbalanced and unfair RPG/limited ammo mechanics are not that well designed but it weirdly adds to the horror and actually contributes to making the game really fucking intense.
The new version has some minor differences and issues, but it's good. There's a profile for modern WASD and a classic profile for original controls.
Asher Perry
How does the mouselook/transition between mouselook and the inventory feel now? I remember that being a big issue with Portable/Enhanced.
Gabriel Nelson
I don't think I've ever noticed an issue with the mouselook on either version of enhanced. There's a control bind to lock/unlock the mouse to freelook.
So I hit the hind at the start of the game to look around like normal, and I ever need to click a HUD element, I just cycle that bind to unlock the mouse, click, and then lock it back to center again.
Might sound complicated describing it like this, but it's no different from using Shock 2's MFD. It's intuitive enough.
Jose Sanchez
And my bad, I got warriors mixed up with drones. It's definitely different... But I can't judge before seeing a render.
I'm under the impression that they just contract with freelancer(s) that's been porting all these games to Kex, like Turok, Forsaken, System Shock, Blood, etc..
Still holding out for new updates to Forsaken. New fixes, new features from the N64 version, but I've got this feeling they're spread too thin on their projects right now.
Austin Hill
No I know that. It's part of the reason why I recommend new players play SS2 first. It's just the way you had to drop items into the inventory in 1 felt clunky and annoying as fuck in the enhanced/portable edition of SS1. Has that been fixed in the new port?
Chase Morales
Looking Glass's game's were insanely forward thinking. Did you know that System Shock 1 actually has VR support built in? It's for 1994 vr and is allegedly awful but it's still built in
Sebastian Kelly
To pickup items you just click and drag from the environment to the HUD, and I actually can't remember but dropping them does work differently. I think there's a specific button you have to press to drop stuff, or maybe you just right click over something you have selected.
I know it's simple when you figure it out, but I can't remember.
Ryder Rivera
I don't recall seeing a concept for the warrior before, though I keep finding art I missed. Personally I'm really not a fan of sticking a human head on a robot body and calling it a cyborg when the whole point of what Shodan was doing was merging the two.
It's a shame because the drones have been pretty much spot on compared to the originals, but for the rest of the cyborgs Nightdive have gone off in crazy directions for seemingly no reason.
Which one are you talking about? Enhanced Edition? I played through it a bit but the controls were still clunky.
Owen Thomas
Played this for the first time a few years ago. It became one of my all time favorites.
Jaxson Martinez
Being pursued by Shodan really is an experience like no other. Loads of games have copied it but none quite get the same felling.
Ryan Gonzalez
The sourceport update of EE, not the older version of it. The current EE runs on their own engine.
Aiden Perry
Did they fix the music on the source port version? I remember comparing EE to Portable and portable had noticeably better quality music.
William Gutierrez
Don't forget a health system that actually accounts for the player's heart rate. If you use a health pack when your heart rate is high it will be less effective.
The only other game I've seen with a system like that is the Hideous Destructor mod for Doom
Sebastian Torres
Also don't forget how System Shock 1 had incremental leaning.
Nathaniel Hall
I played it a couple months ago and I thought it was really fun. Although after the destroying the grove it's very vague on what to do afterwards until you get to the security floor.
Jaxson Wood
I love how many different assets they use in System Shock 1 for everything. It's so much extra work to make loads of the keypads and doors different, they didn't have to do that but it gives off the feeling of a real place.
Landon Martin
Not sure what you mean on that. The music plays, loops correctly, and changes with area and context. I'm assuming the sound fonts are "generic" I guess. I can't remember at this point, but I know I swapped it for ChoriumRevA.
Sebastian Gray
Damn WHAT THE FUCK happened with the world? Everything was easy peezy awesome and then BOOM 9/11 fucked it all up!
Cameron Gutierrez
But issues with music in a game like SS1 are usually system dependent. Like it's a person's configuration that's causing the problem, or they don't have the right drivers.
Brayden Lewis
What game is it?
Zachary Campbell
read the thread zoomer
Aaron Campbell
The music plays, loops, and changes correctly, though the sound font they package may not be the best. I can't really remember but I know I swapped it for ChoriumRevA or something else.
Issues with MIDI are typically due to a person's config, like they don't jave the right drivers or something.
Adrian Hughes
Yikes. SS2 is better and it's barely playable because of the bugs, despite the fan patches.
System Shock 1. Great game, way ahead of its time. Terrible controls even for 1994. Kinda been fixed by first mods then new re-releases using said mods and finally a brand new source port, but it still feels a bit clunky and is a bit hard to get into these days. Underneath is a fucking gaming masterpiece. It's the inspiration behind Deus Ex, Half-Life, Doom 3, Dishonoured, Prey (reboot), Glados from Portal, Bioshock (especially Bioshock as it was made by the same team who made System Shock 2 and is almost a remake of SS2 in a lot of ways) and every game that features audio logs ever.
Michael Phillips
>playable because of the bugs Played it 2 weeks ago, no bugs or crashes at all.
I think I remember hearing that the reason SS2's multiplayer was so bad was because they never intended to have it in the first place, but were made to put it in, and then not given any time to make it stable and polish it up.
Jackson Gutierrez
>points out crashes and corrupt saves but not how to prevent them That's not helpful at all.
That makes sense. I play almost everything in SP so I guess I'm extremely unlucky.
Jace Gonzalez
They're making Triop unambiguously evil in the remake, judging by the kickstarter updates. Subtle shades of grey are too confusing for modern audiences.
David Ross
yeah nice game and all but you can't deny the colony game is similar.
Caleb Myers
bump.
Blake Robinson
fuckin human mantis over here can't spell assassin without giant hydraulic arms
Because the simpler the game and its idea, the better to sell it. Don't be so silly user and look what Fire Emblem or... I duno, Persona became from the last decade. Those games sells like hotcakes. And now look how badly Pray was sold
I think I'd really enjoy melee assassins with the behavior of Half-Life 1's fem assassins. The gutted security level and reactor room are the only spaces large enough to accommodate that.
Robert Morales
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>great combat The game is great but you don't need to start making shit up. The combat is the biggest stain on the whole experience
