System Shock remake

[Blue Jam]

Out on the 30th of May. Finally:

[Lemming]

So anxious for this one, System Shock is one of my favourite games of all time.

Played the various Medical deck demos they've released over the years and I always end up fearing that they've not really struck the right tone for System Shock - where the original had fast-paced techno music, the remake has silence or "atmospheric" music, where the original had garish bright colours, the remake has darkness so you can't see what's in front of you, whereas the original had a frantic pace and a feeling of "fucking helllll the station's gonna blow up, let's get a move on, 'kin 'ell" (and even an actual seven hour time limit on hardest difficulty), the remake has an overall tone of trudging around Tesco Extra at two in the morning with the lights out and a couple of dodgy-looking drunk guys wandering around, no real feeling of urgency.

I'm interested to see how that tone can last because the game is borderline-funny in terms of how out of control things get, especially towards the end where the reactor's about to blow up and the escape pods have been locked and the most elite cyborgs are all hunting you personally and SHODAN's about to detach the bridge and you're trapped under the bridge jets as they're about to fire and Diego has a lightsaber and wants to duel you right outside the bridge entrance and even if you get to the bridge you'll be shot away into deep space where nobody can help you, and you're probably overdosing on adrenaline-enhancing drugs by this point. The plot calls for the sort of frantic FPS action the original game offers, I'm not sure how you can pull it off with the sort of slow-paced atmospheric survival-horror tone they're going for in the remake. Still gonna be a day one purchase and one of the big games of the year but I'm nervous about how it's going to pan out.

[Blue Jam]

Hiya @Lemming mate :) Yes, I have enjoyed reading about your FPS nightmares immensely.

@H-O-W-L , penny for your thoughts?

[H-O-W-L]

Not too arsed. Could be alright. I prefer the original because I'm that sort of tosser honestly. The demo was alright when I tried it. What Lemming said is pretty on-point, though; the original was fast-paced and hellish and this one seems to be going for a more Bioshocky tone which I'm not so keen on. The closest game to approximate SS1's tone and pace is probably Prey.

[H-O-W-L]

Also not very pleased that they've made SHODAN inextricably female now. The mixed pronouns/tenses for SHODAN in the original were a stand-out feature that made it clear that SHODAN was something more than could be quantified in terms of humanity. Something different.

[madhair60]

does the enhanced edition of 1 significantly update the controls, interface etc or should I just behave and play the actual original?

this is a big gap in my gaming knowledge and I'd like to remedy that, but if I can play the original before the remake I'd like to do so in the correct way.

[H-O-W-L]

does the enhanced edition of 1 significantly update the controls, interface etc or should I just behave and play the actual original?

this is a big gap in my gaming knowledge and I'd like to remedy that, but if I can play the original before the remake I'd like to do so in the correct way.

Enhanced basically resolves the system and PEBKAC related issues (wonky UI etc) that make the original a bastard to play nowadays. It's otherwise unfettered and you can play it without losing anything except some of the crumbliness of the original's interface, the value of which is debateable. The actual gameplay is wholly untouched.

[Blue Jam]

this is a big gap in my gaming knowledge and I'd like to remedy that

Same for me, and I'm a bit ashamed to admit that. Given how much I love shock games I really should have played the one that inspired them all. Been waiting for the enhanced edition, just had no idea it would take this long...

[Blue Jam]

Also not very pleased that they've made SHODAN inextricably female now. The mixed pronouns/tenses for SHODAN in the original were a stand-out feature that made it clear that SHODAN was something more than could be quantified in terms of humanity. Something different.

This one was written by Chris Avellone, who also did Prey, so I have faith in the developers here.

Different voice actor though isn't it?

[Critcho]

Also not very pleased that they've made SHODAN inextricably female now. The mixed pronouns/tenses for SHODAN in the original were a stand-out feature that made it clear that SHODAN was something more than could be quantified in terms of humanity. Something different.

I wonder if the gender neutral thing was because they'd written the script before they'd decided on any voice acting.

I've always been of the view that SS1 gets sorely underrated because people get confronted by the weird control interface and ugly sprites and assume the whole thing is unplayably dated. But once you get used to it a great game to this day.

I'll probably give the remake a shot, but I do wonder if smoothing away the off-its-time oddness of SS1 won't take away a lot of what still makes it unique, and make it just seem like a middling modern 'immersive sim', which might make people even less likely to bother with the original.

