Was this peak PC gaming? I don't think I've played a better game than System Shock 2

Have (you) actually play it? Weird hold and release melee, recoil that just changes values on camera rotation without any smoothing and movement like you feeling like air is made of gelatine. It's fun, but lets not pretend like it doesn't control like piece of shit.

>Its pacing
The whole game is relentless as fuck. It's short, admitingly but there isn't a single boring moment in it. Shit doesn't stop hitting the fan, you are always somewhere interesting, doing something interesting
>Level design
It has great level design, by this I mean each floor of the ship are made so that you have some degree of liberty in how to approach them but still a sense of progression within them, there is ample opportunity to explore and things are very well inter-connected, levels or rooms aren't too long or too short, which plays into the pacing I already mentioned.
>The atmosphere
Well, it's a dark engine game which helps, but I'll go ahead here and say SS2 has the BEST SOUND DESIGN I have ever heard in any game. It's beyond fucking brilliant. The soundtrack is banging too, from atmospheric to full blown techno pieces.
>The depth of gameplay and player agency
Your character progression choices matter greatly, and depending on them you may not even be able to use a simple pistol. There is a huge freedom in what kind of skills, tools and abilities you can have, and your choice in them really does matter.

All these things make it an incredibly tight and immersive experience. A final note is that the setting is incredibly coherent and has had obvious effort into being made as believable as possible. It feels like every single asset and texture of the ship actually translate to a mechanical function or purpose for the ship. Almost as if the devs designed the ship itself first, and then decided to build levels and environments around the design. There are no "decorations", if you see something, it's purpose on the ship is clear and that makes it all the more immersive.

>How in the fuck have they not topped this as of 2019?
Because of casualisation "necessary" for consoles. Dead Space was supposed to be SS3, but bam - Resident Evil 4 is a smash hit, better copy it. Bioshock was supposed to be SS3, but bam - let's remove everything "confusing", like inventory.

Arx Fatalis. Thank me later.

The skill tree was superfluous and the replaying was tedious.
The game tells a pretty simple story with little room for variation at all, so why did it need a class system?
In the end whether its magical psychic energy or not so magical nonpsychic bullets, you're still going to be shooting the same stuff.
At least in actual rpgs your build can affect the outcome; this game wasn't a 'real' rpg.

it never gets enough credit as a survival horror game, the resource management in this game is way more tense than any resident evil ever was

SS2 unironically controls much better than Alien Isolation and has much better HUD and UI than Prey 2017.

It would be if there was a mod that made energy and exotic weapons not shit in comparison to standard.

I haven't played it. Do I have to play the first one? Nobody ever talks about SS1. Or are they not related?

Dead Space was REALLY good though. Bioshock could have been better. I agree it felt a little too casual. It could use some edge. But its story was still amazing.

>each floor of the ship
They're called decks you uncultured dumbass

Energy weapons are fucking great though. Especially as a psychic, you end up with unlimited ammo essentially. The laser pistol is fucking amazing with the overcharge shot and one of the most usefull weapon in the game.
For exotic though... I agree it's a bit of a meme weapon class. It does have the crystal shard though, which is the strongest melee weapon, but unfortunately the wrench is already so absurdedly good that getting the crystal is overkill and not worth the CM investments.

it's pretty damn gud, but not the best-

>Dead Space was REALLY good though
Maybe it is fine action, but it is not a good System Shock game.
> SS1
It's on par with SS2, imo. Just use mouse patch or extended edition.

Dead Space has amazing resource management and just general survival horror mechanics. Especially the first one, then it gets progressively casualized.

Do they have a story? Does the story continue from the first one or is it unrelated?

System Shock 1 and Arkane's Prey were better

For a second I thought this was an unironic response to this

Yes and yes.

I'll deck your mum in a minute you cheeky prick

>Bioshock was supposed to be SS3, but bam - let's remove everything "confusing", like inventory.
I haven't played System Shock and I think Bioshock is a dumbdown game for homos. Why add the extra effort of not letting players pick out what from the drawers?

I didn't play this games so I won't comment on that, but by comparison to other true 3d FPP games that came out earlier it's not very good in terms of control.

Youre actually fucking retarded, youre expected to kill every single enemy you see in dead space and youre expected to do it with your ranged weapons, even on""""""impossible"""""""""""""

More like DICKS, you fucking faggot sorry english is not my first language I appreciate the correction but there was no need to be rude about it

Well yeah, she somehow crippled by the many in SS2.

It was a bit of a fluke.
Everyone likes to mention how Bioshock is just a consolized (fucking heavily, I know) System Shock, but if you look at any of the System Shock post-mortems they all regret not simplifying it (or in their terms, making it more user-friendly).
Looking Glass's final days were a rare intersection of being too competent to make a boring or shallow game, but being too incompetent to follow through on dumbing it down.

It lives on a bit in Arkane, since Arkane's founder is in deep cocklust with Looking Glass. Which I love. Arx Fatalis is their best game on that front, though.

I prefer her femdom tendencies in SS2. The whole insults you whilst praising you stuff and giving you CMs at the same time. It's kinda hot

You're not expected to kill every enemy on the highest difficulties lmao you have to run away half the time.

