So, System Shock 2....oh the horror!

[EG]

the game, and with its level design, atmosphere, weapons and stuff, I like it. I just criticized one aspect of it.

He's relenting!

Get him some-more.

 

[J_C]

I'm not. I said this from the start.

 

[zerotol]

Weapon degradation?

What idiot uses weapons and does not get max repair?

Rarely my main weapon wasn't green or just 10

 

[J_C]

Weapon degradation?

What idiot uses weapons and does not get max repair?

Rarely my main weapon wasn't green or just 10

Yeah, you start with max repair in the game. Oh wait, you don't.

 

[Zboj Lamignat]

Repair is a waste of modules anyway :shrug: Like I said, if you're really butthurt about weapon degradation then get the shotgun from the showers/toilets on the first deck. It never breaks. Later on you will get the code to the weapon locker on the first deck with unbreakable assault rifle, the best weapon in the game. There you go, you can finish whole game without using a single maintenance tool nor going pure meele. Or you can use the tools to repair the extra weapons you like (for example grenade launcher, second best weapon).

 

[J_C]

then get the shotgun from the showers/toilets on the first deck. It never breaks. Later on you will get the code to the weapon locker on the first deck with unbreakable assault rifle,

What? These never break? Is this a bug or something?

 

[Zboj Lamignat]

Probably. Was never patched though. There are some more unbreakable weapons, I just remember these two. There is also an unbreakable standard pistol for sure, but I don't remember where it is.

 

[kenup]

http://www.ttlg.com/forums/showthread.php?t=9964&s=

Just Ctrl-F unbreakable and you're gonna find a few.

 

[Zboj Lamignat]

And this thread was going along nicely until people started claiming that Resident Evil and Dead space are better than SS2. We might now as well call in an orbital strike and be done with it.

There's a lot of things that make Resident Evil work so well, but one of them is that you don't have an almighty wrench to rely on; there are very few situations where you wouldn't want to use a gun, and since enemies never drop anything, the game is rigged so that it's strictly advantageous not to kill enemies to preserve your resources. Combined with some multiple routes, especially in the first game, and the relative slowness of the zombies, there's a lot of places where you can avoid enemies - and sometimes you have to, at least until you've accumulated some extra ammo. The first game especially is a beautiful piece of game design; it does a grand job building situations where you have to weigh whether it's better to risk being able to run past an enemy versus spending the ammo. This gives it a very slow, creeping pace and where every encounter and every shot feel like they matter, and much time is spent looking at the map, figuring out which rooms are worth clearing and which you can avoid visiting again.

This sort of deliberation is something I never really encountered in System Shock 2, where you basically always kill everything you come across one way or another

Uh, there is no option to run past enemies in SS2? So why was I doing it all the time and why are people doing it in most LPs? You can run by them, you can sneak past them, you have many ways to enhance your movement (implants, drugs, psi), you can fool them with psi, you can lure them to hacked turrets. And you actually prefer running circles around slow-ass cumbersome enemies (because console gaem hurpa durpa)?

 

[ColCol]

The only problems difficulty wise I had with this game is the "boss battle" at the end of the body of the many. This is just because they spam you with powerful enemies. The game is not that difficult outside this fact. There's plenty of supplies in the game to deal with the occasionally respawning enemies.

 

[kenup]

And this thread was going along nicely until people started claiming that Resident Evil and Dead space are better than SS2. We might now as well call in an orbital strike and be done with it.

Uh, there is no option to run past enemies in SS2? So why was I doing it all the time and why are people doing it in most LPs? You can run by them, you can sneak past them, you have many ways to enhance your movement (implants, drugs, psi), you can fool them with psi, you can lure them to hacked turrets. And you actually prefer running circles around slow-ass cumbersome enemies (because console gaem hurpa durpa)?

 

[retardation]

I remember being bored to death with respawning near the end of SS2 - the last hours of the game are in general underwhelming. I had to turn that shit off in order to finish the game. Whoever thought constantly respawning enemies was a good idea needs to have respawning dicks in his ass.

 

[J_C]

Probably. Was never patched though. There are some more unbreakable weapons, I just remember these two. There is also an unbreakable standard pistol for sure, but I don't remember where it is.

Ah, you mean that those specific weapons don't break, not that every shotgun and rifle is unbreakable.

 

[retardation]

Probably. Was never patched though. There are some more unbreakable weapons, I just remember these two. There is also an unbreakable standard pistol for sure, but I don't remember where it is.