[H-O-W-L]

This one was written by Chris Avellone, who also did Prey, so I have faith in the developers here.

I don't have much faith in Avellone, honestly, I've experience with his pedigree outside of Prey and I'll say that his presence there (mostly character fundamentals and worldbuilding) is the extent of what he should do really. The interminable dialogue in Fallout New Vegas' Lonesome Road is his doing, as a good example.

[Lemming]

does the enhanced edition of 1 significantly update the controls, interface etc or should I just behave and play the actual original?

this is a big gap in my gaming knowledge and I'd like to remedy that, but if I can play the original before the remake I'd like to do so in the correct way.

Same for me, and I'm a bit ashamed to admit that. Given how much I love shock games I really should have played the one that inspired them all. Been waiting for the enhanced edition, just had no idea it would take this long...

As H-O-W-L said, the current Enhanced Edition available on GoG is the best way to play it these days. The big change is mouselook, which is pretty crucial and doesn't really affect the game's feel in any way.

It controls more or less like a standard FPS - all you really have to get used to is pressing Enter to switch between mouselook and cursor (mouselook for looking around and exploration, cursor for when you want to interact with an object, access your inventory, or fire a weapon). I think the only other thing that could trip up a modern player is the fluid movement system where you can control exactly how much you crouch/lean, which is handled by the stickman thing in the top right - though the Enhanced Edition might let you bypass that with dedicated leaning/crouching keys iirc (at the cost of having a bit less manual control over yourself).

I'll probably give the remake a shot, but I do wonder if smoothing away the off-its-time oddness of SS1 won't take away a lot of what still makes it unique, and make it just seem like a middling modern 'immersive sim', which might make people even less likely to bother with the original.

Exactly - SS is from the era of immersive sims back when the term meant trying to fully immerse the player in the game through every possible design trick, as opposed to the later meaning of "a game with doors that have keypads". Like with Ultima Underworld, the UI which the remake is doing away with* is such a key part of the whole thing.

*understandably, given that they've got to make the game as accessible as possible

I don't really see how SS can work with standard FPS gameplay; you've got to have the mad panic of manually reloading guns and fiddling with the settings on the SPARQ beam and switching between all your different implants that have become unwieldy by the end. I don't think there's been many games that actually make you feel like a relatively unskilled newly-awoken cyborg who's got to master all kinds of shit he doesn't know how to use.

From the last demo version I played it did seem that they were trying to bring a few of those elements in, but it was consistently in a way that didn't really recapture the original. Even just the convenience of being able to reload by pressing "R" felt weird, compared to the original where you'd be fumbling about trying to shove a new clip in while the mutants surrounded you.

[madhair60]

thanks for the fill-in, game fans. I'll give it a go sometime. I'm not scared off by esoteric controls, in fact I usually like them, I just wanted to make sure the Enhanced Edition wouldn't neuter it.

[H-O-W-L]

Enhanced is one of few examples of an actually good resculpting. Compare it with the much higher-budget Bioshock Remaster, which is laughably shit.

[Mister Six]

What did they change in the Bioshock remaster? I have it on Steam but haven't bothered playing it. I assumed it was just higher-quality textures.

[Cold Meat Platter]

All the big daddies are now called big jobbies

[H-O-W-L]

All the big daddies are now called big jobbies

What did they change in the Bioshock remaster? I have it on Steam but haven't bothered playing it. I assumed it was just higher-quality textures.

They manually enhanced some of the key models, poorly AI upscaled others, and replaced others with even worse stock textures. In the process they also decompiled all the maps to add new director's commentary reels to them which broke every trigger in every map, meaning the game is even buggier than the original, and they also did not fix ANY of the bugs from the original anyway so it's twice as buggy and just generally arse. I've been replaying both in parallel for achievements in the remaster and the true-blue experience of the latter and fuck me the remaster is shit.

[bgmnts]

Can also attest my experience of the remaster was no different to the original game; on the 360, in my case.

Unsure what they did to warrant the significant increase in storage space but it wasn't noticeable.

[Lemming]

Anyone playing this? I'm going to sound whiny but I really can't understand what they're going for with it - it's not bad as such, but it feels like they've just made everything about System Shock slightly worse in every way, without really changing much.

