System Shock remake
eurogamer.net
eurogamer.net
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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
or
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CoGFV_xxR64
And Matt Grey did an awesome job with the remasters
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
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 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.
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).
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.
> 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.
High praise for what was already described as one of the best games of its time.
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 :)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
ohh man I remember that!
good times :-D