Maybe those particular pieces were made in Germany.

 

[Kem0sabe]

Also, I never noticed the enemies re-spawning. How much time do you faggots spend faffing about?

I remember it being pretty noticeable right from the start that they respawn, or maybe it's been so long that it just seems that way.

 

[EG]

Also, I never noticed the enemies re-spawning. How much time do you faggots spend faffing about?

I remember it being pretty noticeable right from the start that they respawn, or maybe it's been so long that it just seems that way.

I suspect some of us linger and retrace steps considerably more than others.

 

[Zboj Lamignat]

The first deck stays clear afair (it does have some event spawning though).

You have to have Perception 1 to not notice spawning on ENG.

 

[thesheeep]

The only problems difficulty wise I had with this game is the "boss battle" at the end of the body of the many. This is just because they spam you with powerful enemies. The game is not that difficult outside this fact. There's plenty of supplies in the game to deal with the occasionally respawning enemies.

Yeah that fight had something cartoonish, when you run around and around, just to stop occasionally and shoot behind you.

 

[DraQ]

The game is not that old. It was released in 1999, in a post Half-Life universe where game developers had already mastered the complex gaming art of reliably hitting shit with a wrench.

Hit detection being good is not the matter of being able to hit shit reliably.
It's the matter of how well does the game simulate the act of hitting something.

With melee weapons getting (visibly!) caught on scenery, and being able to miss someone if the weapon model actually misses them I can't help but consider SS2 hit detection good. Yeah, melee weapons could have slightly longer reach or swing more downward so that you wouldn't have to crouch to smash monkeys, but that's irrelevant.
Hell, the best thing about "smasher" upgrade was not more damage but the fact that it let you swing reliably in confined spaces.

Given this, I don't think respawning properly achieves its end of creating tension/depleting resources just because by end game you are powerful enough to mow through everything anyway.

Depletion, maybe, but it definitely achieved tension, because it didn't allow just sitting on yuor ass.

Also

And if you buy invisibility, you can just run past everything anyway, so respawning's not an issue.

This means that respawning was effective. Without respawns invisibility is only really useful for setting up a sneak attack, because choice between expending resource to temporarily bypass an enemy and expen ding it to permanently neutralize them is a no-brainer.

At stopwatch-predictable intervals in some cases? Sometimes from completely empty rooms you'd previously cleared?

That's an argument against particular implementation, not idea itself.
Don't be Bethesda.

Not applicable to SS2 due to the type of enemy you're fighting. Not applicable to any game without grossly overpowered protagonist either.

Seriously if you make a game that focuses around threat and resource management, then allow player to bypass those by turning it into a game about efficient elimination of a finite threat, then you fail.

You fail to provide a compelling threat, and you fail to produce compelling reasons for player to pursue their objective.
Neutralizing a threat once and for good is almost always preferable to having to avoid it continuously, because the former entails finite cost.
You might be successful if you managed to make resources guarantedly insufficient to deal with the threat, but that's tricky to accomplish in terms of gameplay, is very prone to dead-ending and requires arbitrary gameplay restrictions (for example no melee capability).
In most cases (albeit not SS2 itself) putting only finite, non-respawning enemies is also unrealistic, because most games assume vast open world outside the bounds of the gameplay area, that reacts to stuff happening and, for example, sends in reinforcements.

Yes, my point is that the average player would be physically incapable of killing every last enemy on a deck in the first place. So even if you had, say, 30 enemies on a deck, a hacker would only be able to kill a handful of them using turrets and their own limited combat capabilities, and would have to evade the rest, possibly being forced into killing one or two of them in a desperate situation. A combat specialist would be able to take care of more of them, but would have to do so precisely because they lacked the skills to access alternative routes to their objectives.

What about above average player? What if the player cleverly uses AoE or friendly fire?
What about slightly below average player for whom the amount of resources will be insufficient to accomplish even essential tasks?

The problem here is that you need to work hard to possibly still fail at providing enemy that cannot be defeated directly, while respawns succeed automatically.

I don't see why melee capability would need to be removed.

Because the act of swinging a wrench, rapier or pointy Annelid kidney stone doesn't consume resources.