What's so strange is that they kept the levels fairly close to the original; some areas are cut, but for the most part you're in almost the exact same maps with the same layout, even the same enemy placement. Which means that aspects of the original that could repel modern gamers - not knowing where to go, very little indication of what you should currently be doing, lots of backtracking, etc - have been preserved. And yet the actual game mechanics are almost all watered down compared to the original, so you're getting all of the "dated" aspects without any of the things that the original got so incredibly right. It's bizarre, I can't really tell who it's made for: people who can't handle SS1's design won't like the remake, and people who can handle it would be better off playing the original.

If it was a total reimagining (a la Black Mesa) then I could understand why it exists, but instead it's a near 1:1 remake at times with all the unique elements of System Shock 1 taken away - you basically are playing the original, except with less weapons, less freedom of movement, missing areas, and several other lost features. I can't get my head round it at all. It's like if someone made a total remake of Crash Bandicoot but removed the music and the ability to spin, to deploy a tortured analogy. Another thing that keeps tripping me up is that you can no longer make jumps that you could in the original, since you move much slower, your jump height is far less, and you can't do the weird quasi-mantling thing you could do in the original. Feels like the Hacker weighs like 20 stone now.

I've played for a couple hours and most of the stuff I whinged about in my first post holds true - the loss of the soundtrack is a major blow to the game, and everything has a very lethargic feel to it compared to the original's sense of mad panic. Overall the only reaction the game really inspires in me is a strong desire to play the original instead.

And they removed

Spoiler alert

the mutants flooding the elevator at the start of Research

[close]

even though that was one of the funniest things in the game.

[QRDL]

Interesting, I've played SS1 (the Enhanced Edition) for the first time recently and didn't feel in any way panicked. It was pretty often tense and stressful, but I took it really slow and explored cautiously, like in Thief. The only moments when I felt what you did for a second was when I was locked out of the pods. But even then it was obviously not going to end the easy way, because there were another 2 unexplored floors on the elevators (IIRC).
I think this is just the result of learned cynicism from years of seeing story cliches play out in games. This could be an argument for playing the original on hardest difficulty.

Otherwise, on a pure gameplay level, the immersion was wholly successful. I think people don't realize how fully-formed a prototype for the genre this is. I didn't.

As a result of my different mindset the original's music often just didn't fit.
I guess the developers of the remake felt more like me, judging by what you say. I only played the remake for fifteen minutes or so to see how they solved the interface. I think they did an alright job on the modernization, though I still have muscle memory from my SS:EE playthrough and will have to rearrange my fancy bindings on the G604.

PS: Do you really think that the term "immersive-sim" lost its meaning? Wouldn't people who know of the sub-genre already have experience with several of them? It's not a well known categorization.

PS2: FUCK THEM for removing this! It was a great scramble!

And they removed

Spoiler alert

the mutants flooding the elevator at the start of Research

[close]

even though that was one of the funniest things in the game.

[Lemming]

Interesting, I've played SS1 (the Enhanced Edition) for the first time recently and didn't feel in any way panicked. It was pretty often tense and stressful, but I took it really slow and explored cautiously, like in Thief. The only moments when I felt what you did for a second was when I was locked out of the pods. But even then it was obviously not going to end the easy way, because there were another 2 unexplored floors on the elevators (IIRC).
I think this is just the result of learned cynicism from years of seeing story cliches play out in games. This could be an argument for playing the original on hardest difficulty.

Quite a lot of people play the game that way. I suppose the gameplay itself, especially without the timer, encourages caution and thoroughness. But with all the difficulty settings on 3, you're constantly swarmed by enemies and have a countdown in the top right at all times, which makes slow-paced gameplay almost impossible. Plus the plot always seemed to be very much going for freneticness and speed to me - the first thing you're told is that a mining laser is about to fire at Earth and you're the only one who is in a position to stop it, and then the Medical riff kicks in, and it only gets more ludicrously high-stakes from there. The coalescence of astounding bad luck factors right before the bridge (the reactor going into meltdown, the escape pods being locked, the entire Security deck fortress being in the way, the bridge being about to detach, Diego waiting to ambush you) is so comically intense that I don't see how it's even possible for the remake to encourage a plodding pace and a horror-y tone by that point. Especially since, by that point in the original, you're able to fly, run at about 90 miles an hour, and have a lightsaber.

And of course, the game's meant to be funny to an extent, especially in some of the SHODAN taunts and ambushes - but for the humour to come off, it sort of requires the original game's sense of frenzy.