No, peak PC gaming is right now. Back in the day, PC occasionally got an exceptional game that wouldn't have been possible on console, but aside from that its library was mostly shovelware and it lost out on most of the good multiplats that consoles got. Now, we don't really get many big cutting edge PC exclusives, but we get basically every game that's not directly sponsored by Nintendo/Sony, and usually the best version of all those multiplats to boot. I'll take modern PC gaming over retro PC gaming any day.

Stuff like this is why I don't like remakes, people don't always create greatness intentionally.

Wow, a braindead, retarded liar. Dead space is a game that literally locks you into rooms to fight enemies and the enemies you """avoid""" will slip into a vent and spawn back in front of you before you reach the end of the hallway. You might be actually retarded if you dont finish the first dead space with your inventory full of extra ammo for every weapon after killing everything in the game

Wait are you serious? I thought the whole thing about looking glass was the immersive sim design philosophy, which has player agency play a huge role, so why would they want to dumb it down?
Are you sure they didn't mean just the interfaces and controls in general (like psy powers were a fucking chore to swap between)

Also Arkane is done with these games. The CEO who as you said is in deep cocklust had said himself that after the commercial failure that Prey was, he would not try to make such games again.

What? I replayed it like last year on the highest difficulty. I kept running out of inventory space because I kept getting more ammo than I could use. And I was actually using stasis. Ran out of shit to buy long before the final chapter.

Dead Space's inventory/resource management depends on you losing your spaghetti and missing shots.

>Arx Fatalis
Who the fuck has the rights to it?
They need to re-release it with a improved magic system without on relying on mods.

>which has player agency play a huge role
Well player agency is a part of that. For example, when they added NPCs to Ultima Underworld 2 (worth playing, by the way), they removed most inventory items so the player wouldn't break routines too easily.
And then for System Shock 1, they removed NPCs altogether but kept the majority of inventory loss.

Stuff like that. There's a whole series of MIT "gamelab" post-mortems some kindly user linked me to a few years ago, worth checking out.

Arkane themselves, they even released the source code in 2011

>Who the fuck has the rights to it?
>They need to re-release it with a improved magic system without on relying on mods.
Why the fuck you need a rerelease when it is already done by fans for free?

>done by fans for free?
Even with Arx Liberatis, the magic casting is still janky as fuck.

>they removed most inventory items so the player wouldn't break routines too easily.
Would you elaborate on that, please?

Well in Underworld 2, you could bring items into places where NPCs were, and NPCs would comment on that. This lead to some genuine reactions, but also a lot of blank expressions the second the player started pushing it (the classic "put a fish on their head" scenario).

So in response, the lead gameplay designer just straight up removed most items. Bit of an axe-wielding approach but did the job.

It’s up there, but I think there are better games, like Thief and Stalker.

This is where RPGs peaked.

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Wait a sec, there are NPCs in Underworld one as well.

>not 7.2
Close. But not close enough.

I only played Underworld 2.
Up to Ultima IV in my big Ultima marathon and it's taking a while. Fucking "Learn the power of Friendship: The Game".

Damn did I get meme'd? I always went exotic for the shard and cleaned house with it. Is the wrench really that similar in effectiveness?

1v1 me in chess you swine.

>Is the wrench really that similar in effectiveness?
Only for early game.

If you get the Adrenaline Overproduction PS1, you 1-hit everything with any melee weapon, so it ends up not mattering.
Apart from the boss where it has the x0 multiplier.

>Only for early game.
Wrong. If you invest ANY OS upgrade or CMs into strenght or psy enhencing melee powers, the Wrench will fucking rape everything from start to end-game, and unlike the crystal it can actually damage shodan, making it arguably even better than the crystal. The energy alternative, laser rapier is a meme because it's only effective on enemies you don't really want to melee (robots who explode in your fucking face) and the Wrench is much more effective on ANALlids.
As I just said, you kinda did. It reallty depends if you invested anything in melee or not basically. If you didn't, then it was worth it I guess. If you did, then it's overkill and the Wrench would've done the job just as fine.
Basically if you invest in melee or do a melee build, the wrench will suffice and the crystal will be overkill. If you're doing a jack of all trades or another build but still want to slap shit in melee, then exotic will be worth it.

>psy enhencing melee powers
I went 0 in psy.
Only exotic & energy weapons for the laser rifle.

>and unlike the crystal it can actually damage shodan
Does it? The damage tables still have it at 0x. I remember just getting bored and tossing some grenades on my PSI run.

Attached: wrench_damage_table.png (875x149, 41K)

Then you're fine and I wouldn't say it's overkill. The crystal is basically a neat option for builds that don't touch melee but somehow end up investing some in exotics, and allows you to have a non-ammo dependant melee weapon that wrecks shit.

My first playthrough on the other hand I got memed into oblivion. Was doing a melee build, I had just finished SS1 in which the laser rapier is pure sex, so the moment I found one in SS2 I ditched the wrench, invested in laser and agility to wield it and then got introduced to my first spiders and regretted everything. Ended up literally backtracking to get my wrench back and smack these shits with it.

Depends what version you play on, the steam and gog have some differences in terms of "bugs" (for example in gog the fire aura DOESNT protect you from explosions) and I believe in the gog version the wrench does work against shodan. So does the psy blade, or laser rapier.

Might check in on whether GOG's co-op lets you get through a fucking bulkhead without randomly giving up.