Your point about respawning enemies fitting into the setting is flawed precisely because the game models none of the things you mentioned. In the reality of SS2, both annelid and cybernetic forces would respond dynamically to their knowledge of the player's whereabouts, the amount of forces they had available nearby, the necessity of diverting forces from their duties on one part of the ship to another or the proximity of the player to certain critical objectives. They would be able to respond far quicker to disturbances in one part of the vessel than in another. The player could theoretically trick hostile forces into rushing to a compromized area, and then quickly moving to a less heavily guarded hub whilst their attention was diverted, or shut down access to a particular entrance for a short while. But LG put even less thought into this than we've done in this entire thread, because everything of that nature is influenced solely by the linear narrative, and the respawning enemies are merely a design crutch.

You are right about it being imperfect in game (dynamic response is simulated using alarm system, BTW), but it doesn't mean that it would be better with no respawns at all.

I really don't get your claim about respawns ruining the game. It's a survival-horror RPG/shooter. The limited resources available in the game would be less meaningful if there were a finite number of enemies. With infinitely respawning enemies, you can't just sit around forever; it forces you to make progress through the game, otherwise eventually you'll have no way to fight back. The idea of not knowing when and where you're going to get attacked is also very compelling and really ratchets up the tension.

Oh come on, you know that one can achieve that survival horror feel without respawing elements. Just think any survivor horror, Resident Evil, Silent Hill, Amnesia.

Amnesia started sucking at being survival horror the moment you realized that the enemies arrive and leave as part of insular setpieces.

You could feel safe most of the time.

Also, sanity was a non-resource in that loss of it didn't affect you adversely.

When I'm treading through an unknown area, I feel that tension, because I don't know what is waiting for me there. But when I discovered the area, respawning enemies don't do anything for me, because I anticipate them, I know what will come at me. I'm not feeling the suspense, just some annoyance, when I have to backtrack for some stuff, and I am slowed down buy these fuckers.

The thing is that respawning enemies don't allow you to secure and control area, especially when they are actively moving around and searching for you.

You always have a feeling of being deep in hostile territory and don't have luxury of being able to backpedal into a cleared zone.

It's not fucking zombies on a spaceship that made SS2 scary.

Sad to say, but I think Dead Space out SS'ed SS 2.

I played that. I also spent most of that time commenting how SS2 did everything better.

Lies. SS2 had no vacuum nor 0G.

It's why "Amnesia" was such a breath of fresh air as its whole design goal was to try to completely eliminate any sort of abstract systems or gamey elements and focus on pure immersion. By the end of Amnesia I was aware of its mechanisms enough to not be taken in by it as much, but holy fuck, those first few hours were unlike anything I'd ever played before---just immediate and visceral to an extent that it probably made me forget I was playing a game for longer durations than any other game I've ever played. Not that every game has to do that (I don't demand immersion from, say, a strategy game or even most RPGs), but it's definitely a novel experience when a game is able to pull it off so well.

teh ironing being that it completely fucked this up with the lazy ALERT MUSIC-HIDE AND LOOK AT WALL-WAIT FOR SILENCE AND GO traffic lights system.

This. If anything, this "pure immershun" was one of the aspects Amnesia failed spectacularly at, because not only did the enemies appear out of thin air, but they did so as part of one-shot setpieces and then disappeared back into thin air.
How is that any improvement over SS2?

 

[LeJosh]

Is this vanilla SS2?

Using the guide Infinitron stickied, it looks tremendous afterwards.

As for respawning, I didn't find it too bad.

 

[Correct_Carlo]

This. If anything, this "pure immershun" was one of the aspects Amnesia failed spectacularly at, because not only did the enemies appear out of thin air, but they did so as part of one-shot setpieces and then disappeared back into thin air.
How is that any improvement over SS2?

That's a massive improvement over SS2, actually. In SS2 enemies pop out of thin air, you swat them like mosquitos and continue on your way. They have all the presence and consequence of mowing down enemies in Quake. Amnesia's monster can't be killed, so it's always a matter of evasion via running or hiding. Of course, the monster can be "gamed" after you've learned his patterns of movement enough, but that's really true of any game. I never said he can't be gamed, just that the early portions of the game before you've learned his patterns of behavior are much more effective at the "horror" part of survival horror than any other game I've played.

And, yeah, I'd definitely say Amnesia is more immersive than SS2, precisely because it has minimal gaming elements (not HUD, no stats, no combat, etc,etc). Although, I think the degree to which we are able to be taken in by a game probably varies from person to person, so alot of this might be subjective.

Hit detection being good is not the matter of being able to hit shit reliably.
It's the matter of how well does the game simulate the act of hitting something.