It's a bit like Doom in a sense; I'm vaguely old enough to remember people back in the day talking about it as being scary and how they had to edge slowly up to every corner to peek round it, but given the Metallica and Pantera MIDIs blasting out as soon as the game starts and the Doomguy grinning like a maniac whenever you pick up a new weapon, not to mention the constant splashes of dark comedy, it never struck me as really being the slow-paced horror game that some people (including, it seems, the developers of Doom 3) took it as. It's interesting to see that its reputation was revised by Doom 2016 to "RIP AND TEAR!! DOOMGUY IS UNSTOPPABLE!! HEAVY METAL!!" which I think is possibly intepreting it a bit too far in the other direction...

PS: Do you really think that the term "immersive-sim" lost its meaning? Wouldn't people who know of the sub-genre already have experience with several of them? It's not a well known categorization.

Mostly just joking about how hard to define the term is, and how difficult it is to identify any consistent criteria between the games that fall under the label. There's definitely some games that obviously qualify (Ultima Underworld, Deus Ex) but I could never figure out exactly how, say, Dishonored or Dark Messiah were meant to be immersive sims - or even Thief, to an extent. Warren Spector's definition seemed to hinge largely on "emergent" gameplay, but then a lot of games that fall under the label don't really allow for very much of that, including System Shock.

[Sex Festival Organizer]

I was *so* stoked for this when I first read about it, massive fan of SS1 and especially SS2 that I am, but my enthusiasm has waned considerably since then, and now I'm 97.5% sure I won't bother with it at all. Another missed opportunity to be filed alongside Torment: Tides of Numenera.

Well, at least this thread his made me want to have another round of System Shock Portable, which is nice.

[QRDL]

Mostly just joking about how hard to define the term is, and how difficult it is to identify any consistent criteria between the games that fall under the label. There's definitely some games that obviously qualify (Ultima Underworld, Deus Ex) but I could never figure out exactly how, say, Dishonored or Dark Messiah were meant to be immersive sims - or even Thief, to an extent. Warren Spector's definition seemed to hinge largely on "emergent" gameplay, but then a lot of games that fall under the label don't really allow for very much of that, including System Shock.

In the storage level I threw a mine onto an unpward stream of air. It maintained a semblence of momentum and kept drifting away from me. I think it took me 10 quickloads to succesfully bomb one of those large robots this way, but it worked. Is that "emergent"? Unintended and yet successful use of the game's systems? I don't know if this is what Spector means. I think that he was just proud that their proto-physics worked.
I guess it's way more "emergent" than the banal Human Revolution triad: gun/vent/terminal.

[Video Game Fan 2000]

alongside Torment: Tides of Numenera.

this one was very depressing, both the game itself and the content

so miserable. its like they made a monkey island reboot and it was a realistic story about losing your teeth from scurvy

[oggyraiding]

I enjoyed Torment: Tides of Numenera. Not the best game ever but kept my attention until the end and I thought the setting was unique. Worst bit was the combat, especially some of the later encounters where there are loads of enemies so you have to spend 2 minutes every turn watching them all inch towards you.

[H-O-W-L]

Have now played it. Not as bad as I expected but definitely under par for me. I honestly think now if you want the system shock 1 experience and can't be fucked with the old engine, just play Prey 2017. Perfect followup, that.

[H-O-W-L]

it's not bad as such, but it feels like they've just made everything about System Shock slightly worse in every way, without really changing much.

Yeah that's my takeaway too. I just play it like, "this was refined better in Prey" or "this was fine in the original, why's it changed?" or even just "why couldn't they have made this slicker?". I love the original but it definitely had elements that became refined by later Shock-alikes (even Deus Ex!), whereas SS2 was a regression that killed the franchise in my eyes, and this seems to be a weird remake that pillories itself between SS1, SS2, and modern game conventions.

It's not bad but I fail to see why it's any better than SS1. Very Gus Van Sant's Psycho vibes-- not as bad though.

@Lemming would you agree that System Shock, at times, feels like the early seasons of Red Dwarf, too? It very much does to me. The visuals alone, the burnished grey-blue brutalist metal landscapes and very twentieth-century-futuristic-filmset vibes of the look of it all. It's a very purposefully retrofuturistic design, I feel, and I like it a lot. Very low-fi and working class grunge vibes. I can see the average grundlecunt Lister type working on Citadel -- whereas I can't even with say, Prey's Talos One, which is unique to SS1 and part of why I love it.