Hit detection is exactly being able to hit shit reliably. Whether the game simulates the act of swinging a wrench well or not is irrelevant as far as hit detection is concerned as it's all about whether the game can reliably detect the player connecting with the environment or not (there are games which simulate melee really poorly which, nonetheless have excellent hit detection...and vice versa).

I see what you're saying, though, and as I said before I don't think SS2 has bad hit detection as much as it's just that the hit boxes on the small creatures don't match their models properly. You can hit moneys with a wrench standing up, you just have to fiddle with it and it doesn't have any sort of logical visual analogue when you do it. So swinging at a monkey's head and missing looks almost exactly the same as swinging at a monkey's head and connecting. There's no logical visual indication of why you should have missed in one instance, yet connected in another.

 

[Jasede]

It sounds like you're not playing on the hardest difficulty.
Deus Ex and System Shock 2 are really meant to be played on those I feel. But if you still feel like it's "swatting flies" at that level then I suppose the game was too easy for you.

Also Amnesia is terrible and I can tell you the exact moment when I noticed that: the game was trying to tell me with music and visual effects that I was in grave danger - a monster was chasing me! I ran, like the game wanted- except of course I ran on a flashback trigger and had to watch a flashback sequence with narration while I am supposed to be chased by a monster while at the same time moving as slow as molasses because else, how would poor Jasede know he's in a flashback?

Yes, I am bitter about that. What shit; set flashback triggers that trigger while being chased. No army of teleporting exploding protocol droids could ever replicate the distaste I then had for that Amnesia game.

 

[dieu]

They could have saved all that money on music and graphics in Amnesia, if they instead had a text message pop up every 30 seconds saying "you are very scared"

 

[Correct_Carlo]

It sounds like you're not playing on the hardest difficulty.
Deus Ex and System Shock 2 are really meant to be played on those I feel. But if you still feel like it's "swatting flies" at that level then I suppose the game was too easy for you.

I play every game on the hardest difficulty. IIRC, even on impossible with the proper ammo and the assault rife, everything dies in 1-4 shots, standard ammo 2-6. Even security mechs.

But, honestly, the enemies taking slightly longer to kill wouldn't make it any more effective as a survivor horror. It'd still play like an awkward, Dark Engine, RPG Quake, only with bullet sponges as enemies.

Also Amnesia is terrible and I can tell you the exact moment when I noticed that: the game was trying to tell me with music and visual effects that I was in grave danger - a monster was chasing me!

You can turn off music in Amnesia, you know. There's no in game menu option, IIRC, but there is a "on/off" setting in the config file. Since that seems to be people's number one complaint about the game, I just thought I'd point that out. Seems a bit silly to be like, "This game totally sucks because this one minor feature every single game in existence has which I could totally turn off if I wanted to!"

And visual effects only happen when you look directly at the monster, which I think is essential to the game (or any piece of effective horror), personally, as monsters are much more effective when they are obscured. Once you get a good look at them, all the horror dissolves. I think the best horror films never show the objects of horror directly and once they do they usually stop being horror films and start being something else (action films, thrillers, etc, etc). So I thought that central built in mechanic of trying to encourage the player not to look directly at the monster was brilliant, actually.

I ran, like the game wanted- except of course I ran on a flashback trigger and had to watch a flashback sequence with narration while I am supposed to be chased by a monster while at the same time moving as slow as molasses because else, how would poor Jasede know he's in a flashback?

I don't know. I've played through the game twice and never experienced this. Sounds like a bug.

 

[maxim]

OT:

Yeah the Amnesia scripted monster spawn sequences really diminished the replay value and even "gamified" the first playthrough. A better system IMO would have been a combination of infinite patrolling monsters and random rare spawn chance under certain conditions, to make the randomness seem more logical. For example in the prison area the random spawn chance would be only in the hallway areas ( not in the cells), starting from a certain distance from the player and never in the players FOV. As for infinite patrols, well they used that in the Justine DLC in the potato cellar and the first time was a real rush to sneak past one of her suitors.

The other thing that personally didn't like was the "stranger danger" music that started to play whenever some of creature spawned nearby. The main themes themselves were creepy and atmospheric enough. Plus if there would be no danger music then it would force you to pay much more closer attention to the surrounding to spot whenever some monster is making sounds (gatherers grunts, brutes metallic screeching, suitors moaning etc). Currently you just find a hidey hole and wait for the music to stop.

Yet again it was made by a small dirt poor swedish dev team as only their fourth game and for its worth it most certainly has left its mark on the horror genre.