I knew the remake would be off the mark though when they were advertising it with a boob-plate booth babe SHODAN cosplay:


Fair play to the cosplayer; they put a lot of effort in and it is fucking impressive... but so not SHODAN. Really tired of post-SS1 efforts to make SHODAN a seductress. It was not a sexual entity for fuck's sake!

[Lemming]

Lemming would you agree that System Shock, at times, feels like the early seasons of Red Dwarf, too? It very much does to me. The visuals alone, the burnished grey-blue brutalist metal landscapes and very twentieth-century-futuristic-filmset vibes of the look of it all. It's a very purposefully retrofuturistic design, I feel, and I like it a lot. Very low-fi and working class grunge vibes. I can see the average grundlecunt Lister type working on Citadel -- whereas I can't even with say, Prey's Talos One, which is unique to SS1 and part of why I love it.

Yes! TriOp and JMC both feel very similar, what with their obvious disregard for lower-ranked workers and the industrial, functional, grimy look of Citadel and Red Dwarf. Both places feel kind of like they were slapped together on the cheap.

Holly and SHODAN obviously echo each other too, AI which have been hastily integrated into ship/station systems and given an absurd amount of control, but then turn out to be something far more erratic than their creators intended. Love how in those early seasons, when Lister and Rimmer are pretty much totally dependent on Holly to fly the ship for them, it feels like Holly is Red Dwarf in the same way that SHODAN is Citadel.

Queeg always makes me think of SHODAN, especially the bit where Holly directly assumes control of Rimmer's body. If Holly had gone SHODAN-nuts instead of just Holly-nuts, Rimmer and Lister would be so fucked.

Really tired of post-SS1 efforts to make SHODAN a seductress. It was not a sexual entity for fuck's sake!

Yeah, for real. We talked about it quite a bit back in the FPS thread iirc, but SS2 really is shockingly shit in its handling of SHODAN.

The robo-body that's replicated in the cosplay there is such a low point, it doesn't even make sense. SHODAN's trying to become less human, it's actively repulsed by organic life, and it's evolving into a "higher" lifeform that's far away from anything to do with humanity. SS2 making the face deliberately more human, referring to it as "she", and then the unbelievable boobs and hair-made-of-wires robot body stuff at the end feels like a complete inversal of everything the character stood for.

I love how when you see SHODAN's "true" form at the end of SS1, it only makes it even less comprehensible, less relatable, and less human. You're finally seeing your tormentor face-to-"face", and it's just... nothing. It's something totally alien, and always has been. Floating cartoon carrot. Then it starts slowly burning its "face" (or rather, the human-looking face its designers gave it, which it has slowly been shedding) into your retinas as it kills you, as a final "fuck you" to you and to humans in general. It's incomprehensible that Ken Levine played that and thought "this'd be better if she was a sexy robot and also you killed her by firing a pistol into a screen with her face on it".

Absolute agony that the latter version of SHODAN is the one that's lodged itself in pop culture.

[H-O-W-L]

I love how when you see SHODAN's "true" form at the end of SS1, it only makes it even less comprehensible, less relatable, and less human. You're finally seeing your tormentor face-to-"face", and it's just... nothing. It's something totally alien, and always has been. Floating cartoon carrot. Then it starts slowly burning its "face" (or rather, the human-looking face its designers gave it, which it has slowly been shedding) into your retinas as it kills you, as a final "fuck you" to you and to humans in general. It's incomprehensible that Ken Levine played that and thought "this'd be better if she was a sexy robot and also you killed her by firing a pistol into a screen with her face on it".

Absolute agony that the latter version of SHODAN is the one that's lodged itself in pop culture.

1000%. I've been thinking about writing about this again and the best things I can relate SHODAN to are like, Nyarlathotep or AM from I Have No Mouth... SHODAN is a completely non-anthropomorphic entity, and attempts to anthropomorphize it are just so... so off base.

[H-O-W-L]

Just got to the (shit) cyberspace climax. SHODAN having a wobbly meltdown speech is terrible and it also saying "Lighthouse-class starbase" as a MEMBER BIOSHOCK INFINITE? jibe actually made me scream in anger. Fuck's sake, mate.

Fucking hell this showdown fight is dreadful. Fucking awful. Holy fuck. No stakes, no tension, nothing. A total wet fart. The original wasn't great but at least you could fail. Fuck. Me.